To Bathe in Fiery Floods

How best to put the process into words?  Someone in your life, someone close to you, has with an untimely haste been torn out of it. Many lives have been touched and many tears shed, but you’re one of the few at ground zero.

Friends and relatives drop by to check in on you when what everyone knows you need most is to just mill around in abject aimlessness.  An event you’d been looking forward to (such as the Golden Globes or the Giants/Packers NFC Divisional Game) comes and goes without any great notice from you.  Long-ago resolutions to eat less junk food and drink less sugar are shattered.  Mordant humor, usually initiated by the elders in the group, combats the fierce and unremitting sound of hollowness.

When it comes to movies and drama, grief is most often an obstacle to the hero’s journey rather than a journey of its own.  It’s about avenging yourself on the One-Armed Man, about learning Uncle Scar was full of shit when he told you your father’s death was your fault, about coming to terms with the fact that sticking it out as Batman means living with the consequences.  We see interludes of tear-flecked faces and indolent moping, but the actual intricacies of saying goodbye to a loved one are left largely in the background.

There was a point at which I crusaded against the use of death as a convenient plot device, but those days are behind me.  Life and art both take time to learn the guidelines of, and the more you experience the both of them, the more clearly delineated they are from each other.  Real-life grief and dramatic grief have little in common the majority of the time.  Grief is about introspection, about pausing to reflect, about letting everybody’s anger and denial whirl around in a cyclone.  Drama has to sustain some form of momentum, and doesn’t have the time to detour down all the avenues proper, real-life grief detours down.

That said, exceptional as they may be, there are examples where the grieving process has been dramatized in a way that props up a narrative all by itself.  Todd Field’s In the Bedroom is a movie like that.  A rousing success at Sundance and then on the awards circuit, it managed never to bore or agonize its audiences even though the boring and agonizing routines of a bereaved household were pretty much its centerpiece.  The movie does conclude in more of a revenge thriller capacity than the preceding hour would suggest, but Field only allows his characters’ tempers to flare and vendettas to be enacted once all the characters have nearly been driven mad by the aftermath’s everyday tedium.

The movie’s middle hour would in a more tightly-plotted movie occupy a forty-five second montage.  That sounds like a criticism, but it’s not.  I know it betrays the “rules” of storytelling to keep your characters fettered when they should be taking action, but how are you supposed to take action when the very thing you should be taking action against has crippled everything about you?

The most obvious literary precedent for the passively grieving avenger is Hamlet.  Though the Danish tragedy’s revenge plot is set up in the proper spot at the end of Act I by the Father Ghost’s proclamation, Hamlet traipses around the castle for the better part of three hours (in an unabridged production) before finally resolving to follow through with it.  I know more than one literary prig who will tell you that Shakespeare wrote such a lengthy middle section of Hamlet because he had so much beautiful poetry to write and would have done a disservice to the world if he kept it from them.

You have some idea how I feel about those people.

The terrible and un-dramatic truth about the grieving process is that, as much as we want it to be forward-moving, the bulk of it is a muddled and bloated affair where we have no idea what the hell we’re doing.  It’d be very easy to write a bad play about this truth, and almost impossible to write a good one, which should give you some sense of why I love Hamlet so dearly.

Hamlet holds within its pages a small glossary’s worth of quotable lines yet, when confronted with my own grief, it is (of course) a relatively unremembered turn of speech that always pops into my mind.  Right in that opening court scene, when Gertrude and Claudius are appealing to Hamlet to cut out the mourning bullshit, Claudius refers to Hamlet’s demeanor as an “obsequious sorrow”.

Now the thing is, I know that the word “obsequious” here is an adjective built on the obsolete word “obsequies”, meaning “funeral”.  ”Obsequious” just means “funeral-like”.  I don’t even think the modern sense of the word “obsequious” existed yet at the time Hamlet was written, the sense where it means “fawning” or “doing so to please”.  So call it my own little anachronistic analysis of the line if you want to, but I always find myself wondering to what extent the formalities of grieving are “obsequious”.

Are we really crying because it’s what our bodies are telling us to do, or is it because we know that’s what the occasion calls for?  Are we worried about not crying because we see everybody else crying?  Do we feel like we love the deceased less the less we cry?

Part of my fascination with In the Bedroom is that it deals quite frankly with these exact issues.  When the parents of the murdered son finally have it out after months and months of avoiding each other, the mother accuses the father of callousness.  Very Hamlet-like, if you ask me, implying she is the one who “really loved” the dead party because she’s a wreck and can’t be a part of the world.  Tom Wilkinson then fires back that her histrionics and affected grief are really part of an elaborate show, a calculated move to look the part of son-loving mother when all she ever really had for the boy was disappointment.

While Hamlet may be the go-to Shakespeare play when it comes to putting the utter unfathomability and terror of the great beyond into words, I personally think the Bard did no better than the speech by Measure for Measure‘s Claudio that begins, simply, “Death is a fearful thing”.

What are we really thinking about as we sit in that funeral home in our black suits and dour faces?  Is it the person in the casket that our hearts truly throb for?  Is it greed, to presume they were better off here with us than whatever unknowable place they now occupy?

I can do no better in answer to these questions than to leave you with some of the most delightful words I’ve ever read on a most fearful topic:

• Claudio. Death is a fearful thing.

• Isabella. And shamed life a hateful.

