Remarks to the Dictionary Society of North America, May 23, 2013

I’m pleased to welcome the members of the Dictionary Society of North America to the University of Georgia and to say a few words of exhortation as you prepare for your 19^th biennial meeting.  My field is literary studies, and though I have used dictionaries all my life, in paper and digital form, I can’t claim to know a lot about how they are put together and the thinking that lies behind them.  I do think of dictionaries as an original form of Big Data (with capital letters), a linguistic and cultural archive of information about how we think and talk and feel that contains the deepest substance and meanings of our civilizations.  Dictionaries are (and maybe this is an old-fashioned concept) archives of the most important sort. 

Many of you may think of yourselves as humanists, some of you may be social scientists, and some of you may be in other fields entirely, such as computing, but I think of all of you as humanists.  The process of putting together a dictionary is a fundamentally humanistic one because language is a basic feature of what it means to be human.

It is almost a hackneyed cliché these days to say that we are in a state of fundamental change.  I think that the change happening right now is more sweeping and fundamental than any of us realize.  Lexicographers and those who conceptualize and construct and talk about dictionaries face the same challenges that the humanities at large are facing: how is change going to change us?  How will digital technology transform us?  Are the boundaries by which we’ve traditionally defined ourselves becoming more destructive than creative?  How are constantly shifting cultural and national and linguistic and ideological boundaries going to affect what we as humanists, what you as dictionary makers, do? 

We can’t sit back and be passive as change happens. We have to take charge. We have to control the process of change.  Once we come out on the other side of whatever place it is we are in right now, however unfamiliar the new territory and its terrains and disciplines may be, we have to make certain that the values that have been important to humanistic studies since their beginnings survive.

Thank you for what you do.  And with that, I hope you will have a pleasant and productive conference here at the University of Georgia, where spring is fast becoming summer, that time of year when above all else air conditioners are king.

Comments for the Lamar Dodd School of Art Graduation, May 9, 2013

I am pleased to be here to offer congratulations and best wishes to those of you who are marking your graduation today from the University of Georgia with a degree from the Lamar Dodd School of Art.  You’ve worked hard, you have much to be proud of, you ought to feel good.  I extend these wishes to your friends, your parents and spouses and partners and special others, and to everyone in general, because at the end of the year everyone deserves a hug and congratulations.

I have two very brief but important imperatives for you today.  First, use your love of art, your creative and scholarly abilities, to do good in the world.  Don’t go back to your studio or office after this ceremony and close the door.  You haven’t earned the right to do that.  What you have earned the right to do is to use your education and your training and talent to go out and improve your society, serve your fellow human being, and do good for this planet.  This is what art is for—it serves the higher needs of humankind.  And humankind, in this day and age, really needs some help. 

Second, take every opportunity you can find to promote--among your friends, your family, the people you work with, and anyone else you happen to run into--the value of the arts.  A recent report from the Wallace Foundation found three intrinsic benefits of the arts:  one is pleasure and captivation.  A second is personal growth “such as enhanced empathy for other people and cultures, powers of observation, and understanding of the world”—these “cultivate the kinds of citizens desired in a pluralistic society.”  The third benefit is the sense of “communal identity” that comes from thinking and talking about the arts, the “expression of common values and community identity” that come from artworks that commemorate events important to individual, group, or national experiences.  And this report does not even begin to touch on the economic values of the arts, or their impact in providing a meaningful quality of life in our community.  Here’s my report to you: The arts are not a luxury, a convenience, or a casual pastime.  They’re an essential part of our daily lives, of our private selves, of what it means to be human and civilized.  Be sure to share that message.

Congratulations, and my best wishes to you all.

Roger Ebert (1942-2013)

In my blog postings about films and literature, I have always had Roger Ebert in mind. Although I didn't always agree with him, his passion for films, especially good ones, was always evident in his commentaries. He was a deeply empathetic critic.  He liked or found something positive to say about a surprising number of films, even ones that from my point of view were pallid. He was willing to give a weak film consideration if he found in it something reasonably ambitious, something human and genuine.  As a writer, he managed something most serious critics cannot achieve—he expressed intelligent and sophisticated ideas in a clear, engaging style. He was usually interesting, and usually worth reading.  He wrote with integrity and intelligence. His opinions, about film and about life in general, were unpredictable and often surprising. He seemed an authentic human being. You can't say that about most public critics. Late in his life, besieged with illness, deprived of his voice, speaking only through the written word, he became something of a heroic figure.  Publishing and blogging on a wide variety of topics, he emerged as a popular intellectual.  I used his film commentaries to measure my own thoughts. I admired his public struggle with illness—though to call it a struggle is perhaps wrong.  He lived with and adjusted to his illness and rarely seemed daunted by it.  His proclamation that he wasn't afraid of death impressed me. Few can make that claim.  He made a real impact on readers and film lovers of his time.

A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter

James Salter’s prose style in A Sport and a Pastime (1967) is spare, fluid, and often lyrical.  His major influence, probably, is Hemingway.  Salter writes mostly in simple sentences, with a phrase here and there, and with few if any clauses.  There’s little elaboration of his central thoughts and meanings.  He relies to an extent (like Hemingway) on dialogue, but mostly it is the clean, clear, often beautiful prose that carries one through his novel.  His ability to create tone, mood, especially in the final pages of this narrative, is impressive.

Set in the 1960s in France, A Sport and a Pastime describes the friendship of two young men, Dean and the narrator, as they travel and live in Paris and outlying regions of France.  It is a novel of imagination, and almost nothing in it may really happen, in a literal sense.  The narrator invents events or characters, transposes wishes and desires from his own life into the imagined life of his friend.  It’s possible that the narrator is in love with Dean, or that the he works out his jealousy about Dean’s romantic relationships by inventing and writing about them.  The narrator vents his own sexual dissatisfaction by imagining in graphic terms his friend’s sexual relationship with a teenage girl.  His imagined narratives are a form of wish-fulfillment. For much of the novel, each relatively short chapter ends with or at least involves a candid description of sex between Dean and his lover Anne-Marie.  Dean is a Harvard drop-out with no certain source of income other than what he can convince his father or sister to give, and what he can earn from tutoring.  It’s amazing how far he can make the money he does have go.  (Though we have to remember that much if not all that he does with it is what his friend the narrator imagines for him). 

