Attack from the Distaff Side

Returning for a moment to the milieu of the previous post, when we look back at the dawn of time we find book and movie titles such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Man in the White Suit, The Boy with Green Hair. Males baffled by circumstance, yearning for nothing more than a modicum of peace and security. And when we look for similar titles on what used to be called the distaff side, what do we find? Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman! These men are just sitting quietly, humbly, merely hoping to be allowed to watch a football game, and...they're ATTACKED! By fifty-foot women!

It's the story of my life.

The Least Justifiable Remake in Hollywood History Is...

Total Recall, currently being developed by Columbia Pictures, although the original version is less than 20 years old, hasn't become dated, and contains thrilling effects and memorable performances, including the first widely noticed one of Sharon Stone's career.

I'm pleased to say that fans are already condemning, reviling, execrating, and opprobriating the remake, and that one of them points out the irony of the production company's name: Original Films.

If only Philip K. Dick were still alive to haul in the cash, and perhaps to write a story about a man who discovers that everything he touches becomes a remake of itself.

men, men, men!

1. I’m reading a suspense novel whose front cover is a photo of a naked young male. I’m afraid someone will see.

2. Which reminds me, I want to rent Brokeback Mountain – but only for Heath Ledger’s performance, you understand.

3. I read an article somewhere about the show Mad Men, in which the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, talked about having to compromise on casting. In the case of one important role, after much painful discussion they decided to go with “the beautiful one” rather than the better actor. I leaped to the conclusion that “the beautiful one” was a woman, undoubtedly either January Jones or Christina Hendricks, but now I think it was Jon Hamm, who plays the lead role, Don Draper. They can't possibly have hired him for his acting.

great deleted scenes, oracular arts and crafts, anniversary price tag

1. Finally watching a movie you’ve been putting off mistrustfully, and loving it so much you watch all the special features and deleted scenes.

2. Attending a show of crafts the kids made in summer camp: seeing the life they live when you’re not there, the aptitudes they didn’t know they had last month, the memories they’ll have fifty years from now, the roads they’ll go on their own.

3. Unplanned anniversary celebration with a former love: no gifts, no flowers, much laughter and free-hearted talk.

Bergman vs. Fellini: Rematch of the Gladiators

I met my project deadline a couple of hours early; it’s 97 degrees outside, six degrees cooler than yesterday; I’m shutting the blinds and putting on Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel, followed by Fellini’s Variety Lights. Two early b/w films by masters, both of them about young women who fall in with troupes of third-rate traveling entertainers.

My verdict: Bergman by a mile.

The Fellini is a charming, involving (largely because of its starry-eyed brunette ingenue, Carla del Poggio, and her rival for love, Giulietta Masina) tragicomedy about performers deluding themselves in work and love, and about the squalid and ritzy sides of Rome, which Fellini always describes with such zest and affection. The themes are true and almost too recognizable –- there’s a fair amount of All About Eve, some of The Blue Angel, a lot of smile-making ethnographic portraiture, and pleasure in the beauty of ugliness –- and we finish the movie feeling tenderness for characters who, whether they’ve won or lost in worldly terms, are traveling on a train they’ll never get off.

Visually, the film, which Fellini only co-directed, but conceived and co-wrote, is apprentice work: it’s almost all straight montage, very little camera movement, and what there is seeming tentative, studenty, no hint of the extravagant, comically startling swoops and pans of the mature Fellini.

Sawdust and Tinsel is on a whole other level of art. The fact that it’s considered one of the director’s minor works, made before his breakthrough with Smiles of a Summer Night, is a comment in itself. Most other directors would die happy if they made one film of this quality.

Many of the themes of Variety Lights are visible here too: a traveling performing company is a wonderful metaphor for life’s journey of pretense and attempted escape. Once again there’s a magnetically sexy young female lead (Harriet Andersson) and an aging manager clinging to false hopes despite repeated betrayal.

