Colin Marshall

Michael Cimino: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

The handout LACMA ran off for this screening featured a few paragraphs by a critic who describes the film as brimming with homoeroticism. I waved this off as garden variety academic evidence-planting, but then paused to consider the facts. The women involved — a couple bland hookers, a desperate housewife posing ineffectually naked at the back door, and a girl passing on a scooter only to be asked where she buys her pants — have no bearing on the story at all. Clint Eastwood does spend a nontrivial amount of time driving around with Jeff Bridges in drag. And my dad, my age when the movie came out, still remembers that its promotion strongly featured that big cannon on the poster. Oh dear. That cannon.

Michael Cimino’s having directed helps this critic’s case too, given the odd sexual rumors that tend to enswirl him. When I found out he made this, I could barely believe he did a seventies road movie heist comedy, crime melodrama, whatever you want to call it. The only conceivable way I would have actively sought Thunderbolt and Lightfoot out — and I’ve thought about this — is if I finally watched the 228-minute cut of Heavens Gate and, moved, launched into a complete Cimino viewthrough. Hence my thankfulness for a series like LACMA’s on the golden age of road movies; it also supplied a suitably beaten-up print which, believe you me, is the only way to watch a picture of this class.

Not to say that the film comes to nothing more than third-run-theater type car-chases-and-fistfights entertainment, though it does contain both car chases and fistfights. It follows the partnership of Lightfoot, a young drifter with no discernible background, and Thunderbolt, a retired bank-knocker-over. Right after Lightfoot steals a Firebird from a used car lot, he meets Thunderbolt by inadvertently saving him from a couple of suited assassins who’ve tracked him down at the remote nowheresville church where he’s taken up preaching. The would-be killers, who keep making failed attempts on the heroes’ lives, turn out to be the remnants of Thunderbolt’s old gang. Mistakenly convinced Thunderbolt double-crossed them in their last robbery, they in quick succession learn the truth — he didn’t grab the money and run but hide it in an old schoolhouse — and follow Lightfoot’s suggestion that they all team up for One Last Big Job.

The film ultimately takes on qualities of the standard heist picture — too many of them — but it flaunts enough small weirdnesses that, if it doesn’t transcend the genre, it at least becomes an unusually memorable example of it. Hitchhiking, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot get a ride with a fellow in some sort of lowered black sports car. Seconds — seconds — later, the driver rolls his vehicle completely over, leaps out of it, and opens the trunk to reveal a compartment crammed with live rabbits. He then begins methodically throwing the rabbits out of the trunk and blasting at them with a shotgun. Thunderbolt beats the guy up, and that’s the last we see or hear of him. In the culmination of a squirrely running joke about pistachio ice cream, Thunderbolt’s old partner arch nemesis tells a kid who approaches his ice cream truck — everyone in this ad hoc gang gets day jobs to support their career in robbery — to “fuck a duck.” When Thunderbolt and Lightfoot finally come across that relocated money-filled schoolhouse, Lightfoot wonders aloud why anyone would have bothered transporting it. “History,” grumbles the squinting Thunderbolt. “History, damn it.”

Can we chalk up this slight askewness to Cimino’s influence? I’ve seen too little of his work to say for sure. This being his first project as a director, he presumably didn’t have much influence; history has it that, unsurprisingly, Eastwood effectively became a second director. Some of the aesthetics, especially in the early scene where Thunderbolt’s pursuers chase him across a vast wheat field, scream Cimino’s sensibility. Few of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’s elements seem to “belong” together, in the cinematically traditional sense, which must be why I can’t quite label it a minor work, opting instead to call it a work of strong interestingness with major stars (and a director who would become majorly eccentric) in a minor form.

Arthur Penn: Bonnie and Clyde

I’d been “saving” this along with a few other pictures, refusing for years and years to watch them on home video because I somehow felt I could only properly experience them on a film print in a theater with a crowd. As luck would have it, the L.A. County Museum of Art’s film program — also known as the greatest thing going in Los Angeles, now that Tokyo 7-7 has closed — included it in their “classic road movies” series. As luck would also have it, I interviewed Jonathan Rosenbaum, whom I consider the most taste-endowed critic around, the morning of the screening. He said that, despite coming of age as a cinephile in the seemingly golden filmgoing age of the early sixties, he prefers the on-demand, order-from-anywhere, discs-straight-to-your-mailbox present. But when I told him of my deliberate wait to see Bonnie and Clyde theatrically, he assured me that I’d made the right choice. (He added that he used to drive down to LACMA all the time when he taught at UCSB in the eighties. I gather Santa Barbara’s cinematic poverty obtained then just as it does now.)