Anne-Marie is a lower middle-class working girl who has had a few other relationships before she meets Dean.  Dean is alternately self-conscious about Anne-Marie’s lower-class status, worried about losing her, worried about marrying her, worried about what she’ll do when he leaves.  It’s clear that the girl has similar worries, but most of the time we’re not concerned with her except as a willing and avid recipient of whatever kind of sex it is that Dean wishes to have.  It’s almost incidental that Anne Marie has a name.  She’s just the receptacle of his sexual needs, and of the narrator’s.

This is Salter’s most famous novel, the one that earned him his modest reputation.  It seems somehow dated.  I’m no sexual puritan, but I sometimes felt during my reading of it not only a voyeur but even an exploiter of Anne Marie.

Primer

It’s interesting to see how much can be done with a small investment.  Obviously, a lot of donated time went to the making of Primer (2004, dir. Shane Carruth). Much of it takes place in a makeshift lab in a garage, where four guys in their off-hours work on various experiments and inventions.  They are sober, conventional, semi-geek-like, semi-normal guys.  Their experiments involve computers and tables and various chemicals and definitely don’t appear to be high-tech.  Except that they are.  Two members of the team develop a device, nearly by accident, that allows a kind of time-travel.  The device is an unassuming box covered with metal plates.  When the inventors climbin, they are able to jump back, or forward (depending on your perspective) in time far enough to learn what certain stocks will sell for, or what team will win the Final Four, and when they return to the present they use the information to make investments that pay off.  The problem is, however, that using the boxes creates duplicates of the time travelers, and parallel timelines of causality.  The guys at first use their device carefully, but ultimately they grow careless, and a billionaire inventor aka Bill Gates appears to be trying to steal it.  Things get complicated.

The film relies on the characters to explain their invention, why it works, and what it means.  They’re not even sure what to do with it, and in the end they lose control of the lines of cause and effect it creates.  The narrative is too complicated, the science is too obtuse.  The characters monologue and mumble so much that it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on.  We bog down in the premise and its development.

We have to admire this realistic and minimalist effort to tell an interesting, complicated story on a miniscule ($7,000) budget.  The film has no special effects, except the faint whirring sound of the device.  But the problem is not the budget--it’s exposition.

Pitch Perfect

Narratives about the struggles of the young to find themselves are fundamental to literature.  They’re fundamental to film as well.  In the U. S., we expect much of this self-funding to take place during college years, a time when, not incidentally, many students have parentally funded opportunities for occasional study mixed in with other forms of growth and development better left to one’s imagination, or better not.  For audiences who find pleasure in stories about young people trying to find their way in the world, grappling with difficult parents, negotiating personal ambitions with practical realities, the film Pitch Perfect (2012; dir. Jason Moore) may offer satisfaction.  For audiences who enjoyed the television series Glee (at least in its early years), Pitch Perfect will also entertain—it’s about singing and dancing and sometimes prancing college students competing for a national a cappella singing championship in.  In fact, these students sing better than the goobers in Glee, they’re more interesting, and there’s less computer manipulation of the music.  And, most of all, for those who take pleasure in films that make fun, sometimes wicked fun, of college students who try to find themselves in singing and dancing, Pitch Perfect will give you some laughs.  It really does satirize the students, their youth and inexperience on the one hand, their eccentricities and egos and inexperience and pretensions on the other.  Pitch Perfect gives us college students who still possess distinctive personalities that haven’t been worn away by four years of higher education.  They’re funny, we enjoy laughing at them, and the film also makes us care about them.

This is not a good film.  But it has entertaining moments, and was fine for watching at home.  I laughed often during the first half or so.  The acting isn’t especially good, most of the primary characters in one way or the other inhabit the expected stereotypical roles in films about the young, and the main character has creepy eyebrows.  The Breakfast Club (1985; dir. John Hughes) has a role in one of the secondary plots—I was never quite able to understand why. 

Pitch Perfect doesn’t stay true to its satiric energies.  In the end, satire surrenders to a deadpan narrative about students competing for a national prize and the fraught romantic relations of two characters.  I’d rather have kept laughing.

WUSA

As a film of the late 1960s WUSA (1970; dir. Stuart Rosenberg) addresses the anxieties of a Southern white backlash against the civil rights movement (reflective of the George Wallace movement), and a general late 60s cultural malaise.  An ever-present sense of entropy, of total moral and cultural decay, pervades.  The message verges on nihilistic surrender.  

With its emphasis on the power of media in politics (in this case, a right-wing radio station (WUSA) fomenting a political movement), WUSA looks back to All the King’s Men (1949) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) and anticipates Nashville (1975) and even O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000).

The setting is New Orleans, which the film presents as a place of amoral chaos where the down and out, the disgraced, and the criminal gather.  The principal characters fall into those categories and come to the French Quarter to live in a Pontalba-style apartment together, one of those old tall buildings with a central courtyard.  The various characters can look out their doors into the courtyard and watch one another come and go.  To an extent their lives intertwine against the backdrop of a developing right-wing political movement.    

Anthony Perkins plays Rainey, a survey taker hired by a black political boss who is helping the white owner of WUSA prove that welfare fraud is rampant.  Rainey is hired to conduct a “survey” proving there is fraud to advance the radio station’s cause. He is not at first aware of how the information he’s gathering is being used, or of the radio station’s involvement.  His character is sexually ambiguous, and there is a hint that he might once have been arrested on a morals charge, or that he was engaged in some sort of event for which he feels guilt.  The film ambiguously implies his Christian faith, which basically means his strong moral sense.  He previously worked in Venezuela for 6 months as part of a vaguely defined “mission”—building a fence to keep children from falling into a river, coaching a boy’s baseball team.  Was he trying to expiate some previous wrongdoing?  When he returned to the United States he suffered an “illness,” probably a breakdown, whose nature is left vague.  He’s increasingly upset by the human suffering he uncovers in his work, and especially by the apathy of the main character, Rheinhardt, played by Paul Newman.