• Claudio. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
  To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
  This sensible warm motion to become    1355
  A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
  To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
  In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
  To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
  And blown with restless violence round about    1360
  The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
  Of those that lawless and incertain thought
  Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
  The weariest and most loathed worldly life
  That age, ache, penury and imprisonment    1365
  Can lay on nature is a paradise
  To what we fear of death.

Source:  [click here]

The Ledmacbrs Aemn Disguise

This post’s titular phenomenon is a thoroughly arbitrary pet peeve of mine, and yet it’s a storytelling device used and repeated so broadly that I find it a wonder I’ve read no extended harrumph about it.

You run into it most often in mystery stories, whodunits, obtuse thrillers … any genre whose first-half convolutions build towards some reveal or unmasking at the end.  Let’s say, to take a random example, that you’ve been watching Leonardo DiCaprio run around an insane asylum like a chicken with his head cut off for an hour and a half, and he’s been accumulating a mounting pile of conflicting information.  One clue points towards something sinister on the part of the administration, one clue points towards his own instability of mind, and over and over again so on and so forth.

I reference this neither to spoil Dennis Lehane’s novel Shutter Island (and Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation) nor to mock them, but rather to point out the hallmarks of a certain kind of plot.  It can be great fun being toyed with and misdirected, but we all know that these stories will conclude by revealing to us The Big Secret that answers earlier equivocations affirmatively.

Now to go along with The Big Secret, there’s usually some sort of Big Tipoff.  The kind of clue that’s been dangled before our eyes all during the story that we’re meant to whack our foreheads for not having caught onto.  I suppose the thinking goes that the simpler the clue, the greater the forehead whacking … and in the case of Shutter Island the overarching truth, that which ties up all the seedy mischief and apparition sightings with a nice little bow, could’ve been guessed by unscrambling a name or two.

For some reason, this feels wrong to me.  When thrillers go the route of labyrinthine plotting and obfuscated meaning, a resolution that pat feels distressing to me.  Like it’s child’s play.  To its credit, the Shutter Island plotline at least involves psychosis, so it’s not an instance where the villains have intentionally hidden truths under the shoddy cloak of the scrambled name.  All but the sorriest Pop Culture Black Holes know by now that wizard demon-child Tom Marvolo Riddle grows up to christen himself Voldemort.  The bulk of Chamber of Secrets sees Harry interacting with the Tom Riddle of old via that magical time-portal diary, only to unravel the web of intrigue by rearranging the letters T-O-M-M-A-R-V-O-L-O-R-I-D-D-L-E into the startling declaration pictured above.

Search me if you want an explanation as to why Tom took his demon moniker not from an idol or from mythology but by goofing with the letters in the name he already had.  I also find it kind of a cheat that he was allowed to unscramble to a full sentence.  It’s like he couldn’t get a truly horrific name offhand, and needed the leeway of “I am”.  My reaction was identical in Sleuth when I discovered the makers billed Michael Caine’s doppelganger with the phony name Alec Cawthorne.  It’s not quite “Michael Caine” scrambled … it’s “Or, Michael Caine”, provided that you flip the W to an M and lop the T into two I’s.

Bullshit.  I love Sleuth, but that’s bullshit.

While we’re on this subject (and while I’m venting) I also happened to be one of a small minority in my eighth grade class who thought Louis Sachar’s inexplicably popular novel Holes was garbage.  My main case in point?  I thought it was ridiculous, little thirteen-year old prig that I was, that any person would ever have the palindromic name “Stanley Yeltnats”.  Show me one bleeding person on this planet with the name Yelnats, other than a kid in a cute kids book who needs his name to read the same both ways.

There was also a book called George Washington’s Socks that we read studying the Revolutionary War in fourth grade.  I won’t look up the author because I have no interest in insulting them directly, but it’s stuck in my memory for fourteen years since for one simple reason.  The time travel device that transports the kids back to 1775 is emblazoned with the name “Emit Levart”.  Oy.

I’m a fairly difficult person to agitate.  I don’t honk at people on the freeways, I don’t intervene when people cut in front of me at Starbucks by pretending not to notice which way the line goes.  My neighbors just had a baby, and you’ll get nary a noise complaint out of me.  On top of that, I know how tough it is to structure a thriller plot and to come up with revelations that are both shocking and believable.

But I tell you, dear Reader, all a writer need do is scramble up a few names, and I’m fuming.

The Shattered Illusion

How long 'dey validate here, d'yknow?

Most great movies, after some fashion, involve the absorption into a new world.  Even intentionally naturalistic movie settings like the jury room in 12 Angry Men or the Washington Post office in All the President’s Men elevate the mundane surroundings into an involving version of reality.  The rotted American suburbias of Blue Velvet and American Beauty intentionally displace themselves from easy geographical specification – they inhabit our minds not as “places” but as microcosmic experiences.

That said … movies still need to be filmed somewhere, and you can’t point a camera at a microcosm.  I gather from looking it up that the American Beauty exteriors were filmed in the Brentwood and Hancock Park areas of Los Angeles.  It is a measure of the movie’s success, I would say, that I was unable to identify this fact, despite living here.  Upon finding out that I live so close to the neighborhoods that were turned into this famous and otherworldly cinematic stage, I find myself hoping to God I never accidentally drive past the houses used for the Burnham and Fitts residences.