Most of what I already knew about the film revolved around the critical debate it sparked upon its 1967 release. The NYT’s Bosley Crowther effectively sacrificed his own reviewing career to his hatred of the movie, writing no fewer than three (!) jeremiads against it, while the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael seemed to have made her reviewing career by praising it. I imagine Crowther as the Rex Reed of his day, a critic to be taken seriously only when inverted. (Although he did much to champion Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. Broken clock, twice a day, etc.) Nobody invested in film criticism could dismiss Kael, though some of her pronouncements about cinema — not all, not most, but some — strike me as shockingly philistine. I can occasionally feel a certain embarrassing wink coming through her writing: “Let’s face it: we go to the movies for the laughing, the crying, and the gripping of the armrests, right?” I feel the same embarrassment for anyone who makes a show of cutting through supposed pretension while also being wrong.

That said, Bonnie and Clyde does indeed go straight for the basic emotions, though it commands a wider suite of them than most. You’ve got these two doomed young kids, played by the biggest not-quite-young-enough stars of the time, hooking up, speeding from state to state, robbing banks, and occasionally exchanging hails of gunfire with the cops. Because critics have written so much about the influence of the Nouvelle Vague on the movie, I expected a near-pure product of the late sixties with a casual nod toward the actual Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s Depression era. It turns out to do it almost the other way around, with spare but meticulous thirties period production (my favorite background sign: “WE BUY PECANS”) and an avant-garde-ish sensibility that comes and goes.

The film hits its best moments when that sensibility periodically peaks, creating the feel of a Hollywood thriller as interpreted by Breathless as translated back into an American picture. Two come right at the beginning: first the opening credits’ extended series of sepia-toned snapshots of the pre-life of crime Bonnie and Clyde that don’t stay onscreen for quite the durations you expect, and then a delightfully languorous yet jump-cutty sequence illustrating the ennui of Bonnie’s Dust Bowl maidenhood that could well have been lifted from a genuine Godard project. Nearly two hours later, just after the bullet-riddled anti-heroes have met their fate, the film ends after hanging, at an unusual distance, on the downcast face of the policeman who’d had it particularly out for them. No sermonistic wrap-up; no further survey of the remaining secondary characters; no (ugh) historical blurbs offering needlessly specific context; it’s just over.

But the most striking move by far comes smack in the middle. Slowly realizing that their crime spree can end nowhere but in death, Bonnie demands that Clyde take her back home. He’s offered her the chance before, but now they’re in too deep to allow any permanent return. They compromise by meeting Bonnie’s family for a picnic in a barren sandscape, undulant with dunes and hazy with an oddly flat afternoon sunlight. The setting, weird even by the film’s dominant Texas-meets-the-moon backdrop, contributes only part of the scene’s deeply unsettling character; just wait until the conversation with Bonnie’s unnaturally withered mother, who sternly but vacantly insists that she’d better just keep on running. It feels almost like a dream sequence, but instead of revealing it as one, the movie reveals the elasticity of its own fabric, a fabric that can unexpectedly accommodate this as reality. Bonnie and Clyde’s real thrills come, for me, at times like these; I just think it could’ve used more of them. It’s a stretchier movie than it gives itself credit for.

(As a side note, if some producer ever gets the terrible idea in his head to get a remake going, there can be casting option for Bonnie and Clyde’s sidekick C.W. Moss than Jordan Morris.)

Matt responds to Revolutionary Road

An interesting comment by a certain Matt on my consideration of Revolutionary Road:

You almost can’t blame him; surely this is the first instinct of anyone outwardly gearing up to make a big change. Anyone preparing to do that — myself included — needs to raise a formidable amount of inward-looking vigilance to avoid falling into the same pattern.

I don't know. My main reaction to the novel is that I would like to punch Frank Wheeler in the face, and possibly Richard Yates as well.

The glossy numbing rot of tightly circumscribed suburban striving is something that usually interests me, but Yates's relentless contempt for his characters overrode any sympathy I might have had for his themes. It is fine to write about vacuous jerks, but it is overbearing to annotate every encounter, every inner monologue, every f***ing page practically, with authorial contempt for said vacuous jerks (to make double extra certain I know how to feel). Just give them to me bare, and let me figure out for myself whether or not I hate them.