Rheinhardt calls himself a “communicator,” a euphemism in this film for conman.  His past is a mystery too.  In earlier days, we learn, he wanted to play clarinet, but he ended up a disk jockey.  He refers to himself as a survivor who doesn’t care about anything.  In the film he takes a job as a disk jockey for WUSA, doing what he’s told, reading editorials he’s given to read, showing no apparent concern for the message he’s delivering.  We sense in Reinhardt a man scarred and embittered by disappointment, an individual who’s given up.  Deep underneath, he’s apparently outraged by what he does at WUSA, and in latter portions of the film perhaps we expect his outrage to break out in some action against the corrupt politico he works for.  But that never happens.  Instead he drinks excessively and verbally abuses those closest to him, including Rainey as well as a young woman named Geraldine, his roommate and love-interest.  Rheinhardt has a past connection with an evangelical preacher played by Laurence Harvey. Harvey’s character is also a con man. They know each other and Newman says the preacher owes him money.  At film’s end they head out of town together, looking for more situations and individuals to exploit.

Woodward’s character Geraldine has come to New Orleans looking for work as a “cocktail waitress.” Her background isn’t clear either.  It’s suggested she might have been a hooker in the past, or fallen victim to some compromising situation.  She doesn’t do much other than loll around and look distressed at Newman’s increasing drunkenness and erratic behavior.  She’s not particularly intelligent or capable of analyzing her situation.  She’s a victim, though we aren’t prepared for what happens to her—the only truly tragic moment in the film.

Tension gradually builds around Rainey.  He is increasingly unhappy with the man he works for and what he’s discovering in his work--the exploitation of poor African Americans.  Newman’s amorality particularly bothers him.  One night Newman and a group of hippies living in the same apartment building set out to shock and insult Rainey, and that seems to be a turning point.  In the climactic scene, the radio station holds a rally in the Super Dome.  A very drunk Rheinhardt is the master of ceremonies.  It’s clear the rally is for white people—an anti-civil rights rally.  One audience member wears a “white power” hat.  (The rally scenes seem to foreshadow more recent reactionary movements in American politics).  Perkins, hidden in the top of the stadium with a high power rifle, assassinates the owner of WUSA when he rises to speak. 

The film is confused.  We see many images of the gay population of New Orleans, and it’s never clear whether they are intended as evidence of welcome sexual freedom or moral depravity—I think the latter.  A prominent secondary character is a young black man who poses as his sister in order to receive her welfare check (she is a prostitute).  Are we supposed to feel anything more than contempt for Newman?  He may be embittered and scarred, he may hate what he does, but does that compensate for what he is? Everyone is corrupt, or indifferent, with the exception of Rainey and Geraldine—both are dead at the end of the film. 

African Americans have a prominent presence—their oppression gradually incites Rainey, and they are the target of the radio station’s political movement.  Only two black characters have significant roles: Rainey’s corrupt boss and the previously mentioned cross-dresser. 

The hippies who live near Woodward and Newman also have little interest in politics or taking a stand.  They play their music for money and smoke and sell dope.  They seem like hippies from a Love Boat episode—created by someone who’d never really seen or understood what hippies in the 60s really were.

Novelist Robert Stone wrote the screenplay, and his considerable narrative skills do make for a satisfactory story.  We don’t ever come to understand fully Rheinhardt’s motivations, or Rainey’s.  Newman plays the kind of damaged macho character he played throughout the 50s and 60s, but in those films (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, Cool Hand Luke, The Long Hot Summer) the characters he played were more comprehensible, better explained.  His character in this film is a weak echo of those earlier roles.  Everyone comes into the world of WUSA pre-damaged, as if damage is the nature of the human condition.  Director Rosenberg handles the climactic scenes in the Super Dome and the city jail in such an understated, almost apathetic manner that whatever tension or force they might have had drains away.

Tenth of December: Stories, by George Saunders

In Tenth of December: Stories (Random House, 2013), George Saunders encapsulates the lives and sensibilities of average American middle-class citizens.  He shows us quietly desperate lives, some of them set in a future much like our own, others simply in the present day, in the middle of things.  Families are of special interest to him.  So are teenagers and younger children.  Saunders tends to narrate through the minds of his characters.  Sometimes he reports their thoughts and words directly.  In “Victory Lap,” two teen-age lives intersect when a psychopathic killer comes on the scene.  (The story evokes two different but genuinely convincing teen-age minds—the girl recalls that kissing a classmate “had been like kissing an underpass . . . a cow in a sweater”). In “Puppy” a dysfunctional mother is set in contrast with her teenage daughter, who in turn worries about her mentally challenged younger brother.  In “The Simplica Girl Diaries” a father and husband records his experiences in a daily journal—his family is constantly in debt, always obsessed with acquiring material possessions, keeping pace with the demands of affluence, struggling with the different personalities of family members.  “Escape from Spiderhead” is a terrifying exploration of scientists studying how chemicals can control human emotions.  The title story, “Tenth of December,” alternates the viewpoints of an old man dying of brain cancer and of a ten-year-old boy who falls through the surface of a frozen pond. 

This is the first collection of Saunders’ stories I’ve read—glowing reviews and comments, including a New York Times article, aroused my interest.  His style is distinctive.  It’s also frustrating—the frame of reference tends to reside in the mind and language of his characters.  There’s no counterbalancing authorial perspective, or any way to ground the character’s view in a context of reality.  The stories challenge the reader to empathize, to struggle for understanding of what characters experience and feel. Sometimes the characters are so offensive that empathy is difficult—“Exhortation” and “Al Roosten” are examples.  I had difficulty engaging with these stories, and while I admired most of them I didn’t really like them.