What would it do to my viewing of the movie?  How could I ever be ensconced into Sam Mendes’ and Alan Ball’s world in the same way – knowing those are houses with real families, having real dinners and not whipping asparagus plates at each other?

Andrew Niccol’s recent movie In Time was a victim of this for me.  It supposedly takes place in an alternate universe-type fantasy world of indigent slums and palatial chrome corporate high-rises.  The only problem is, the movie’s “wealthy quarter” is simply Avenue of the Stars in Century City, Los Angeles.  CAA’s glorious glassed-in headquarters (arguably the sexiest structure in the city) doubles as the movie’s evil empire stronghold.  The southern end of Avenue of the Stars is not shown onscreen, probably because the Fox lot and the “Nakatomi Plaza” from Die Hard were deemed too spottable.

Michael Mann’s Heat also lost a smidgen of its magical aura for me a few months ago when I signed with my new management company.  Why?  Well, as it happens, new management company shares a parking garage with the restaurant Kate Mantilini on Wilshire Boulevard, which is the setting for when Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley famously called time-out to their dogged chase and made a stop to share their recurrent dreams over coffee.  Before I lived in Los Angeles, that movie took place in a scarred dreamworld of gun clips and blood-spattered moonlight.  When the cop and criminal paused for a drink, it was like an oasis in a town where everyone is parched from one kind of thirst or another.  A ceasefire in an unceasing battle.  A crying out for understanding in the madness.

Now … all I’m wondering is how much they’re going to tip the wonderfully attentive valet staff in the garage.

These objections are entirely unfair to the movies.  Most people that go to see Heat or In Time will not be people who drive Avenue of the Stars and Wilshire Boulevard on a daily basis, as I do.  By the same token, I’ve heard talk that Chicagoans are rougher on the Batman movies, knowing as they do that Wayne Tower is actually the Board of Trade Building, and that the train system derailed by Gary Oldman at the end of Batman Begins is a computer-generated fakery.

It’s also fairly amusing to me that the final scene of The Untouchables takes place in literally the same spot where the Gotham police apprehend the Joker in The Dark Knight – at the end of LaSalle Street in Chicago.  Even dressed for a 1930s setting and filmed in brighter hues than the streetlight grime of Christopher Nolan’s Gotham, a non-Chicagoan might still spot the likeness.

Then there are the movies purportedly taking place in alien landscapes.  One reason 50s and 60s sci-fi movies have not tended to age well is that the surface of “Mars” (or whatever) is obviously just the California desert.  Even the very best of this bunch, Planet of the Apes, reads a little comical today when the astronauts crash land into an alien environment’s lake and deplane without so much as spacesuits.  All their talk about “this strange planet, light years from Earth” is impossible to take seriously.  Yes, those who have seen Planet of the Apes know the final twist theoretically accounts for this detail … but we don’t get to the end of the movie till the end of the movie, do we?

In the era of omnifunctional CGI, these fabricated worlds tend not to draw so much from earthbound locales (no forests or oceans were harmed during the making of Avatar), but there are still instances when the seams show.  The original Lord of the Rings trilogy has long passages set in fantastical forests and shires, but here and there we get wide shots of positively ordinary-looking Australian fields.  And viewers sharpened on their architectural history may notice that Harry, Ron and Hermione scoot to class along the south cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral.  (I take for granted the Christian imagery is obfuscated, but would need to double check.)

Movies have the ability to transport us to worlds within our own world, and that’s the joy of them.  Go see Heat, go see In Time, and enjoy them because they’re marvelous movies.

And then meet me for a bite at Kate Mantilini.

Between the Lines, Off the Page

I’d be willing to wager a hefty sum that not many viewers of Cloverfield emerged from the movie thinking about the poet Ezra Pound, which is (I believe) all the more reason to obsess over what’s to follow.

The likeness has nothing to do with quality.  Cloverfield has been enjoyed by many and is, for what it is, good.  Ezra Pound’s poetry has been enjoyed by almost no one outside the stuffiest of literary circles … and is not good.  I was assigned several works of his during a seminar in college, and met them with all the affection of the barrel of an Uzi.  That he’s an able writer and knew a lot of pretty languages just made his inscrutable nonsense all the more vexing to me.

What smacked of Pound to me about Cloverfield when I finally saw it (I somehow missed it during college, though I was an avid moviegoer and fit snugly within its core demographic) has almost nothing to do with the movie itself.  Rather, it’s the ardent and incredibly detail-attentive J.J. Abrams fanbase, whose buzzings amplified the mysterious and whispered-about project to the level of near phenomenon before it had even come out.  Even now, a simple Google search will tap you into an avalanche of theories, “facts”, clues, portents, inside references, outside references and outright guesses that together compose the Cloverfield mythology.

What may be a mite perplexing to the casual viewer, though, is that elements of the mythology widely held to be accurate simply are not indicated by the film’s actual onscreen goings-on.  Most famously, the film’s unnamed behemoth was supposedly slumbering for centuries beneath New York Harbor before being jostled into wakefulness by a fallen satellite.  Technically, the last shot of the movie includes a glimpse of the satellite crash far in the distance but this a) is still far from explanatory and b) is so imperceptible that no one could ever be expected to have noticed it.  Knowing of its alleged existence, I watched the film frame-by-frame a dozen times or more looking for it and, if it’s really there, I missed it.