All the novel's action flows from Frank's inner narcissist: it kills his wife, wrecks his kids, scorns his friends, and (constantly, neverendingly) fishes for validation from precisely the cozy vacuity he affects to disdain. Frank is interested in cultivating a praise-garnering personal narrative, not actually extricating himself from the eudemonic atrophy he spends so much time critiquing/ironically dismissing. He doesn't want to be different, because that would involve risk and actual physical separation from the people he condescends to, in which case who would be there to listen to him expound about how different he is? Rather, he wants to gesture at being different while staying right where he is. Best of both worlds there: he gets the safety and predictability of structured banality, and he gets to scoff at the rubes who don't "get it" while those same rubes tell him he's awesome and a rebel.

Navel-gazing men barely notice anyone else, and this indifference is not benign (even moreso in 1955, I suppose). Frank wants credit for empathy, for responsibility, for sophisticated adulthood, but he undertakes not a single action that does not redound to his own ego-fulfillment. Basically, he just takes. His marriage to April becomes an unintentional fait accompli, based on her not wanting him to feel bad, and him having no clue this is going on:

What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you'd started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right," and "Whatever you think is best," and "You're the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world," and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums - earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and "We've got to be together in this thing" when you meant the very opposite [...]

This edifice of innocuous little lies becomes impregnable over time; eventually you are trapped in this thing you loathe, and you barely know how it happened. The difference is that April genuinely loathes it and understands its implications, is in many ways a genuine victim, whereas Frank is just posing.
As to those implications, here is an "ancient man" telling us the novel's Big Important Theme:

He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife's smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death he has imposed coherence on his own life, and on life itself. Now all the other years can fall obediently into place, each with its orderly contribution to the whole. [...]
He has brought order out of chaos.

So: we choose Structure (tidy communities comprised of tidy houses on tidy streets) over the sloppy churnings of life, and in so doing obliterate the interesting parts of ourselves. We submit to pointless nothing work, anonymity, serial pettiness. Ultimately we begin to mistake this coping mechanism for virtue, i.e. this is a thing we do because it is right and true, not because it eases our angst. We gloss the sacrifices, re-categorize them as choices borne of integrity.

I'm not sure the novel is successful at illuminating the particular ways in which this dynamic manifests, however. Not that they're not there: for Frank, a succession of pats on the head (from his job, his boss, his mistress) stand in for accomplishment. Mrs. Givings confuses activity with purpose. Yates indulges a reverie for nearly every character wherein he or she wrestles with the vague but persistent idea that they've missed something (ugh). And so on. But he seems to want to attribute this state of affairs to the weakness/wickedness of individuals rather than the infrastructure of anodyne self-congratulation that coaxes them into acquiescence.

I'm all about promoting interesting comments. Matt, if you have an internet thing, I'll link to it.

William Peter Blatty: Crazy

This week’s Santa Barbara Independent has my review of William Peter Blatty’s Crazy. Here’s some paragraphs:

Is the prospect “a touching and humorous novel from the author of The Exorcist a publicist’s dream or a publicist’s nightmare? Either way, that’s how William Peter Blatty’s new novel Crazy has been pitched to readers. It comes as the third in his late-career burst of productivity that began nearly 40 years after the book that spawned two literary follow-ups and five films. The popularity of the Exorcist franchise having ensured that Blatty’s name will always carry an underworldly tinge of quasi-Catholic menace, it’s no wonder the man would want to exercise other novelistic muscles.

This isn’t without precedent: Blatty spent the early 1960s as a comic novelist and the late 1960s writing scripts, most famously the second Pink Panther film, for Blake Edwards. Yet nothing about Crazy indicates a continuation of that tradition. Though ostensibly a story told in modern times by the now-82-year-old protagonist Joey El Bueno, the novel is thoroughly of early-1940s New York City as experienced by a 13-year-old, which means schoolyard scuffles, bull sessions on the block, and delirious trips to Coney Island.

Blatty, too, grew up in that time and place. Having reached his own early 80s, he presumably draws on a very similar store of memories as Joey, who also grows up to be a screenwriter. Here we feel the deeply unpromising premonition of a reminiscence-heavy one-man show; once you’ve heard one cultural veteran remember the joys of shouting up at the high window of a school chum’s Brooklyn apartment building to come out and play stickball, you’ve heard them all. Blatty allows himself all this and more, but in this frame of urban idyll he makes a few strange choices.

In my last Santa Barbara year, I’m on the lookout for more print venues in which to write book criticism. Any Los Angeles and/or non-local organs of repute you can recommend?

The Marketplace of Ideas: 10,000 in 2011 or bust

This will be The Marketplace of Ideas' final year. That is, unless the show reaches 10,000 podcast subscribers by the end of 2011. I'm still figuring out how to properly interpret my statistics, but getting to 10,000 surely requires somewhere between a doubling and a quintupling of the current subscribership. If you're reading this, you may well subscribe already, but you can still help ensure the program enters 2012 and run well beyond. How, you ask?