But there’s a profound understanding here which is manifest in the treatment of the characters. The manager isn’t just a foolish would-be lover; he’s torn in every direction, clinging to a love he knows is shabby, jealousy rejecting her, bullying and being beaten at his own game; itching to escape his circus, trying to sabotage it, ultimately accepting his small portion of life with a grudgingness that can’t quite conceal blessedness. Every look in his eye reveals a thought-out complexity. The young woman is not just grasping or faintly conflicted; she’s kind and unkind, haughty and humiliated, and her mistakes come from fighting for her life. The triangular relationship with the manager’s wife isn’t schematic; details and subtleties, ambivalences, give it actuality and dimension. (Is it that Swedes are just more serious, that Swedish actors are better?)

Sawdust and Tinsel is stylistically masterful by any standard. Already there are the beautiful landscapes of The Seventh Seal, with slow-moving horse-drawn wagons enlivening the sharp ridge under the gray sky. The film progresses by means of set pieces, such as a Felliniesque (before Fellini was doing it) seaside striptease before an entire company of soldiers by an aging sexpot, shot silent-movie-style, which comic interlude rises to the pity and awe of tragedy when her husband, in full clown costume, comes to rescue her. The ending keeps us guessing among a few obvious alternatives, but it combines them in a way that evokes the “Ahh” of the just-right. These performers’ journey is touched by the numinous. It’s in their faces and in the airy chiaroscuro surrounding their wagons and their silhouetted walking figures.

Amazingly, this film received bad reviews when it was released in 1953; one prominent Swedish critic called it "a piece of vomit."

In the little interview that’s a special feature on the DVD, Bergman says, “It’s a good movie”; he says he has a soft spot for it. If you’ve made Wild Strawberries and Cries and Whispers afterward, I guess that’s a fair assessment.

the future of cinema, support your local paranoid, I don’t have to handle it

1. My favorite movie at the middle school film festival: “Follow Me,” an homage, I think conscious, to The Red Balloon. A boyfriend and girlfriend, holding hands, walk into the school, the whole frame shot in black and white except that the girl holds a red balloon. They part to go to their separate classrooms, and when the girl reaches hers, the balloon escapes and floats back toward the boy, while the boy’s shoes, also red, slip off him and walk by themselves toward the girl’s classroom. Then we see the boy and girl holding hands again as they leave the building at the end of the day; the balloon floats behind them, with the shoes tied to its string.
PS: I recommend this 2007 French homage to The Red Balloon.

2. Within a mile, I twice cross paths with the same ratty little car: it has bumper stickers for 9/11 trutherism, Alex Jones, and Brave New Books. I hatch a plan: I’ll follow him all day, freak him out, make him think the enemy has arrived, just as he’s always dreaded and hoped. Or -- what if I followed him and he never noticed? He’d have to be stripped of his Conspiracy Theory membership!

3. Confronted with a parenting difficulty, I inquire into the stressful thought, “I need to know how to handle it.” Turns out I don’t!

Wild. Outrageous.

I was emailing with my blogging mentor the other evening, and she said:

“It's virtually impossible to get a lot of traffic with the kind ofthing you do. It's very good, but it's not what people consume obsessively. Be more wild and outrageous.... No one wakes up in the morning and asks: What's the latest finely tuned observation.”

Well, I do! So I write it to find out.

In my opinion, what this country needs is some finely tuned observations. What have we gotten from wild and outrageous? Billionaire bankers ruining the economy with their wild, outrageous new derivative securities. Draft-dodger politicians wildly and outrageously invading countries that pose no threat to us. In the age of wild and outrageous, all that matters is explosions: it’s not interesting unless something's blowing up. Which did you read today, the article about the new commanding general in Afghanistan or the one about the soldier in Iraq who shot five of his buddies?

My reply to my mentor:

“Getting a lot of traffic isn't my game. I'm not unworldly enough to think I'll get it with this kind of post. I just have this online journal and write what I want. Wild and outrageous I wouldn't know, unless it happens by accident. It would probably have something to do with popular culture or current events, and that doesn't interest me.”