These stories are works of the Great Recession.  The great obstacles people struggle against are almost entirely mundane and ordinary—disease, age, depression, economic difficulties and stress.  Yet such obstacles can reduce our existence to abject misery.  In only one or two stories does there seem to be any glimmer of redemptive hope.  Even in the title story, when the dying man rouses himself to wade in to the frozen pond and rescue a drowning boy, he still in the end has advanced brain cancer.  His victory is short.

It’s rare to encounter a writer capable of as much understanding of family dynamics, or as much empathy for suffering individuals.  Yet Saunder’s empathy is never maudlin or sentimental.  It’s the product of deep understanding.  His alternation of adolescent and parental points of view gives us a chilling view of the isolation that can occur within family walls.  Unlike Jonathan Franzen, who for the most part (based on The Corrections) sees families as oppressively dysfunctional, as worthy of contempt, Saunders at least may see some value in the family unit, and he displays genuine compassion for his characters.

Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths (2012; dir. Martin McDonagh) wanders unsteadily between violent crime drama and comedy.  That uncertainty makes it both amusing and uncomfortable.  One may say something similar about Quentin Tarantino’s films, yet they ultimately verge off towards violent moments of revenge and redemption, while Seven Psychopaths verges towards comedy and introspection, despite continuing violent scenes.

Actually, I might describe this film as a fusion of the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men.

Perhaps as a reflection of our utterly amoral and dysfunctioning times, the film’s repeated scenes of violence are presented as if they are in the normal course of things, not to be lingered on or grieved over.  Only the death of a central character at the end of the film seems to stimulate real emotion.  The overall tone of the film is amoral and madcap.  It does not exalt the moments of violence.  It’s failure to comment on such moments in itself constitutes commentary on our soulless fascination with violence and death.  Yet the film is not entirely consistent—one of its most likeable characters commits the worst mayhem.  Yet the Buddhist/Christian hoodlum Hans provides balance: ordered by a thug to “Put Your hands up!” he refuses.  Asked why, Hans responds, “Because I don’t want to.”  Warned by the thug that “I’ve got a gun,” Hans answers “I don’t care.”

Characters and an always moving, self-reflecting, refreshingly unpredictable plot make this film entertaining and surprising. The screenplay is a major strength.  It’s about a screenwriter, Marty (Colin Farrell) who is trying to write a screenplay entitled “Seven Psychopaths.”  But he’s struggling: the only psychopath he can think of is “a kind of Buddhist”:  “I'm sick of all these stereotypical Hollywood murderer scumbag type psychopath movies. I don't want it to be one more film about guys with guns in their hands. I want it... overall... to be about love... and peace. But it still has to be about these seven psychopaths, so this Buddhist psychopath, he... he doesn't believe in violence. I don't know what the fuck he's going to do in the movie.”  So what we have here is another example of a film about a film—in this case, a screenplay within a film--a story about how a story gets written, though in this case the way the story gets written is more interesting than the story itself, which we never see, other than in the title of the screenplay. Seven Psychopaths is about films, about screenwriting and creativity.  There’s even a short debate between two psychopaths about the difference between French and American films (one type ends with characters aimlessly wandering in the desert, while the other ends in a hail of bullets). 

Primarily there are strange and unusual characters: a true psychopath who murders crime family members, always wearing a bizarre red mask.  There’s an older gangster (Hans, played by Christopher Walken) who earns money kidnapping dogs and then returning them to their owners for a reward.  He’s a devout Christian who eschews violence.  Tom Waits is impressive job as a former hit man named Zachariah.  His wife left him when he couldn’t muster the resolve to murder a target.  Ever since he’s searched for her, always carrying with him his prized white rabbit.  And there’s the murderous Charlie (Woody Harrelson), the worst psychopath of all—he’s reduced to tears and desperation when his beloved shih-tzu is stolen.  At the film’s comic center is Billy (Sam Rockwell), the crazed psychopathic best friend who tries to help his screenwriting friend by creating situations and introducing other psychopaths who might provide material for the screenplay.  At its contemplative heart is Christopher Walken as Hans, the non-violent true believer who fears nothing. All of the psychopaths want to help write the screenplay. They want to share credit for it too.  Marty writes them into the screenplay and, in the process, they become the stuff of the film itself.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Jiro at the age of 85 has spent his entire life perfecting the craft and art of preparing the best sushi in the world.  He runs a restaurant in Tokyo with only 8 seats.  People make reservations a month or more ahead of time, sometimes only for a fifteen-minute visit.  Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011; dir. David Gelb) is a portrait of Jiro himself, of his sons, of the art of preparing sushi, but mostly it is a portrait of a way of life devoted to a continuing effort to perfect one’s chosen vocation. 

With its title and our typical American sensibilities, we might read humor or irony in the title.  But the title means to be taken literally.  Jiro does dream of sushi.  It is his life’s focus—as an individual, a cook, and a spiritual being.  The humor that sometimes arises in the film is not the humor of cultural sarcasm, but the humor that arises from normal human situations.  In other words, this film neither condescends to nor smirks at its subject.  One such situation is the relationship between Jiro and his two sons, both of whom work with him.  The oldest is 50 and is clearly ready to take over when his father steps down.  Jiro, aware of his son’s interests, isn’t ready to step aside.  He knows his hanging on provokes some impatience, is amused, but feels no real guilt.

I do not know whether calling sushi an art form is appropriate or whether it misses the point.  Maybe it overvalues or undervalues the subject.  As an art product, sushi certainly ephemeral—it is made and then consumed and then no longer exists.  But must art be permanent?  (In the long run, no art is).  In this film, Jiro and his sons and their staff treat each piece of sushi with a delicate, respectful attitude that suggests reverence, veneration.  The experience of consuming sushi may be a religious or artistic experience, judging both by how the sushi chef approaches his craft and by how his patrons talk about it.  (Frankly, I’ve often felt the same about fried chicken, but that is another story). 