Blog/tweet/Facebookify about the show. If you enjoy a particular interview, please don't hesitate to write a little something about it on whichever social media outlet you prefer. Most of the stuff I currently like came from recommendations found on blogs, in tweets and what have you — less so from Facebook status updates, but hey, they're still important — and I do hope others can come to like (or "Like") The Marketplace of Ideas in a similar fashion.

Review the show on iTunes. This seems like it wouldn't do anything at all, I realize, but the iTunes staff move in mysterious ways. Each new review raises the show's profile within the iTunes podcast directory, which sometimes leads to appearances in featured spots. This gives the old subscriber count a certain shot in the arm — not that most of 'em stick around. (Why is that, anyway?) All you have to do is pull up The Marketplace of Ideas' page in the iTunes store, click "Write a Review >", and leave a few choice words and (ugh) a star rating.

Recommend the show to a friend. Simple as that. A sharp listener like you certainly has plenty of friends who are looking for something engaging to pipe through their earphones, to play in the car, or to put on the stereo during afternoon tea. You — you! — can improve their lives by pointing them toward this one such engaging thing.

Wield your awesome media power. Write for a paper? Have a radio show? Do a podcast? Responsible toward any kind of media outlet that demands a flow of interesting stories? You might consider one about The Marketplace of Ideas. Some fascinating facts about the show include that (a) I do it on one seriously low budget, (b) I've nonetheless featured guests like New Yorker book critic James wood, marketing mastermind Seth Godin, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, critic Clive James, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly, NPR's Peter Sagal, pop alternastar Momus, KCRW Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt, and public philosopher Alain de Botton, and (c) I'm, uh, gunning for 10,000 in order to bring cultural conversation of unparalleled depth to the airwaves and the iPods alike? (And if you do some kind of interview-y type thing, I'll almost certainly be on it.)

Tell me what you think. Anything you want to hear more of on the show? Anything you want to hear less of? Guests, subjects, sensibilities, formal quirks: I want to know what you think about every aspect of The Marketplace of Ideas. This information helps me tweak the formula in ways that help the show evolve into something even more enjoyable, informative, immersive, edutastational, etc.

Join the mailing list. I’ve just started a mailing list geared toward the truly elite Marketplace of Ideas listener. It delivers weekly updates on the program’s current and future broadcasts as well as related internet interestingness. I think you’ll find it the most efficient and entertaining possible way to stay on the vanguard of The Marketplace of Ideas’ grand quest to bring long-form cultural conversation to its proper place of prominence. Want to join? Simply let me know your preferred e-mail address to add at colinjmarshall at gmail. We will march on a road of bones.

Who is this Toussaint fellow, anyway?

Today, The Millions publishes the fruit of all my yammering about Jean-Philippe Toussaint, “Darts and Philosophy, Bowling and Metaphysics: A Primer on the Novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint”:

On a train to Beijing in the middle of the night, a man readies himself for sweet, unexpected restroom love with a Chinese girl he met just the day before. Just then, his hated cellphone rings. It’s his on-again-off-again girlfriend half a world away in Paris, calling with the news that her father has drowned, had a heart attack, or both. The man sits on the train in total darkness, listening on his phone to nothing but the sounds of a Paris gallery at midday as his semi-girlfriend runs tearfully through it, having quickly forgotten she’d made the call at all.

I don’t know about you, but if an author writes a scene like that, I want to read his entire oeuvre. I heard this vignette of a man, his Chinese almost-lover, and his distraught Parisian girlfriend discussed on KCRW’s Bookworm, which at times this this feels like my own personal contemporary fiction tipster. Host Michael Silverblatt turned out to be talking to the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, well-known in the Francosphere (and not unheard of as far afield as East Asia) since the mid-1980s, but not an object of English-speaking readers’ attention until two decades later.

That is strange. It’s not as if some native writer in North America, the United Kingdom, or anywhere else coated in the English language had already filled Toussaint’s niche. In order to fill his niche, a writer would have first had to find it when just describing it has proven a complicated task for Toussaint’s admirers, critics, and even translators. Not particularly shy about discussing the motivations behind his work, Toussaint himself has made a few statements about what’s important to him.