I wonder: could I ever be wild and outrageous? My first answer is, No, that’s not me. But I’ve learned that there is no immutable “not me,” and that changing is mostly a matter of deciding. Maybe someday I’ll decide to be wild and outrageous. It would be new -- the first time.

Wild and outrageous people are like children, getting the same laugh from telling the same joke a thousand times. Some wild outrageous people are fun and some of them have been geniuses. I like to be around them in order to observe, take notes, and make wisecracks. I don’t think I’d want their inner lives, for the most part. If they stood still for five minutes to think about it, they’d want mine.

Geniuses aside, “wild and outrageous” makes me visualize a group of white thirty-year-olds getting drunk and jumping up and down to bad music, flinging their arms and whooping in order to pretend they have soul. People who boast how “crazy” they and their friends are; whose refrigerator doors are cluttered with photos of people making manic faces, the same exact wild and outrageous faces in millions of photos across the nation’s refrigerator doors. They’re like a movie whose ads call it “hilarious” but which turns out to be moderately amusing in some spots and witlessly vulgar in others.

Aw, who am I kidding? Don't you wish you could do this:

It Didn't Have to Happen This Way But It Did

I drive by a field where a painful incident in my past occurred, and I feel only a mild wistfulness as I keep going forward, the strands of myself separating and recombining, mutating and adapting. These quiet days, even my metabolism feels new: a craving for fruit has come over me: pineapple, cherries, blueberries, blackberries, mangos, plums, any fruits you can name, and once a day is barely enough, as if I’ve regressed into some kind of tropical forest ape.

I lull myself to sleep with scary movies. I cherish the unnerved feeling after it’s over, when you feel you’re still in it, the monsters coming at you, the cave getting pitch dark. Sitting in your easy chair you’re in a deep-breathing, slow-lifting trance that’s almost postcoital. I recommend The Descent, about a group of six adventurous women -– all, coincidentally enough, raving beauties – who get trapped in a deep cave. Never before in my adult life have I been tempted to sleep with the lights on.

Change works through the drifting days as well as the dramatic ones. This is how you make your trail, your worldline, the unique squiggle in spacetime that represents how you danced and ran and squirmed from birth to death. You take one step, then another, none of them necessary until it’s already taken, and at the end you can read your whole life’s unplanned choreography, the curlicued signature you left on the page of eighty years, and it looks just right.

My worldline has led me back to reading science fiction, as I did in adolescence. Currently it’s Stephen Baxter’s panorama novel Evolution, which covers all of primate history from 65 million years ago to the present -– in fact the future. It’s like an exceptionally readable textbook in human paleontology, with imagination added where the fossil record is sketchy. There’s a wonderful set piece about a handful of anthropoid apes set adrift on the ocean on a downed tree after a flash flood: it’s a lifeboat survival tale, complete with long-delayed cannibalism, and reads like Life of Pi except with all the characters as animals. Baxter renders the full stink and slime and gore of animal life; it’s shocking to think of my ancestors defecating on each other to assert dominance or obsessively picking bugs out of each other’s pubic hair to establish social bonds. But that’s us, dear readers: we’re “bipedal, tool wielding, meat eating, xenophobic, hierarchical, combative, competitive” and possessed of “doggedness, exuberance, courage, and vision.” Chance and opportunism, smart or foolish or arbitrary choice, pre-adaptation or blind leap, guiding us through an unexplored cave so that we miraculously chose the right passageways and crawled through into the light. We’ve still got the dust on our clothes.

Some of us back then lived among sabertooth cats who were specialized to prey on hominids. No need for scary movies. No luxury of splitting the monogamous pair.

I look back gratefully at my four-foot-high, stone-axe-chipping, fireless, garmentless forebears of a million years ago and wonder at the courage of the primitive. It’s still all we have.

A Movie I Cried at Yesterday

Bridge to Terebithia.

I haven't heard that much sniffling from all corners of a theater since Shadowlands.

It was the mothers who were weeping -- the mothers and me. The kids had all already read the book, or else heard about it from their friends.