There are tidbits more tenuous even than this.  The film’s main character, who in the movie’s timeframe is preparing to depart New York for Japan, has (I glean from the annals) been offered a job at a Japanese company in some way responsible for mutating the creature that eventually takes his life.  There’s even a staunchly refuted supposition that the alien in the Abrams-directed Super 8 is in some way tied to the Cloverfield alien and that the connection will be revealed in a later sequel/prequel.  I’ve never heard anything about either movie having a link to Lost, but you have to believe the rumors are out there.  That’s part of the fun of the J.J. canon.  His hardcore fans have an infinite superhighway of goodies to absorb that only they’ll ever be privy to.

By a similar token, readers of Pound’s The Cantos are meant to bring much more to the table than simply what’s on the page.  His sources are so numerous and varied that even the most well-read scholar must have a commentary on hand to figure out what the hell he’s getting at.  He’ll shift freely between languages – the Classical languages, the Romance languages, a bunch of Chinese dialects.  His defenders will claim to their friends he’s going for well-roundedness and not obtuseness, but then I’d imagine that Pound’s defenders don’t have a lot of friends.

Most persuasive in making me realize I was never going to be content as an academic, maybe, was this notion of “critical reading”.  Professors would stress to me time and again that reading at the collegiate level was meant to be done dispassionately.  You’re supposed to react to texts with your brain, not your heart.  And being told that just made me want to rip the ivy off the walls and lash them with it.  (Of course, these were all people who enjoyed the process of deconstruction and I was not – so we were never going to come eye to eye.)

Part of the reason I’ve always loved reading film criticism more than literary criticism is because it’s necessarily done from the heart.  Detailed as one may get about dissecting the fine points of it, the medium is on the whole too enveloping and literal to be approached on a purely academic basis.  And if that’s a nebulous way of saying I hope to Christ they never try to make a movie out of anything written by Ezra Pound, so be it.

I love J.J. Abrams and, outsider though I am, I’m admittedly fascinated by the ongoing hypothesizings of his rabid fans.  Because, when you sit in a darkened room and watch J.J.’s creature alight on a ravaged Manhattan, it doesn’t matter where it came from or what awakened it.  The answers are out there for you if you’re interested, but what’s there on the screen is still whole and self-consistent enough to be satisfying.

Even if it’s not how I do things (I’m more a believer that the story should start and end on the page), I can safely say my copy of Cloverfield will lie unscathed on my bookshelf while my Cantos is flying through the window and into the rainy gutter where it belongs.

Voice of the Unfamiliar

It’s a dangerous but oftentimes captivating decision for a writer to have characters speak in a language or lexicon that isn’t real.  I typically think of fabricated words as being a prose writer’s conceit (I’m thinking of Faulkner, and also the stupefyingly thorough legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkein), but it’s evidenced in movies too.

Stanley Kubrick, a filmmaker notorious for contorting the works of other writers (Stephen King, Peter George) into unrecognizable incarnations of their printed selves, displays a surprising faithfulness to novelist Anthony Burgess in the film version of A Clockwork Orange.  Chief among Anthony Burgess’ innovations in the book may be his creation of the futuristic street gang’s nadsat language, which is some grotesque inter-mangling of Elizabethan poeticisms, contemporary Cockney slang, Russian, and a few terms that beggar any assessable origin.

Kubrick allows Malcolm McDowell’s Alex to carry on in long, monotone voice-over passages right at the outset where it seems almost the point that his meaning be muddled  (you know pretty quick that it’s not Ethan Hawke).  Then once we hear the droogs conversing with one another, we find it’s a pattern that’ll continue in the dialogue.  If there’s any logic to be found in why Alex complains of a “pain in the gulliver” to mean a headache, or recounts eating “eggiwegs” for breakfast, it’s lost on me.

I’m the first to agree it’s a jarring way to begin a film that’s already off-putting.  But as we’re ensconced further into Kubrick’s dystopia, the confusion slowly begins to lift.  Kind of like that linguistics experiment where the researchers would have subjects read pages of English without spaces and without punctuation marks – an exercise in the nonsensical at first, but a hurdle that could be overleapt with practice.  But why, the disenchanted viewer may ask, would the audience want to make this effort for the sake of the filmmaker?  Does it have a purpose, or is it simply flourish without reason?

A movie I’m compelled to bring up by way of comparison is the Diablo Cody-scripted Juno.  A far less divisive film in terms of its content but one that found itself a dartboard for the daggers of a vicious and vociferous minority.  Those who have bones to pick with Juno mostly fixate on the quippy dialogue, which they term “unrealistic”.  Indeed, the vernacular of Juno is in its own way as alien as the streetspeak of A Clockwork Orange, alien at least as far as audience members not raised on instant-message shorthand are concerned.  However, many viewers far older than the film’s intended audience fell under its spell, so the argument that the language creates an impregnable generational barrier is demonstrably incorrect.

(Roger Ebert called it the best movie of its year, topping No Country for Old Men and Atonement, and he’s pretty much as old school as filmgoers get these days.)

I think all you can say is that those deciding to put an unfamiliar vocabulary in their characters’ mouths have to be prepared for a little polarization.  Some viewers will be ensnared, some will check out.  Of the two aforementioned films, I’m personally more partial to Clockwork, but that says as much about my sensibilities as it does about the films themselves.  In both cases, we’re seeing young rebels communicating in a tongue that’s native to them and indecipherable by their aged onlookers.