He placed great importance on humor at the beginning of his career, and though to an extent he still does, he’s since balanced it with a certain wistfulness. He eschews shades of gray, but he places so many black and white extremes so near to one another that, if you step back, they look like gray. He believes novels have no political role, only an aesthetic one. He deals with both the little irritations and the Big Questions, usually in as close a proximity as possible. He respects no boundary between fiction and nonfiction. And as he said in that Bookworm conversation, you can perform all the experimentation, all the rigid structuring, all the nouveau roman stuff you want, but if your book isn’t first and foremost exciting, hang it up.

Despite sharing content with the individual Toussaint novel writeups I’ve posted here, the primer is more revised, streamlined, and unified than all of them simply mashed together. If you’ve been scratching your head about why I can summon such enthusiasm for this Toussaint fellow, I can honestly say there’s no better piece on the net to help you figure it out.

If you know of any contemporary (i.e., post-1950) novelists you’d like to read a primer about, don’t hesitate to let me know who they are. I’ve got a grand plan for this whole project, and the wider a field of writers I have to work with, the better.

Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road

I’ve read “Like Men Betrayed”, (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) James Wood’s consideration of Richard Yates and Revolutionary Road, many times. Besides being one of my favorite pieces of book criticism in recent memory, it fired me up to give the book a closer examination of my own. Despite never having held mid-century novels of domestic anguish in particular regard — especially ones adapted into Sam Mendes movies — something about Wood’s assessment said, “Hey, you really oughta check this one out again.” Not in those words, but still.

Wood calls the Revolutionary Road “the decade’s great, terrifying indictment of suburban surrender.” The novel came out in 1961, making “the decade” technically the sixties, but, set in 1955, the novel takes aim at the kind of suburban surrender we think about when we think about fifties America. I grew up in the nineties, which decade enjoyed a psychologically complex relationship with the fifties: never were those white picket fences, high-finned autos, and racist milkmen more viciously pilloried and more ironically beloved. People now regard the fifties as culturally bland, perhaps rightly so on the whole but perhaps wrongly so in the details, or vice versa. Yet I seem to recall feeling the press of a certain cultural blandness in the nineties — a blandness convinced of its own eclecticism — that I definitely don’t today.

But even though I grew up in the suburbs, I never quite became the kind of ineffectually resentful suburb-loathing adolescent you see in the back rows of classrooms. I bore, in fact, no meaningful anti-suburban feelings; while not jazzed as a youngster about having to bike 45 minutes to get to the nearest building that wasn’t a house, I couldn’t interpret the milieu of nearby Seattle as any kind of alternative. The city’s rambling slackers, shambling junkies, and angry kids ecstatic with fandom for unhygenic, unskilled rock bands represented all that then repulsed me, and surely they despised the suburbs, so...

Point being, as I now draw near the age at which many Americans think a freestanding house on a quite street might not maybe be so bad after all in a way, my distaste for the suburbs intensifies each day. I don’t sit around jabbing by Gaulois skyward, pontificating on the intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual graveyard that is the cul-de-sac; I just find my life increasingly taking a shape that gives the suburbs a very, very wide berth. I think about that old Talking Heads line: “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?” It’s a fair question, though: how did they get there?

Revolutionary Road offers an answer, or at least an illustration, that has to do with pregnancy, passivity, and palliative irony. In their late twenties, central couple Frank and April Wheeler already have two kids and a house, which I’m sure was just about par for the U.S. of 1955 but in 2010 seems almost scandalously premature. April, a housewife, has recently gotten involved with the community theater. Frank, employed in a vague managerial position by a towering entity called Knox Business Machines, believes his job to be just one stop on the way to the even vaguer creative career (“in the humanities”) laying somewhere in his future. As Wood puts it, Frank “prides himself that he takes his job ironically, that he cares nothing for it, and that his real life is elsewhere.”

Clearly not unheard of half a century ago, Frank’s cognitive dissonance-driven posturing has, I would imagine, grown even more common today. It’s one thing to hold a day job and not take it seriously because you’re entertaining visions of yourself as an actor, a painter, a writer; it’s quite another to regard the job as not what you “really” do when you have no idea what that you’d do were its burden lifted. Pushed to the breaking point by the stultifying mediocrity of her surroundings, April, the daughter of absent bohemians jet-setters, pushes through a plan to move the family to Paris. Frank wrings his hands over questions of logistics and ultimate purpose alike. April, in words that would seem flaky if they weren’t the most lucid and forthright ones any character speaks in the entire book, insists that the move offers Frank the very opportunity to learn that purpose, to “find” himself.