This documentary observes and watches.  It watches Jiro in his kitchens, listens to him and his sons and colleagues talk, observes them in their daily lives.  We learn something about sushi and much more about life in Japan and about human beings in general.

A Late Quartet

A Late Quartet (2012; dir. Yaron Zilberman) is a small, seemingly unambitious film that gradually swells.  The cast is outstanding, with Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, and Mark Ivanir as members of a world-famous string quartet that has played together for 25 years.  Walken has too frequently in his career played eccentric, loopy characters that many take to be an extension of himself. In A Late Quartet he gives a remarkable performance—nuanced, resonant, and convincing as the senior member of the quartet whose discovery that he has Parkinson’s disease sets the plot in motion.  The other principal actors are nearly as good.

The film shows us the melodramatic conflicts, rivalries, disappointments, and ambitions of the quartet’s members.  The first violin (Ivanir) is a perfectionist who refuses to play from memory and has coldly devoted his entire life to the violin.  The second violin (Hoffman) secretly longs to be first violin and suspects that his wife, the violist (Keener) doesn’t love him.  The violist many years before had an affair with the first violinist, before she met her husband, before pregnancy pushed her into marriage.  She never has been entirely happy with herself.  And the cellist (Walken) lost his wife a year earlier and is still recovering.  The relationships grow increasingly complicated and tangled.

The film demonstrates how the lives and identities of the quartet members are intimately tied to the quartet itself.  The violist in particular fears change of any kind, while her husband longs for it, or thinks he does.  The first violin refuses to share his position as first chair with Hoffman, yet he cannot imagine playing with any other person in the second chair position.

I have no idea what the personal and professional dynamics of string quartet members are, but A Late Quartet does a convincing job of suggesting that it knows.  At stake here is the vocation of art, music, age and time, disappointment, love, and change. The final scene, where the group performs Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 (a motif throughout) is a wonderful and emotional resolution.

 

Coonskin

The 1970s animator Ralph Bakshi used broadly drawn cartoon stereotypes of racism, poverty, and oppression to attack these failings in America.  His animation opted for crude rawness over artistry.  The double-edged nature of his method appeals to the same forces it attacks.  This is evident in his 1975 film Coonskin, which transports the Brer Rabbit stories of Disney’s Song of the South (and of African American slave stories appropriated by Joel Chandler Harris) to Harlem.  Bakshi more than Disney sees the subversive nature of the Brer Rabbit stories as allegories of black rebellion against white authority.  In Coonskin the rabbit, bear, and fox in different ways attack religion, the mob, and corrupt police as forces of black oppression.  Bakshi understands that these institutions often work in collusion with the white power structure, a collusion that he illustrates through a number of episodes.  A black preacher named the Simple Savior preys on believers to collect money, working under the direction of blonde white women.  Madigan, a homophobic New York policeman charges protection money to black business owners.  The godfather of the mafia claims to care about the suffering of blacks but collects protection money anyway.  And so on.  In Coonskin the rabbit and his friends take over Harlem and defeat these oppressive forces.  The message is one of black power.

Throughout the film Bakshi portrays crude stereotypes—thick lipped black women with enormous buttocks and breasts, jiving black hipsters, and so on.  The effect is of a confused Black Nationalist arts performance commingled with a minstrel show.  The intent is to show how thoroughly infiltrated our society is with racist images and to demonstrate how they oppress and disfigure the individuals and groups they represent.  Perhaps also the intent is to entertain an audience that is probably mostly white, as were Bakshi and (I am guessing) his animators and crew. One could argue that images Bakshi uses to celebrate and quote from black culture also ridicule it (a similar argument may be levelled at Django Unchained—2012).  The numerous images of huge breasts, naked women, and the various allusions to sex and female sexuality may exploit and comment on our nation’s obsession with sexuality, yet they’re also prurient.  And the ridicule of homosexuals throughout the film (four of the Godfather’s five sons are cross-dressing gays) hardly advances the cause of gender preference equality.

Why is this a Southern film?  Its main characters come from well-known Southern tales.  The film begins in the South and ends there.  The whole film is framed as a series of tales told by an older black convict to a younger one as they crouch against the outer wall of a Southern penitentiary, waiting to elude the white guards and escape.  Yet the society excoriated in the film is not specifically Southern—it’s American.

John Dies at the End

I read John Dies at the End (pseud. David Wong; Jason Pargin; Thomas Dunne Books, 2009) on the basis of a review that promised I would not be able to put it down if I made it through the first three pages.  The review promised bizarre and zany strangeness beyond my wildest expectations.  How to resist?  In reality, the book was somewhat entertaining, but not as zany as I’d hoped.  It began as a chapter posted online in 2001 by the author.  As the chapter gained admiring readers, the author posted another, and then another until, a few years later, he published the results as a novel.  A sequel is apparently on the way.  And three days after reading the novel, I discovered the just-released film of the same title, made by Don Coscarelli, the director of Bubba Ho-tep (2002), one of my favorite films.  How to resist? 

In the novel, Stephen King and Dean Koontz are called out, especially the latter, whose name one of the characters sarcastically invokes.  In the film, less successful than the book, production values are an issue, along with a plot that plods rather than doing anything else.  There is ample humor, some of it forced.  The one great moment comes when frozen food from a meat locker assembles itself into a talking apparition.  Then the film shifts briefly into the realm of Bubba.  More often it trots along as a more serious, more creative, less fun version of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989).

This isn’t the first published web serial that later became a published book.  But it may be the first to achieve such success.  Serial publications were common in the novel’s early history.  Dickens published many of his novels serially, one chapter at a time, in newspapers and magazines. More recently, Gurney Norman’s Divine Rights Trip was printed first in 1971 a chapter at a time in The Last Whole Earth Catalog and then later made its way to book form.  Now we’re to a point in the novel’s history where its physical appearance hardly matters.  John Dies at the End existed in free-to-read form on the web for a good while before it was removed and published.  The same apparently applies to its sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It.  You can’t fault these titles.