Whether you want to build a teen comedy or a bleak sociopolitical satire out of it, the underlying rift is the same.  The scripts for both films portray that rift – naysayers be damned – within an unconventional dialogue.  And, at the end of the day, it’s a daring choice you have to commend them for.

El Laberinto Cinematico

In the short intro on the DVD to Pan’s Labyrinth (not his commentary track, which I assume runs over with many gems of wisdom of its own), director Guillermo del Toro caps his remarks with a certain phrase that, when I heard it, instantly catapulted him into the ranks of my heroes.  Maybe it was a capricious thing, and maybe he didn’t mean anything by it, but four particular words he chose to speak at that moment wound up leaving me awed and riveted as much as the movie itself.  And anyone who’s seen Pan’s Labyrinth knows it’s quite awesome and riveting in its own right.

He briefly sums up his intensely personal connection to this story he’s put on film and, in a voice more earnest and less egotistical than I’ve ever heard from a filmmaker of his stature, bids the audience to “get lost in it”.

It was such an unquantifiable delight to hear him say that.  Too often, I think, filmmakers and writers construct movies like they’re building a highway.  The opening shot is Portland, Maine, the closing shot is Miami, Florida, and the first and only objective is to escort the audience along via as quick and direct a route as possible.  Will they understand the meaning of this? or Is the character’s motivation clear enough?, you can almost hear the producers asking.  One of the most prevalent fears in moviemaking is “losing the audience”, and yet here was Del Toro cheerfully asking his audience to get lost in the woods.

There are a great many open ends in Pan’s Labyrinth.  Characters cross the transom of the real and the imaginary without any set of “rules”.  Creatures’ eyes are not always located on either side of their noses.  Life and death are murky.  The title is never explained (though, to be fair, it’s only the English-language title that invokes the Greco-Roman faun Pan by name).

The movie is by the traditional definition “confusing”, but that’s an unpardonable condescension in my view.  It presupposes a lack of imagination in the viewer, a devout faith in off-the-shelf, A to B storytelling techniques.  The film’s central character (Ofelia) is a pre-teen girl, and though the movie is resolutely adult in terms of its subject matter, it couches those subjects within the reckless and unbounded zeal of childhood.  I read the film as a lament, on Del Toro’s part, that the creativity and flights of fancy we run with oh-so willingly before puberty are dripped and drained from us as the grim cloud cover of the “real world” sets in over our heads.

The movie visualizes its titular labyrinth (on what may or may not be a literal level), so it can hardly be called an accident that the narrative dips and curves around unknown corners toward a final, long-pursued center of enlightenment.  I also found myself tabbing, with an interested curiosity, how many movies among my personal favorites take up this labyrinth construction.

The original Sleuth memorably opens with Michael Caine getting lost in Laurence Olivier’s plant hedge maze before finally being welcomed in ominously.  Simply put, the perfect metaphor for that movie.  The Shining has the great set piece within the Overlook Hotel’s snow-encrusted maze, a symbol for Jack Nicholson’s twisted psyche that has ultimately frozen over.  Inception takes that one step further, literalizing the process of navigating the unconscious and even going so far as to name one of the participating characters (the one played by Ellen Page) after the Greek heroine Ariadne, who masterminded the labyrinth of the fearsome minotaur.

(I even think Christopher Nolan’s production company uses a mazelike emblem as its logo.)

Field of Dreams and Signs are two of my all-time tops, and they both deal with farmers etching or having etched their crops in a way that leads them to a Spiritual Awakening.  Even moreso than Pan, both of those pictures ignore the banal realities of existence (eg, the Earth being 70% water and the fact that Kevin Costner travels through time for no reason), but they’re pitched with a level of wonder that only a blackheart could push back against.  And who can forget The Third Man?  No one, as no one could forget the way it follows up its most shocking plot contortion with a chase through the labyrinthine sewer system honeycombing downtown Vienna, our archvillain’s portal for remaining a ghost.  No, I say to you, these cannot be chalked up to coincidence.

Now.  I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel here, and I’m not claiming that all movies should use Pan’s Labyrinth and these others as their stencil.  Apollo 13 would not have been a better movie if the shuttle detoured for Mars on the way to the moon.  Linear storytelling has its place.  But when I think of the arid desert of movies that take me by the hand through stale and predictable patterns (for what?  for fear of losing my attention…), I can’t tell you the pleasure I feel when I’m dropped into one and have the leash cut off from behind me.

Thank you for losing me, Mr. Del Toro.  And your movie is marvelous.

The Movies Also Rise

Full-time book author, Part-time movie figment

It’s been quite a while since a movie or book has made me more cognizant of the unholy relationship between movies and books than Woody Allen’s new, sublime Midnight in Paris.  As I pointed out with regards to Wonder Boys, the fact of the film’s main character being a writer will inhibit some audiences from connecting with it.  More elitist still (you may say), the man’s central dilemma is of a decidedly high-class sort:  he’s a wealthy Hollywood laff peddler, and he’s depressed because he’s spent his life prostituting his talents for the movies instead of striving after art’s truer forms of expression.