Again, I can’t put it any better than Wood does: “Perhaps there is no Frank to find.” Here the novel’s real horror kicks in, the distinctive flavor of horror which springs from the revealed loss of agency. Just as whatever will a horror movie’s doomed cheerleader can’t overpower the machinations of the masked serial killer, Frank’s every action draws him back toward safety and isolation to the dim, repetitive pseudo-pleasures of idle complaints aired over cocktails and plain secretaries banged during the lunch hour. What’s worse, this lacks even the nobility of a Sisyphean struggle. Frank doesn’t actually aspire, in his heart of hearts, to anything beyond this; at the bottom of the abyss lays the humiliating mundanity of his genuine desires.

Throughout the text, you can see Yates giving the stink eye to the newfound American priority of security above all else. His concern is valid; even by the time I was a little kid, I noticed that most of the grown-ups around me seemed nearly insane with a lack of imagination. But I find much more to sweat about in the way he lets his characters’ minor acts of complacency build up until it’s too late. They then must resort to extended acts of elaborate fakery — of theater, not unlike April’s shambolic community production that opens the novel — in hopes of papering over their indiscretions of will. Frank and April have kept this up so long that, as April nakedly articulates in her penultimate appearance, they’ve forgotten who they are.

I realize how clichéd a phrase like “they’ve forgotten who they are” sounds, but Revolutionary Road is perhaps the only novel I’ve read which presents total identity loss as a clear, present, shitlessness-inducing danger — and I’ve read everything by Kobo Abe. Though Frank never really means to go to Paris, he hides in the fog of the notion that he soon will, spreading yet another thick layer of the badigeon of self-delusion into the cracks snaking through his life. You almost can’t blame him; surely this is the first instinct of anyone outwardly gearing up to make a big change. Anyone preparing to do that — myself included — needs to raise a formidable amount of inward-looking vigilance to avoid falling into the same pattern.

Not that I mean to get so terribly heavy. One thing few ever point out about Richard Yates is that he’s damned funny. The reason it goes so unpointed out is probably that his writing’s humor and the horror, both drawn without adulteration from humanity’s awkward expectations and fumbling self-justifications, exist of a piece. Never did I grin without a grimace, or grimace without a grin. At his best, Yates gets seemingly endless mileage from the meeting of his characters’ misshapen, ill-defined ideas and the grim reality that awaits them. Early on the night of April’s wanly disastrous stage debut, Frank, the master of the obsessive, misguided mental rehearsal, envisions

himself rushing home to swing his children laughing in the air, to gulp a cocktail and chatter through an early dinner with his wife; himself driving her to the high school, with her thigh tense and warm under his reassuring hand ("If only I weren’t so nervous, Frank!"); himself sitting spellbound in pride and then rising to join a thunderous ovation as the curtain fell; himself glowing and disheveled, pushing his way through jubilant backstage crowds to claim her first tearful kiss ("Was it really good, darling? Was it really good?"); and then the two of them, stopping for a drink in the admiring company of Shep and Milly Campbell, holding hands under the table while they talked it all out. Nowhere in these plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn’t seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?"), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.

Kazuo Hara: A Dedicated Life

“Live with vigor,” the subject of this documentary says a few times in a few different ways. I like this bit of guidance, despite its vagueness — or maybe because of its vagueness. Everyone channels their vigor differently, after all. Mitsuharu Inoue seems to have channeled his into literary fame, a rebel’s reputation, 13 writing schools across Japan, legendary tales of his past, a trail of smitten middle-aged women, a modest sideline as a geisha imitator, and, of course, a Kazuo Hara film about him. Not bad, all told.

For those keeping score, Hara’s first three documentaries follow these individuals:

• Goodbye CP: outspoken poet, disability activist, and wheelchair-refuser Hiroshi Yokota
• Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974: Hara’s aggressively nutty former girlfriend Miyuki Takeda
• The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: Second World War veteran Kenzo Okuzaki, who beats up interviewees and throws pachinko balls at the Emperor

Inoue doesn’t seem to belong in the lineup; he’s not, in Hara’s words, one of the “troublemakers.” That is to say, he makes only well-precedented kinds of trouble. Does he womanize? Sure. Does he angry up the blood of Japanese communists? Sure. But he doesn’t take to the streets with his bent and hobbling buddies, he doesn’t drive around in a sound truck denouncing society, and he doesn’t run off to Okinawa and shack up with a black G.I. By Hara’s standards, Inoue is a normal subject and A Dedicated Life is a normal movie, with color and speech that matches the onscreen lip movements and everything!

Part of me actually regrets Hara’s relative freedom from technical limitation here, since his seventies films’ bare-bones production so positively influenced their style, their form, and thus their interestingness. I feared this one, shot in the late eighties and early nineties, would go down a bit easy. As it turns out, it does go down a bit easy, but don’t take that to mean Hara has lost his daring; in a dead-silent sequence oddly reminiscent of Extreme Private Eros’ childbirths, he gets the camera into the operating room and shoots one of Inoue’s liver tumor surgeries. Funny how... abstract the human body’s interior looks when you really get in there.

