A Steady Hand 

(Reprinted from Printer's Devils / Writer's Church)

I recently watched Werner Herzog's documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about Paleolithic art discovered inside Chauvet Cave in Southern France. The paintings offer plenty of mysteries and no sure answers, most of all, Why? Why would Ice Age hunter-gatherers take time out of their short, violent lives to crawl into a dark, uninhabited cave, in order to cover the walls with graceful, colorful line drawings of horses, lions, and bulls over a period spanning roughly five thousand years?

One thing that strikes me unforgettably about these paintings is how assured the brushstrokes are. These aren't idle doodles; they show no signs of doubt; and whether we ever learn why the artists made these paintings, it seems certain the answer was clear at least to the painters themselves.

In the film, an archeologist talks about meeting an aboriginal man in Australia who is touching up a set of cave paintings. "Why do you paint?" the archeologist asks.

"I am not painting," the man answers. "The hand of the spirit is painting."

My Movie Pitch 

"Here's my movie pitch. Wanna hear it?

"There's this guy—this young, bright, hopeful guy. Like Orlando Bloom coulda played him a couple years ago, before he got old. But not Shia LaBeouf. Smarter than Shia LaBeouf.

"This guy, he gets outta college, he gets a job, everything's going pretty good, and then ... he starts feeling like he's losing himself, you know? Losing track of his dreams. So he says, "Fuck you, job! I quit! I'm gonna chase my dreams!"

"But it's too late, see? Because he's already forgotten them. So he just stumbles around all the time, trying to remember what he wanted.

"It's sort of Reality Bites meets Memento meets The Road."

Land of the Lost 

The Unexistential Desert Island

In Lost, a set of characters, each having learned to thrive in their own way in modern society as best they can1, is suddenly thrust into a radically new world, when their plane crashes on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean.

If the show were a bit darker and a bit less fantastic2, this alone should have been enough drama to carry a TV series, without need of smoke monsters, hatches, time travel, or a nuclear explosion. How well would a spinal surgeon, a Lotto winner, a C-list rock star, and a Korean heiress thrive in the jungle, with nothing except the contents of some salvaged luggage3? Things would get ugly—and dramatic—pretty fast. If I were a betting man, all my money would be on Vincent the dog. (Photo, far right.)

This cutthroat Gilligan's Island would ask, first of all, this existential question: Who are you, when you're stripped of your context—when the skills you've honed over a lifetime are suddenly useless, when you can no longer take your identity from your job—and is that enough to survive? How much of what you do, and how you act, and what you believe, is circumstantial? In absence of society's structures, what are you?

By most measures, the passengers of Oceanic flight #815 are an exceptionally lucky bunch: they have among them a Boy Scoutish medical doctor, a cured paraplegic with a penchant for hunting boar, and an elite Iraqi soldier. Most times I fly, the plane is filled with people who can't even carry their own luggage without rolling it.

But moreover, the survivors of the crash are lucky because, through all their trials, their core values have remained intact. On Lost, no desert-island devolution of society ever happened: the doctor is still a doctor; the con man is still a con man, and the Lotto winner is still a lucky layabout. Thousands of miles from civilization and with no system of commerce, these people more or less elected to keep their day jobs—because without them, they (or we?) won't know who they are. And this would evoke existential questions that no television network is inclined to ask...4

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1. Despite a societal bias to think otherwise, con artists and fugitives are also thriving within their particular circumstances: better to be the con artist than the conned; better to be running from the law than behind bars. "Thriving" is by definition circumstantial.

2. So, a bit more boring and a bit more like other TV.

3. Which, to be honest, would consist of nothing more useful than 3oz. bottles of hair product and cables for recharging now-bootless iPods.

4. We say we work to pay the bills, but it cuts both ways: we accrue bills because we work. Leisure is the dialectic flip-side of work, its antithesis: it's what we do when we're not working. So even our leisure time is actually defined by our work.

When Harry Met Daniel 

The Urban Sherpa Interviews Daniel Radcliffe

Daniel Radcliffe is tired.

He is sprawled out on a chaise lounge in London's Claridges Hotel. "I'm knackered!," he laughs. "I don't even know what's going to come out of my mouth."

Radcliffe has good reason to be tired: while he's promoting the recent installment of the Harry Potter franchise (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), he's also begun principal shooting on the final set of Harry Potter movies.

"Sometimes it feels as though I've been working on this for my whole life. It'll be really nice to finally kill Voldemort once and for all, and get on with things." He stares out the window with a faraway, dreamy look in his eyes. "You know, Ron and Hermione are off to university this week? But not me."

"You mean [Harry Potter co-stars] Emma Watson and Rupert Grint?"

"Right. Of course." He gives one of his famous shy smiles. "Sorry."

Radcliffe fantasizes about going away to a university and having a normal life—but a "normal life" may be impossible for the charming millionaire who has spent his whole adolescence in the public eye, depicting a beloved hero, growing up alongside him, their fates always intertwined. "Other people lined up for their copy of Deathly Hollows to learn what was going to happen to Harry Potter. I read it to learn what was going to happen to me."

He plays absent-mindedly with the promotional broomstick that Warner Brothers left in the hotel room. "You can imagine, growing up like this... Everywhere I go, it's 'Oh, look, Harry Potter.' I'm not ungrateful. But sometimes being the Chosen One is its own burden.