Dream Journal: Dead Woody

Turning on the TV, I catch the end of a news story that recaps the career of Woody Allen in glowing, valedictory terms. I jump to the conclusion that Woody Allen has died. I rush to tell my wife and my brother, and we keep the news on to see whether Woody is really dead. But, flipping channels back and forth, we don’t find any more mention of him.

In this dream, I had just awakened from dreaming of the death of a different famous comedian. So although the idea of Woody’s death made me choke up with tears, I very much wanted it to be true, because then my dream would turn out to be prophetic: I would be proven right.

NOTES:
The atmosphere of this dream was intense with nostalgia, anxiety for the future, and love of art and beauty. The news footage of Woody’s career glowed reddish gold. I woke up breathing hard, not with fear but with excitement over the dream’s richness, and took a long time to settle down. As I write this I’m still in the afterglow of dreaming.

Both in the dream and in reality, I surprised myself by being so moved by the death of Woody Allen. He’s someone whose early work, which came out in my early adulthood, I loved, but I haven’t liked any of his movies since the late 1970s. My weeping tells me to recognize the things I really love, not to reject them.

The half-remembered dream within the dream: the ungraspable nature of reality; the endless levels of interpretation. The different famous comedian I dreamed of, whose name was forgotten: me.

“Woody” is of course slang for an erection. I don’t think I’ve ever used that term in waking life, but, well, it’s there…

“The dream’s richness”: the dream’s me-ness. In real life I identify with Woody Allen (Jewish, witty, smart, small, brown-haired, sexual without machismo), but envy his success. His death: the death of my old self. The uncertainty of his death: a resurrection into a new self, as yet unknown.

The Nonaddictive Personality

I was going to brag that I haven’t spent a penny in three days, but then I remembered that I put some gas in the car for $14.50 – why, I don’t know, since I’m not going anywhere – and rented two movies for $5-something. (FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS and TWO FOR THE ROAD, both excellent in their own ways.) So I can’t even say I’ve been extreme in renunciation: everything in moderation.

Sometimes I fall into a hermitic temper and I stubbornly narrow my life down to a few daily rituals. This week of solitude it’s classical music at breakfast, work through the sunlit hours, twilight walk or gym session, dinner with red wine and rented movie, bedtime reading with more classical music. Email and online surfing of course. I’ve been feeling as if the world is lying outside for me to resist. If I were single I’d be going out and trying to meet people, but with a wife and family far away I have an excuse for asceticism. I haven’t taken the country drive I thought I was going to take, and I haven’t gone to a restaurant by myself (the one time I went with others, they picked up the $8 check), and I haven’t been to a movie theater or concert. All of them, things I used to do enthusiastically when I was really solo.

It’s funny the pleasure I can get out of not buying things. In the normal course of life I spend too much money on restaurants and a goodly amount on vacation travel, but if I see something appealing in a shop window it never occurs to me to buy it. I Iove used bookstores and one of my pet pleasures is seeking out good bottles of wine for under $10. I have pictures I’ve been meaning to frame for years, but I can’t bring myself to find a framing shop and choose a frame and actually hang the things on a wall.

I hear people talk about their binges – how they ate a whole box of cookies or a quart of ice cream – and I’m bemused. Those are things I’ve never done in my life. No matter how much I love food – and I do – I don’t see the pleasure in overdoing.

A little exposure to a sensation is all I need. I get the point quickly and I don’t need a lot more. No need to drink twelve beers if two make you feel just right. As a teenager, if I smoked a joint and felt like my mind was opening ecstastically, I didn’t have to do it again the next day. Each experience meant so much, I didn’t have to keep hammering it in. “Be as one on whom nothing is lost”: Henry James’ prescription for a novelist.

The king of delayed gratification. I don’t even count my chickens after they’re hatched. After all, not all the chickens may survive. One might be eaten by a fox; one might be smothered by the hen; one might be drowned in the duck pond.