Pina

This film tribute to Pina Bausch (2011; dir. Wim Wenders) and her choreography raises the question of what a choreographer really is.  Not just a creative inventor of dance, but a powerful personality.  The dancers interviewed for the film speak of her as if she were a daemonic force, or a lover, or a parent, or a tormentor.  Most speak with awe and respect.  A few speak in fear.  All seem affected by her, even haunted.  How can dancers who live in such close creative proximity to someone for 10 or 20 years remain whole when she dies?  The film raises these questions, because I thought about them as I watched, but it does not explore them.  Bausch’s choreography, however, does.

It’s clear that Bausch saw human relationships as power relations, as hostile and passionate interconnections, destructive and creative.  You see this most clearly in her piece called “Café Muller,” in which couples stumble around the stage, furiously moving chairs, manipulating one another’s limbs.  The constant movement is visual cacophony, anarchy, though ultimately the dancers achieve what seems a short-lived balance or harmony with each other.  My favorite part of the film was the long introductory dance choreographed to Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring.”  It suggests courtship and mating as a cultural and biological ritual. In the beginning male and female dancers enter into separate areas of the stage, gradually intermingling in a process that is more violent than anything else.  The stage is covered with several inches of what appears to be barley.  The rhythmic movement of the dancers is entrancing and also ominous. Another work that suggests a science fiction theme and that certainly seems apocalyptic is “Vollmond” in which dancers individually and together move around a stage dominated by a large red boulder.  They splash in a stream of water, jumping from the water and the boulder back to the floor.  The movement is disorienting, and must have been hazardous for the dancers, given the movement from dry floor to water to wet boulder.

The film offers ample excerpts from Bausch’s major work, interspersed with interviews with dancers in her company, and with others who had worked with her.  She had died of cancer, unexpectedly, shortly before filming of Pina began. The company (I assume) is still mourning her, and the film is suffused with loss and sadness.

Searching for Sugar Man

Sixto Rodriguez’ music might have sounded dated even when it was first released in the early 1970s.  Many of his songs (“The Establishment Blues,” for instance) show the Dylan influence, especially the Dylan of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 41 Revisited.  One hears Donovan occasionally, and Dion, especially in the song “I Wonder.”  One hears also Jose Feliciano, both in how Rodriguez sings and in his guitar playing.  One could argue that his music is derivative, but I’d prefer to call it eclectic—it incorporates many influences.  Unfortunately, the arrangements are often too commercial, unsuited to his lyrics, with too much echo in his singing, with cheesy beats and violins.  His early producers make great claims for his music ability, for his genius, one calling him a prophet, another suggesting he could have been better than Dylan.  I don’t buy those claims—they’re all made forty years after the fact by people who want to bask in someone else’s glory, who want to share credit for his musical accomplishments, but who take no blame for his failure.  There’s no doubt that Rodriguez is a distinctive, unusual person.  And there’s no doubt that his lyrics are often quite good, and perhaps removed now from the milieu of their time his music may be better received.  At least in the United States.  In South Africa, it’s been well received for decades.

The documentary Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, 2012) divides into two parts.  The first half tells us about Rodriguez’ first two albums and his disappearance after their failure.  In South Africa, he becomes famous, a super star, but everyone assumes he’s dead, and various legends circulate about the manner of his death, including one that has him committing suicide on stage.  We meet the South African record store owner who seeks information about Rodriguez, the musicians influenced by his music, and we learn about the impact of his music on the anti-apartheid movement.

The second half describes the revelation that Rodriguez is still alive in Detroit, working as part of a demolition crew that tears down old buildings.  He returns to South Africa, performs four sold-out concerts, and enjoys the success he never had in the United States.

The transition between these two parts comes in a wonderful moment shortly after the music store owner receives an unexpected call at 1:00 in the morning from Rodriguez himself.  We stare at a window on a run-down but respectable house somewhere in, as we learn, Detroit.  A shadowy figure moves back and forth behind the class and then raises the window, leans out, and looks at the camera.  It is Rodriguez.  This is a magic moment.

The film considers but never answers the question of who received the royalties for the 500,000 Rodriguez albums sold in South Africa.  It hints at an answer, but doesn’t pursue it, and it’s clear  Rodriguez never received them.  But he does enjoy the proceeds from his concert tours in South Africa, most of which he gives away to family and friends.

There’s a wonderful story here in an engaging film, deftly and warmly told, with suspense, humor, and some awe, with diversely interesting human personalities, at the center of which is Rodriguez himself, a person who, as my wife Patricia commented, seems to have lived a Zen-like existence, impervious to his early failure, content to work in demolition for thirty years, unfazed by his unsuccessful campaigns for office in Detroit (including his candidacy for mayor), equally content to discover that in South Africa he is famous.  We watched the film twice.

For those of us who lived through the 60s and 70s, there’s nostalgia in the film too, which is in that respect about memory, about past and present, about what was and what might have been. 

Cosmopolis (film)

Don Delillo’s novel Underworld in my estimation is one of the great American novels of the 20^th century.  His novels White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Mao II (1991) are also important works.  His follow-ups to Underworld have been more modest efforts, with his novel Cosmopolis (2003) perhaps the least of them.  It never sparked my interest, though The Falling Man (2007) and Point Omega (2010) were much better.  But I was interested in David Cronenberg’s film based on the novel.  Its first half occurs almost entirely inside a stretch limousine equipped with the ultra high-tech technology and the highest level of security measures.  Its occupant, Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) spends most of his life (apparently) inside.  We see him eat, sleep, have business conferences, have sex, urinate, you name it.  The limo is the symbol of his power as one of the richest men in the world—a multibillionaire.  He has little interest in the rest of the world, in other people, even in his wife, to whom he is clearly attracted, but with whom he discusses sex as if it is a medical procedure for which one makes an appointment (she is a poet and shows the same attitude—they have been married for three weeks in the film without having had sex).  The film stresses the absolutely sterile, lifeless nature of his existence.  The characters in the film speak like characters from a Delillo novel, often in a kind of stylized stream of consciousness, artificial repartee carried out on a high level of intellect and abstraction.  Such speech works better in print than on film.  As Packer’s identity gradually dissolves, as his financial empire crumbles and the capitalist edifice he embodies verges on collapse (his limo is engulfed by a mob of protestors who hate what he is) and as his life is threatened by an unknown assailant, I found myself mouthing “So what”?