Whatever the film lacks in roughness, it makes up for in scope: cut from 70 hours of footage shot over Inoue’s final years, it runs nearly as long as Goodbye CP and Extreme Private Eros combined. What makes it different from them in kind rather than just in degree is that Hara films around Inoue, not just Inoue himself. His previous documentaries stay pretty much locked on their characters, although you can see beginnings of the breakaway in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. Here, he learns as much about Inoue indirectly as he learns directly. Before and after Inoue’s death, he sits down with his friends, his colleagues, his smitten middle-aged women, etc., and gets their impressions of the impassioned writer.

Good thing he did, since it turns out that Inoue lied a lot. His claims about founding the Japanese communist party he eventually spurned? Not so much. His claims about falling in love with a Korean prostitute in childhood? Not so much. Allowing Inoue to build up his own mythology — sometimes helping along with seriously Hara-atypical dramatic reenactments — as the others quizzically tear it down, Hara obviously got even more to work with than he’d bargained for. But this happens without judgment, and if you think about it for a moment, you couldn’t judge Inoue’s tall tale-telling without looking stupid: what does a novelist make his name on if not, uh, constructing elaborate lies?

I often think about the notion of living one’s own life as a work of art in and of itself; Inoue approaches that in a way hadn’t previously considered. If your art is fiction, it makes sense that your life as art would involve fiction as well. I assume that, like most of the Japanese novelists of his generation of whom I’m aware, he worked in the form of the “I” novel, a slab of autobiography with a light dusting of inventedness. (I know a bit more about mid-century Japanese novelists than most American readers, and Inoue never even made my radar before this movie, and it looks as if the entire Anglosphere only knows him through it. This piques my curiosity as to why.) Why not complete the circle and augment your autobiography with a dose of the invented even as you live it?

Ross McElwee: Sherman’s March

Reality Hunger manifestator (and former Marketplace of Ideas guest) has what he calls a “Very Partial Reading List”, which for some reason is only available as a Word document. He presumably means it for readers who, charged by Reality Hunger’s message of boredom with the traditionalism, formality, and plottiness of most novels, need a shot of the good stuff. I recognize books from writers I’ve enjoyed before like Nicholson Baker, Douglas Coupland, W.G. Sebald, D.J. Waldie, and Borges. I recognize books from writers I’ve got a jones to get into, like Gilbert Sorrentino, Geoff Dyer, J.M. Coetzee, and Julian Barnes. I even recognize non-textual media, like Denis Leary’s stand-up special No Cure for Cancer, Danger Mouse’s Beatles/Jay-Z mash-up The Grey Album, and Larry David’s HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Promising company, then, for another name that rung a bell: Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March. Despite recommendation after recommendation flying at me over the years, not least from Netflix’s increasingly trustworthy algorithms, I’d never pursued the film. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t the Civil War connection that put me off; the film’s poster bears an image of Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and its name echoes that of his 1864 campaign that ended in the capture of Savannah, Georgia. As in junior high, I still reflexively tire at the dry, sepia-toned old-timiness of any kind of Civil War material. Then again, it took me surprisingly long to consciously acknowledge any connection between the concepts “Civil War”, “Abraham Lincoln”, “slavery”, and “a war where one part of a country fights another”. Should I blame the failings of public education now?

Never having spent much time in the South outside the bits of Florida that might as well be Northern colonies, I’m always surprised to hear that people still talk about the Civil War down there. (Obligatory Onion link: “South Postpones Rising Again for Yet Another Year”.) Apparently they talk not just about that but about Sherman and his March as well. Having come up in the South, McElwee got it in his head to shoot a documentary about the lasting effects, physical and psychological, of Sherman’s March. Alas, McElwee’s life rebels at his attempt to impose such a project on it. This rebellion comes in the form of a breakup, and his high-minded documentary turns into a filmed search for a new lady that meanders through the South from candidate to semi-appealing but ultimately unsuitable candidate.

Needless to say, Netflix’s user-reviewer brain trust disapproves:

This is not at all what we were expecting, (and yes we did read the details before ordering). This was a total waste of time..turned it off after only a few minutes, and that included skipping through scenes to see if it ever got better...It did not!