I’ve been drinking a comforting amount of wine this lonely week, but the idea that I might slip into excess is humorous. If I drink three glasses one night, I’ll wake up the next morning feeling fine but knowing I won't repeat it that day. I gorged pretty well on Christmas dinner, and since then I’ve been eating with utter restraint – tonight’s dinner was whole-grain bread, cheddar cheese, salad, and shiraz. I used to be a moderate caffeinehead but I cut way down a couple of years ago, and these days if I make a cup of tea in the afternoon I probably won’t finish it.

It’s sad, I know…

Pigging Out

Christmas morning I took a walk through empty sunny streets to slip a rented movie through a return slot, then came back and did a half-day's work on the teachers' notes for a Grade 11 literature textbook. I'd been invited to an early dinner by a couple of friends, and we drove to one of the few restaurants in town that was open: a Southern-style cafeteria where you can get all you can eat for $7.99. It had the only packed parking lot in town, too. The restaurant was a big, clean space with tables being rapidly cleared by black-aproned Hispanic women, and at 4 p.m. the line of customer went the entire length of the interior to the front door. Families were carrying overloaded trays of food, sometimes two trays per person, and many of the trays were piled two or three layers high, with several entrees, two or three desserts, and a multitude of small side-dish bowls. Well, the line was so long you wouldn't want to go back on it for seconds. Now and then a piece of china fell to the ground and smashed, to be quickly whisked up. I got cucumber salad, cole slaw, fried chicken (two thighs, two wings), roast beef, sliced red potatoes braised with onions, corn niblets, fried okra, jalapeno cornbread, pumpkin pie with whippped cream, and apple pie. Water to drink. This was a full tray only one layer high. Everything was good except the fried chicken, which was dry. And the okra was a bit stale and bready. The pies were excellent, the roast beef medium-rare, moistened along with the potatoes by natural juice. Among the three of us we had planned on four trays, but it turned out we didn't need the fourth.

All around, people were pushing plates of half-eaten food away. "I'm through." "I'm done." "No more." "No mas." "It's nap time." By the cashier's station stood a revolving glass display of whole pies. Pumpkin, pecan, apple, buttermilk, chocolate cream, coconut cream... They looked perfect. Some other time perhaps. I'll come back with the kids, they'd love this place.

Back home, I watched one play of the Packers-Bears game on TV: Brett Favre threw a touchdown interception. Sic transit gloria mundi. I read myself to sleep (ALBION by Peter Ackroyd, recomended for anglophiles only, of which I am one), then woke at 8 p.m. and watched a good suspense movie, ONE FALSE MOVE, written by Billy Bob Thornton before he became a star.

Today's plan: just another Monday.

Viewing Log: Werner Herzog at Kaieteur Falls

In Herzog’s 2004 documentary THE WHITE DIAMOND, a British scientist, a typical Herzog distraught jungle obsessive, is testing a new type of small airship to fly above the rainforest canopy of Guyana in search of medicinal plants. He thinks he may also want to fly it above Kaieteur Falls, the world’s longest single-drop waterfall (741 feet), but he changes his mind when a test flight -- five store-bought helium balloons, jointly carrying a glass of champagne -- is sucked into the falls by the downdraft.

A million swifts, it is said, live in the unexplored cave behind the falls. The camera catches a smoke-thick flock of them flying in front of the cataract, a swirling mass in which each individual seems to have its own flight plan, its own will and whimsicality, aided rather than hindered by the need to stay in the group. The water is bright amber at the top of its plunge from the green-black rock of the plateau; as it drops, it lightens, churning gray and white in a smoke-cloud of spume. And the swifts are flying around the spray, inside it, behind it.

Do they live in a continual ecstasy? Because they should. Or are they so used to the waterfall, or are their nervous systems so primitive, that they hardly notice it?

Some of them may not be well mated or well fed, they may have worries about whether another member of the flock is going to steal their favorite cranny in the cave. Some may be old or sick or injured, nearing their last flight. But how terrible, no matter what their struggles, if they didn’t know that they deserved to live in a continual ecstasy. That the conditions demanded it, and not to do so was dumb negligence and loss of life.