A last-minute appearance by Paul Giammatti made the end of the film interesting.

Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005) was more satisfying.  In general, his avant gardism has not often made for good film.

Saboteur

Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) displays many of the stylistic flourishes of the director’s later films.  There is the flair for unusual and eccentric minor characters.  My favorite scene comes when the two main characters, a factory worker named Barry Kane and a young woman named Pat Martin, catch a ride in a circus car full of sideshow attractions—a skeleton man, bearded woman, fat lady, Siamese twins, and a midget.  There are moments of witty dialogue, especially involving the lead actor Robert Cummings.  There are iconic American sites—the Hoover Dam, New York City, western landscapes.  The final scene takes place in the crown of the Statue of Liberty, with Cummings attempting to prevent the villain from falling to his death.  And there is the expected beautiful blonde, played in this film by Priscilla Lane, who takes an active role in pursuing the villains.

What most interested me about this film was its wartime character.  It makes numerous references to America and democracy and patriotism.  Those who first set a munitions plant on fire in California and then plot to blow up a new battleship in New York City are clearly allied with totalitarianism.  There is no mention of the Nazis, but the evildoers enjoy singing a popular song written to the tune of Strauss’ “The Blue Danube,” which I guess shows their love of German culture (who wouldn’t love that tune?).   One of the conspirators speaks with contempt of Americans: “I hate to use the word stupid, but it seems to be the only one that applies. The great masses, the moron millions.”

The film is full of plot holes and non-sequiturs, of instances that I would call poor writing.  For example, although Cummings’ character is suspected of causing the munitions plant fire and is a wanted criminal, he enjoys considerable freedom of movement while in custody.  At another point, Pat Martin is being held by the saboteurs, but she orders a sandwich and pays the man who brings it to her.  Having never been a hostage, perhaps I’m unfamiliar with the protocol, but the idea of ordering a sandwich for delivery while in the grips of the enemy seemed odd.  Three writers are credited for the script—one of them is Dorothy Parker, who may be responsible for the witty dialogue  Hitchcock was apparently an uncredited writer as well.  Such a plenitude of writers suggests there were problems with the script.

Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil is aptly represented here.  Villains and saboteurs are for the most part difficult to distinguish from normal people—there’s a socialite, a rich businessman, an agent who speaks lovingly of his children.  They speak without accents.  The point may be that although these people come from all walks of life and look like the rest of us, we’d better watch out, because any of our friends and neighbors might among them.  (A decade later, a similar argument focused specifically on suspected Communists, the Red Menace).  However, to make clear that the bad guys in Saboteur are evil doers, they are supported by a cast of goon-like henchmen who seem more like reptiles than mammals. 

 

The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski’s languid The Ghost Writer (2010) is a political intrigue and melodrama about a retired British prime minister, political rivalries, the CIA, and a mysterious murder.  Nothing in the film sees real—especially not the way people speak to and treat one another.  Not much is at stake here—sure the CIA may or may not be controlling the British government, certain British politicians may or not be conniving to suppress terrorism or promote waterboarding or otherwise foment corruption in government.  The entire film seems generic, and nothing points this out more than the casting of Pierce Brosnan in the retired prime minister’s role.

The idea of the ghostwriter is the most intriguing aspect of this film.  The ghostwriter for all practical purposes doesn’t exist—he’s hired to edit and rewrite and reshape the prime minister’s memoir, which by all accounts is deadly dull.  He takes no stand and has no voice of his own. His job is to make the manuscript coherent and marketable (what political memoirs have ever been marketable?), and all within a short time span.  The ghost writer, played by Ewan McGregor, convinces himself that the death by drowning of his predecessor was not a suicide but a murder, and he devotes himself to determining who the killers and what the motives were.  Instead of making palatable the story the prime minister wrote, the ghost writer then sets out to discover the truth, which apparently no one wants told.  The development of the ghostwriter’s moral identity and conscience, when in the beginning he didn’t have either, is the real interest of the film.  But it's not sufficient.  I overlooked until the closing credits that this is a Roman Polanski film, and that it was much praised when it was released.  Too bad.  It’s not one of his best. 

Big Bad Love, by Larry Brown

Larry Brown’s ten stories in Big Bad Love (Shannon Ravenel, 1990) are mainly about working class alcoholic men in their 30s on the verge of divorce, or recently divorced.  They’re lonely for love after deserting, or being deserted by, aging and insensitive wives.  They’re like country music songs of a certain type—the George Jones type—that visit and revisit the same self-pitying and self-destructive themes from different angles over and over and over.  Women come in for particularly bad treatment—maybe we’re supposed to believe that is how working class alcoholic men disenchanted with their wives behave, and that Brown himself disapproves of such attitudes, but I don’t believe it.  Most of the stories have different figures as their main characters, but in fact they all seem indistinguishable—are they all Larry Brown avatars?

These stories on occasion have flair and skill.  They are written with a certain rustic elegance.  The interior narrations that characterize most of them, always from the male point of view, are flowing and liquid and rhythmic.  But they seem to exult in misery and alcohol and misogyny.  They’re so repetitive in subject and tone that they ultimately leave one numb.  Part 2 is an exception.  A short play rather than a story, it describes a surrealistic concentration camp trial in which two male writers are accused of plagiarism and bad writing.  They’re forced to have sex with fat women as punishment.   The final story, “92 Days,” is a more developed narrative about a struggling writer, Leon, recovering from divorce through excessive drink and truck driving.  He receives numerous rejection notices and imbibes multiple cases of beer and a promising young poet is killed in a drunken truck wreck and then his young daughter dies.   He suffers a lot.  When a publisher’s letter offers hope that one of his stories may be published, his life begins to look up.  If only life were so simple.  At the heart of all these stories is a self-obsessed, maudlin bubba sentimentality.