Owen Wilson, as the writer, walks the crass and touristy streets of 2011 Paris by day but, through some unexplained paranormal vessel, finds himself transported at each nightfall back to the 1920s, when this same city teemed with the energy of bright and disaffected artists burning with those most artful fires.

It’s by far Woody’s most immersive movie visually, creating a simultaneously realistic and heavenly Parisian universe and inhabiting it with familiar celebrities like T.S. Eliot, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein and young man Ernest Hemingway.  Kind of scary for me to watch, actually, as each performance embodies its forebear precisely how I’ve always imagined them.  When Zelda Fitzgerald climbs the rail of a bridge and threatens suicide, it’s childish and heartbreaking in a way that’s straight out of Gatsby.

Owen longs for the glitzy nights and the young “lost generation” rebels, not for the romance so much as for the courage he sees in them for living out what he failed to.  That the real Owen Wilson is also a tremendously successful Hollywood writer/actor, his resume checkered with instances of brilliance and hackery, gives the movie a disarming autobiographical quality.  And Woody Allen has, of course, refused the siren song of Hollywood for decades and insisted on making his movies outside the system and with no interference from the carriers of his purse.  Both men’s inward struggles seem to underscore the movie’s every frame.

I’ve written before on how irritating I find it when writing for Hollywood is equated with sounding creativity’s death knell.  Beautiful films have been fashioned within these blue-skied borders, and beautiful writings written.  But let’s not kid ourselves.  Hollywood’s definition of a “successful” writer is a step or two removed from that of the burgeoning talents that lined Gert Stein’s halls.  True, the NY Times got a lot of attention for their piece on Diablo Cody and Liz Meriwether’s writers’ group (the “Fempire”), likening them to the legendary “pad o’ guys” whose point man was a very young Shane Black, but that kind of page-trading intellectual comradeship is sadly sparse in the pro screenwriting world.

Even the ballyhooed early ’90s rivalry between Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas focused largely on who was worth more millions, not who had won a creative triumph over whom.  And rather than weigh in with the kind of spirited debate that might ensue over the great novelists, the public simply concluded the both of them were overpriced commercialists and lambasted them down together.

There’s a somber subtext buried between the lines of Midnight in Paris, as well.  We may recall that not a few of these formidable literary giants spent their latter days in bungalows on Hollywood backlots, broke and despairing at how limited their creativity was within the confines of the screenplay form.  If Hemingway and Fitzgerald stood for the dream of uncompromised art in their youths, their ultimate surrender to the growing monolith of The Movies in the 1940s made them more or less into what the adoring younger writer detests himself for.

I have no grand answers here.  Not for how screenwriters can view themselves and be viewed by others as authentic artists, not for how to reconcile literary ambition with a desire to put words on the silver screen.  I don’t know how many millionaire screenwriters walk with the forlorn trudge of Owen Wilson along the bank of the Seine, if only in the depths of their unconscious.  I don’t know how many of them go to bed next to vapid Hollywood materialists when their hearts lie with hypnotic European beauties (preferably played by Marion Cotillard).  I don’t know how many of them have unpublished novels on their hard drives.  I don’t even know how many of them would have liked Midnight in Paris, so maybe I’m alone here … but it’s one of my fierier and more persistent dreams to see the day where the screenwriter is not the disgruntled drunk or lost middle aged self-loather, but where it’s we who bustle about the lights of the brimming city and form the ranks of our generation’s greats.  If it has to be the Santa Monica Pier we walk instead of the Seine, so be it.

The next ’20s will be on us in not so long.

Stay False to Yourself

What am I?

There’s something contrary to human nature about a blog, I think, or maybe about all writing in this era where every word typed lasts forever.  Much as the writer may want to hide from it (and I’m often in this camp), a blog is the most first-person form of writing that exists.  Any time it’s updated, an untarnishable record of how the writer thought and felt on that arbitrary date is etched.  Now, of course, you can always delete entries that, in hindsight, you’re dissatisfied with, but isn’t there something inherently dissatisfying about looking back on something written in this most immediate, eternally-in-the-present medium?

You’re never going to be the exact same person again as the one who hit “publish” on a certain date about a certain topic, so at best a blog is some kind of slow-painted mosaic that, by virtue of its form, will eventually be composed of deliriously inconsistent parts.

That’s why I’m reluctant when it comes to documenting specific autobiographical episodes on here.  On this date, at this time, I went and chased this assignment from this executive at this studio … this spec script went out to these people, with these people attached to produce it.  Even if you keep from naming names (as most screenwriting blogs, with a rather sheeplike coyness, do), you’re invariably going to be captive to the emotional weight of the moment.

I had a script literally placed into the hands of Tim Burton at some point during this calendar year.  Exceedingly rare for an unbacked spec script, and something I only managed after being vetted through (and received favorably by) a number of intermediate parties.  Naturally, this was a very exciting thing.  If I’d written about it here during those breathless days when we were awaiting word, the writing would have been composed by some marginally recognizable specter of my usual self.

The thing is, though, I still know the story behind every blog post.  Whatever un-personal terms I try to dress them in, I can still match most any entry to something tangible – a boon, a hardship – that made me feel that specific way at that time.  It’s not so different with my scripts; pretty much without fail, I can point to a certain conflict or obsession in my head that compelled me to sit down and write each one.  All good writing is subject to the writer’s whims, to ephemeral bursts of enthrallment and exasperation.