Maybe 15 minutes of this film seriously discuss other people (their attitudes and ancestors) and places devastation by Sherman. The majority of this 2 1/2 hour bore-fest is devoted to the depression and anxiety prone directors personal rants and interpretations about this and that but mainly his romantic relationships and thoughts about women.

the guy should have been honest and returned the grant money when he found he could not do the documentary on General Sherman's March, on the account of wallowing in pity for himself after being dumped by his girlfriend. Sheesh! Get over it dude!

Maybe you need to be stoned or a super intellectual type, but I'm just a regular dude who wants to be entertained.

Similar complaints appear for all of McElwee’s films available on Neftlix: too much McElwee, not enough being “about” what it’s supposedly “about”, I’m just a regular dude who wants to be entertained, etc., etc. Personally, I think all films should perform their own equivalent of shifting from being about Sherman’s March to being about the search for a new girlfriend; letting the content shift as it may concentrates you on the form, the element of cinema that matters most. McElwee tried to dictate his project’s content, which didn’t work, as it often doesn’t. Many filmmakers, especially documentary filmmakers, would have simply soldiered on (as it were), an instinct that has produced most of the mediocrities of our time. McElwee proves himself wiser than that.

The lineup of prospective suitresses includes a new-agey actress, a Mormon, a survivalist, an angry activist, a parking-lot rock star, and an aspiring Margaret Mead. The two other major women, even more fascinating, are McElwee’s sister, eager to explain the value of her eyebag-removal surgery, and his former teacher Charleen, hell-bent on hitching him up with whichever eligible woman rolls down the pike and calling it good. Taken as a gallery of eccentrics, Sherman’s March bears a strong similarity to the documentaries Errol Morris shot around the same time, like the tale of dueling pet cemeteries Gates of Heaven and, more so, Vernon Florida, a brief examination of a small Florida Panhandle town.

Fuse that sensibility with Nick Broomfield’s, and you’ve got a reasonably accurate sense of this movie. Broomfield’s documentaries tend to document Broomfield’s making of the documentary as much as whatever they’re supposed document, be it Aileen Wuornos’ media profile, Courtney Love’s control on Kurt Cobain, or the connection between Biggie Smalls’ death and Tupac’s. Some people quite dislike his work for that, and I grant that there might be valid stylistic reasons to do so, but it most often seems to bespeak a certain closedmindeness about cinema. Or maybe I don’t mean closedmindedness; maybe the real problem has to do with misplaced focus. Besides, how could you grumble at that 1930s sports car McElwee drives around for half the movie?

Chantal Akerman: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

You can read my latest Humanists column, on Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, this week on 3Quarksdaily:

"No good movie is too long," Roger Ebert once wrote, "and no bad movie is short enough." Oh, how my inner cinephile regrets bringing up the 201-minute length of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so early in the discussion, it supports that dictum so well! Later revised to "All good films are the right length," the line now applies to the film that much more directly. I'll sound higher-flown but surely even more accurate when I claim that the form of all good movies closely fits their substance. Here we have one of the closest form-substance matches ever made.

The title may have already given this away, but those three-and-change hours don't serve a labyrinthine plot, an ensemble of dozens, or any particular historical sweep; we get a widow, her son, three days in mid-1970s Brussels, and the preparations for those days' three dinners. Already we hit the fearsome wall this film raises against critics: having watched (and perhaps loved) it, you want to insist that, against the implication of all possible summaries, it's not boring. Yet that insistence sounds, to the rightfully skeptical reader, like too much protestation. What's more, you feel all the while that the very impulse to deliberately highlight non-boringness trivializes the many fascinating (and actually relevant) qualities of a picture so richly non-boring on every level. It's like making a big deal out of the fact that it was shot with a camera; sure, it's true, but it's also part of the work's very nature.

Generally speaking, no serious viewer considers boredom a function of length. After all, many boring movies clock in around 90 minutes, and often they're filled with event after tiresome event. Neither, then, can a serious viewer consider boredom a function of happenings. Let's not even start on all the turgid "epics" the annals of cinema history offer us. I would submit that boredom is actually the result of a form-substance mismatch; it's the unpleasant sensation of those two aspects of a film grinding away at one another, rattling, vibrating, putting out that awful burning-rubber smell. Hence the dullness of so many films adapted from other media — literature especially — as well as those conceived first and foremost as screenplays. When the material can't properly engage all the creative bandwidth cinema has to offer, something's bound to burn out. Usually, it's the audience.

I promise you more paragraphs over at 3QD. What with this and all the Jean-Philippe Toussaint I’ve read, this has been not just a very Belgian month for me, but a very Belgian-aestheticization-of-the-mundane month for me. Shouldn’t we have long ago made that month official, like Poetry Month or Black History Month?