Is every working class man in Mississippi an unappreciated truck-driving alcoholic looking for a chance to cheat on his whining wife?

Django Unchained

Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012) is a spaghetti western about slavery. Set in Texas and Mississippi in 1858, it follows the trail of a German bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and his associate Django (Jamie Foxx) as they hunt wanted outlaws.  Dr. Schultz’s basic operating procedure is to identify the outlaws and then to shoot them dead, taking their bodies back to the local sheriff to claim the bounties.  To justify his methods, he always points to the wanted poster that says “Wanted Dead or Alive.”  After they dispense with a particularly nasty gang, he gives Foxx his freedom, and together they set out to find Foxx’s wife, who has been sold to a particularly nasty plantation owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) of the plantation Candieland.

This film has all the distinguishing marks of a Tarantino film--moments of comedy followed by scenes of extreme violence. The funniest scene (there aren’t many) comes when a band of hooded men headed to attack the bounty hunters stop to argue about their masks, which do not fit.  The man whose wife made the masks is offended by their discussion and rides off in a huff.  Shortly afterwards most of the masked men die in a bomb blast rigged by the bounty hunters.  Such scenes juxtaposing the comic or bizarre alongside violence are traits of the spaghetti westerns and B-level films Tarantino takes as his models.  Schultz himself drives a closed wagon with a large tooth mounted on a spring on its roof—it wobbles back and forth as he drives—he was once a dentist—the tooth is an ever-present mark of absurdity that would fit right into any number of Sergio Leone films.

Tarantino’s main method in Django and other films is to show horrible scenes of racism, brutality, and suffering that are followed by scenes in which those responsible for the racism, brutality, and suffering receive their violent comeuppance.  Moments of inhumanity followed by violent retribution.  “There is no remission of sins without the shedding of blood.” These scenes provide catharsis, or so I think Tarantino intends, that allow the viewer release from whatever the brutality might be.  This was his approach in Inglourious Basterds (2009).  I didn’t like that film’s heavy-handed distortion of history (all the high command of the Third Reich, including Hitler, are killed in a bomb blast and fire at a movie theater). But here it doesn’t bother me that much.  There is a deliberate broadness to this film’s portrayal of plantation owners, slaves, and lower class whites.  One reviewer noted that it is the broadness one finds in a comic book—there are few if any gradations between good and bad.  Only in the two main characters do we find complexity.

Christoph Waltz creates a truly unusual, distinctive character in Schultz.  He is affable, always calm and sociable, never out of sorts.  He seems to fear nothing.  In his cart with the wobbling tooth, he at first seems a foolish figure, but when he begins to shoot down people in his way we realize he is someone to take seriously.  He decides what he needs to do to achieve his goals, and he does it.  From the earliest moment he makes clear his aversion to slavery, although slavery is not his main concern.  Bounties are.  Moral compunctions don’t slow him down when it comes to killing wanted men.  Finding outlaws and bringing their bodies in for the bounty is what he does.  He agrees to help Django find his wife out of friendship. 

Django begins the film as a beaten-down man in a coffle of slaves being led towards auction.  When Schultz frees Django because he knows what several men Schultz is hunting look like.  The film shows Django’s gradual transformation from oppressed victim to agent of retribution.  Schultz lures him into the bounty hunting business both by the offer of freedom and by the opportunity to shoot white people.  Schultz asks him, after one successful episode, how he likes bounty hunting, and Django answers, “Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?” After Schultz frees him, they set out to find his missing wife.  But the search for his wife, and the desire to punish those who mistreated her, gradually becomes a quest to punish those who practice slavery.

The final scene in the film, in which Django slaughters every member and worker of Candieland and then blows the plantation house up in a tremendous explosion is the expected cathartic moment.  But what does it accomplish?  It does away with the bad guys (and woman).  It allows Django to ride away with his wife.  In reality, it’s not likely they would have survived long into the night, given the historical place and time of the action.  But the film doesn’t show reality.

Perhaps the most unsettling character in the film is Stephen, the head slave of Calvin Candie.  Played by an almost unrecognizable Samuel K. Jackson, the character seems to have been designed to resemble the bug-eyed stereotypes of slavery.  He shucks and jives, speaks in a heavy dialect (of the sort that whites would imagine for him), and is wholly devoted both to his master and to slavery in general.  Any challenge to that Institution enrages him.  Slavery gives him his position of power and influence as the head slave of Candie’s plantation.  He is the incarnation of what slavery in one sense sought to accomplish—the complete deformation of a human individual.  Stephen has no sense of himself as a slave, as a person of color, as someone who shares in common certain social and ethnic realities with other slaves on the plantation.  He embodies the stereotype Slave, the iron jockey figure that used to appear on so many Southern lawns. In fact, he seems to run the plantation on an equal basis with his owner.  When he recognizes that Django and his wife Broomhilda know each other, he summons Calvin into another room and informs him, speaking without dialect, sipping on a bourbon and sitting in a comfortable chair, in the iconography of the patriarch.  The racist type that he embodies is a conscious and voluntary identity he assumes for himself.

Even though the film attacks slavery and racism, it certainly uses racist stereotypes.  Stephen is an example.  The first time Schultz gives Django the chance to choose clothing, he dresses up like little Boy Blue.  Django’s wife is named Broomhilda.  Django loves to kill white people.  And of course the whites are stereotyped as well—no graduations of moral virtue at all.  It’s beyond Calvin Candie’s range to be anything other than the stereotyped slave owner that he is. 

The film’s final violent scene of retribution towards which everything has moved reminded me of any number of video games that allow the player to slaughter hordes of evildoers.  It reminded me of similar scenes in numerous films of the last fifty years, including many of the films that Tarantino is emulating here.  And it reminded me of nothing so much as the school house in Connecticut where a deranged killer with an automatic weapon slaughtered 20 little children.  Is there a connection—between the video games, the movie violence, and the savagely slaughtered children?