But scripts have characters.  And stories.  And a fictional world for the real-world matters to play out in.  With a blog, there’s nowhere to hide.  No matter how “third person omniscient” I am in trying to approach a topic, it just doesn’t happen.

I’m reminded of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, where he excuses outrageously incongruous statements with a simple, “I contain multitudes”.  Yes, a blog is an imperfect form.  A compilation of disjointed episodes and feelings, preserved and displayed in perpetuum in the guise of a complete portrait.  Snapshots, posing as a movie.  But if the limitation starts to get you down, I wouldn’t worry about it.  Tomorrow you’ll be a different person.

The Writing Man’s Tongue

I halt for no stenographer.

English is one peculiar language.  It’s an absolute mess phonetically, and its dependence on word order leads to some aggravating moments of confusion.  All the years reading the Dead White Males certainly drove me crazy at times, but one thing the ancient languages have on English is case endings.

A word looks different depending on its use in the sentence; “Roger loves Heinrich” and “Heinrich loves Roger” don’t contain identical words.  It’s a drag because it means you have to memorize ten forms for every noun you learn (though there are regularities), but it also obliterates a great many ambiguities.

I’ll give you a good example of that.

In The Wizard of Oz, when the Wicked Witch is streaking across the sky on her broomstick, summoning some kind of script out of black smoke, she writes the words “SURRENDER DOROTHY” upon the blue sky.  I have spent more hours of my life than is perhaps healthy debating whether this mandate was being issued directly to Dorothy, telling her to surrender, or to her compatriots, telling them to surrender her.

The former would ideally have included a comma, but I’m willing to concede that, inking an airborne message of this kind, one might be lax with the ordinary rules of punctuation.

The point is, in Latin or Greek, the Wicked Witch wouldn’t have had this matter to contend with.  The form of the word “Dorothy” would have answered it conclusively.

And it’s for reasons not unlike this that, I think, English is not nearly the Earth’s best language for speaking.  It is by its very nature arranged schematically, not for prettiness.  Part of the reason Shakespeare is impenetrable to some less precocious English speakers is that he was fond of mimicking Greco-Roman syntax (particularly in the Greco-Roman plays).  Consider this line in Antony and Cleopatra:

“He neither loves, nor either cares for him.”

There’s not a reader alive who wouldn’t first read “neither” as an adverb.  It’s not.  It’s an adjective, and it’s the object of “loves”.  In English, we’re not used to objects preceding verbs.  ”I you love” just isn’t an option.

I think a part of Shakespeare wishes he could have written in Latin or Greek, where disambiguated forms would have allowed him to arrange his words more freely.  Even the modern romance languages, though less syntactically lenient than the ancients, retain that basic singsong-y quality of their ancestral tongues.  Italian is mellifluous, and French dignified, in a way that English simply can’t hold a candle to.

Now, having said that though, there is one manner in which I believe my native tongue to be unsurpassed, and that is in its vocabulary.  As a writer of English, I have such an incalculable wealth of words at my disposal that it’s a miracle I ever get through a sentence.  An abundance.  A bounty.  A plethora.  A myriad.  A cornucopia.  A geyser.  My cup runneth over.  These are just a few of the great many ways to express how great many a ways there are to express myself – and yet they’re not interchangeable.  Each one has its own discrete flavor, a figurative or literary touch that it and nothing else would bring to the sentence.

This is the unassailable strength of English.  It’s not hard to understand how it happened.  We simply cherrypick from the best of every other language:  ”abundance”, “bounty” and “cornucopia” from Latin, “plethora” and “myriad” from Greek, “geyser” from Old Norse, “wealth” from High German.

We see something, and we take it.  And you know what?  You’ve gotta respect that.

Now, the upshot of this is that you have no excuse – none – for writing a boring sentence in English.  Just as there’s no excuse for making a bland soup with a cabinet full of spices.  This goes doubly in screenplays; I can’t tell you how many supposedly erotic scenes I’ve read that describe kisses and caresses as “passionate”, or supposedly eye-popping car crashes that are “hard”.  That’s not good enough!  There’s no less passionate sentence than “Rick and Gina kiss passionately”.  Get down into these passions!  I want to know exactly what Rick’s doing to Gina, or Gina’s doing to Rick, or what the railroad tracks have done to that semi.

It may not always have the ring of a ballad, and it may drive you nuts trying to decide who’s supposed to surrender what, but the English language is still an immeasurable resource.  Use it.

Plays are for the Theater, or Not

The closest we'll get to an action sequence.

Plays have been filmed for the movies since the beginning of moviemaking, and most every time such a production is undertaken, the matter of “opening up” the drama becomes a cause for discussion.  Certain plays-turned-movies (10 Things I Hate About You) all but divorce themselves from their stagier origins; others (Witness for the Prosecution, Glengarry Glen Ross) bathe themselves in the mannered dialogue and the histrionics that, properly speaking, shouldn’t belong on film.

Consider the following (paraphrased) exchange between me and my college roommate after we watched Network:

“You like it, Mike?”

“Yeah.  I just kinda wish I saw it as a play first.  Some of those monologues should have been shortened when they adapted it into a movie.”

“It wasn’t a play.  It was written directly for movies.”

“No it wasn’t.”

“Yes, actually.”

“Well, then, maybe it should have been a play.”

“Why?”

“Dunno.”

“No, c’mon, why?  Because it’s got smart dialogue and acting that shoots for the moon, it has to be a play?”

“Yes.”

Network is of course written by Paddy Chayefsky, who did admittedly have a successful run as a Broadway playwright, but to whom the real accolades came during his years writing for the screen.  The fact that Chayefsky tended towards literate monologues and long scenes (at least in his most legendary screenplay) is met with resistance by some present-day screenwriters:  why should he get to write like that when we don’t?

It’s true that screenwriting has undergone an image revamping in the half-century since Chayefsky broke onto the scene.  It has become a figurative pot of gold, a quarry as much for dollar chasers as storytellers, so it makes a certain amount of sense to begrudge a style of screenwriting that was both popular and…you know…good at the same time.

If a writer shines a light of brilliance off-off-Broadway, we can at least glean our schadenfreude from the fact that he most likely eats chicken noodle soup for dinner.  But if he lives in a Beverly Hills mansion, it just doesn’t seem fair.

But Network is and always was intended to be a movie.  What of stories that lived their life of unadulterated inspiration on the stage, and were then appropriated into the venal morass of Hollywood?  I’m thinking, particularly, of the Frederick Knott stage play Dial M for Murder.  It has been filmed as a major motion picture twice, once by Alfred Hitchcock and once as the unofficial remake A Perfect Murder by Andrew Davis (the man who directed The Fugitive).

The Hitchcock movie is to the untrained eye nothing but a walk-through of the play, with a camera watching.  The remake is a tense thrill ride informed more by the Fatal Attraction/Basic Instinct eroto-thriller genre than by its stage-written precursor (going so far as to invite the comparison, casting eroto-thriller regular Michael Douglas as the lead).

It’s pretty obvious that the “open up the play” codicil was enacted early and often in the production of A Perfect Murder.  Hitchcock’s movie takes place largely in a single flat; Davis’ roams freely around Manhattan.  Events are visualized that in the first movie are only spoken about (obeying the “show, don’t tell” commandment).  The dialogue is condensed, made terser and more friendly to those who don’t make a habit of reading the dictionary for pleasure.

And yet Dial M for Murder is an electric and devilish movie, consistently arresting, and A Perfect Murder just sucks.

First of all, though it is a stagnant movie in terms of its setting, Dial M is consistently in flux on an emotional level.  We see a guilty cheating wife, and are inclined to feel sorry for her husband, then see him plot her murder.  We see a man making a bid on a car over the phone, only later to realize it was a ruse and that the car salesman is no car salesman at all.  We see a police inspector that we want to ball-tap for his stupidity, until recognizing he’s playing dumb for his own reasons and is far wiser to events than he looks.

What truly elevates Hitchcock’s picture into the realm of near-masterpiece, though, is the way it toys with its audience’s moral compass.  The intended victim in the movie (though played by audience favorite Grace Kelly) is not blissful and guileless, and her scheming husband (though an unequivocal monster) is at heart only retaliating against a bitter betrayal.

In one of the lead-up scenes where it looks like Ray Milland’s murder scheme has been blockaded, we realize with an off-putting curiosity that we’re nervous.  We want him to succeed, on some level, because we’ve been pre-conditioned.  It reminds me of the Joker’s quick summary of Gotham’s complacency to evil in The Dark Knight:  ”It’s all part of the plan…”.  Or maybe we’re as enticed as he is by the prospect of seeing so clever a mendacity brought to completion.

So the drama is consistently at a roil, but is this a testament to the intimate setting or in spite of it?  While the claustrophobic location does hamper the number of things Hitchcock can do with his camera, it would be foolish to imply the movie is “uncinematic”.  If you think that, you aren’t paying attention to the micro things.  Like the way we’re level with the conspirators during their unsure initiations, and then viewing them from above, like God sitting in judgment, as it becomes clear they’re actually going through with it.

Regardless of the geographical scope, Dial M for Murder is a spectacle.  It was even filmed in 3-D during the format’s first absurd craze in the 1950s.  Common wisdom has it that it was never screened in 3-D, but saying that was a fine way to get an earful from my father, who snagged two passes to a short-run 3-D presentation in Cambridge, MA in 1954.

And what A Perfect Murder gains in allowing itself a broader range of sets, it loses in terms of character identification.  Notably, the twenty-minute conspiratorial conference from Dial M is bisected, translated instead into two three-to-five minute scenes.  While this at first glance may look like an expeditious choice, it’s fatal.

Watching a man be cornered into committing a murder over the course of twenty minutes is unlikely, yes, but it at least affords the time the scene needs to unfold.  It’s a process.  A seduction.  And whether or not we follow the men’s immoral logic every step of the way is irrelevant; it makes sense on its own terms.

But for a man (short of a professional killer) to be talked into befouling an innocent woman on the basis of seven minutes’ persuasion, even with a night’s intermission to reflect, feels wrong.  It feels rushed, snippets from a longer debate that needed to take place but didn’t.  And the drawn and quartered nature of this scene is symptomatic of the movie as a whole.  The headlong, kinetic pace that was presumably going to inject drama rather drains it dry.

It’s a good reminder that just because characters, cars, trains, bullets and the like can move faster in a movie does not mean they necessarily should.  And just because action is restricted to a single set of rooms does not mean it cannot blister along.

A drama crafted with intelligence and deliberateness should not have to be followed by the actors bowing.