"I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like, without this—" he gestures to his forehead, to the location of Potter's famous lightning scar. "I wonder what I would have become. Maybe a cricket star. Or maybe a tosser. Who knows?"

He snaps out of his sulk at the chance to talk about his turn in Peter Schaffer's Equus: "I was naked!," he exclaims. "Waving my magic wand! Seriously, it was a brilliant experience, a great chance to prove to people that I'm more than just 'The Boy Who Lived.' Even my friends, sometimes I think they wonder: 'Sure, you survived the Killing Curse. But can you act?' Hopefully, I showed that I can. Professor McGonagle came opening night—"

"You mean [Harry Potter co-star, Dame] Maggie Smith?"

"Right. After the show, she kept going on about how I'd grown. It was really affirming."

The Potter series has given Radcliffe a chance to act alongside the greats of the British stage. "They've all been so supportive. I've learned so much. But most of all, I don't think I could have done it without my parents. The bravery and sacrifice of James and Lily Potter is a real inspiration."

"But surely you mean your real parents, [literary agent] Alan Radcliffe and [casting director] Marcia Gresham?"

Radcliffe shoots a look and snarls something in Parseltongue, before recovering his charm. "Yes. Of course." He stares out the window again with a grim and distant look, as if remembering fantastic wrestlings with evil, flying battles pitched among the clouds, powerful magicks that Muggles will never know. "It's been a very, very long day."

Vampires Vs. Zombies (Ongoing) 

or, the History of the Internet, According to Horror

(The following post originally appeared on the SnapDragon blog, January 18, 2009.)

The Golden Globe nomination for Alan Ball's new HBO series, True Blood, reminds us of two things: we like vampires, and there wasn't a whole lot of great television in 2008. Stuck somewhere between gothic and camp, True Blood makes a point of being neither serious enough to be affecting, nor silly enough to be fun. It certainly hasn't been able to do both at the same time, like its more adroit predecessor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

What does any of this have to do with the Internet? That depends on how closely you subscribe to a reading of history sometimes popular among fans of the horror genre: All hitherto existing society is the history of struggle between vampires and zombies.

The theory, roughly, goes like this: symbolically, the vampire is powerful, often majestic and seductive, usually solitary. Zombies, on the other hand, are mindless, slow, driven only by appetite, and move in hordes. A period that is dominated by powerful individuals—dictators, charismatic CEOs, iconoclasts—will also be a period that glorifies vampires. A period that celebrates the masses over the individual will fixate on zombies.

It's a theory that probably won't hold up to much scrutiny, and I'll ask you not to give it much.

Buffy premiered on the WB in 1997 and played on that network for five years. (The show itself rose from the dead, for two more seasons on the UPN network, finally wrapping up in 2003.) This same period coincides with Wesley Snipes' Blade movies, and the creation of the Underworld film series—both of which lend credence to the idea that vampires were in the zeitgeist, though neither franchise is an especially proud addition to the vampire genre.

More to the point: this time period is, almost exactly, the first rise of the Internet, during which brazen, single-minded startup companies, led by egomaniacal corporate execs (who often worked—and played—till dawn) drove the NASDAQ index nearly in stride with the Buffy series: the NASDAQ's peak came weeks after the TV show's Emmy-nominated episode, "Hush," and the index's lowest point came in mid-2003, just as Buffy and her gang were leaving Sunnydale (and television) forever.

If you've read this far, then perhaps you're willing to consider what has happened over the period since then: vampires have gotten dumber (30 Days of Night) and tamer (True Blood); zombies have gotten faster (28 Days Later) and smarter (I Am Legend); and the web has shifted toward "crowd-sourcing" and the "smart mob."

The age of the intelligent zombie is upon us.

Most Moving Scene Involving a Dishwasher 

And this year's award for "Most Moving Scene Involving a Dishwasher"1 goes to Rachel Getting Married.2

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1. Presented by Zach Braff.

2. Also nominated for "Best Use of Bill Irwin in a Major Motion Picture," "Best Use of Deborah Winger as a Cold-Hearted Connecticut White Woman," and "Least Nauseating Use of a Steadycam." (You didn't really think I was going to say "Least Nauseating Use of Anne Hathaway," did you?)

(Don't Go Back to) Rockville Center 

Revisiting Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Five years ago, a relatively un-manic Jim Carrey and a charming-as-she's-ever-been (and that's saying a lot) Kate Winslet met on a beach in Montauk, fell in love, and then, when they outgrew each other, they decided to have the entire experience erased from their respective memories. They each hired a dubious doctor and his band of unkempt technicians to systematically delete their remembrance of the other. Rather than suffer through the end of their love, they decided, simply, to obliterate all traces of its existence.

Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is quite possibly the most endearing, enduring, heart-breaking romance ever made.¹ It was my favorite film of 2004, and since nothing better came along the following year, I consider it my favorite film of 2005. And then 2006, and 2007. It's held that spot now for so long that I decided it was long overdue that I watch it again.

I didn't go into this lightly: the first (the only) time that I watched the film, in 2004, I sobbed till I was nearly ejected from the theatre, and I wound up physically ill for a week. I'm sure that owes in part to some over-sentimentality of mine, and also a fairly unique sinus condition that makes sobbing somewhat hazardous to my health.

In any case: not your average chick-flick, this.

I longed to revisit "Joel" and "Clementine" on the wintry beaches of Montauk, but I was nervous to do so.

On the night that I cued up the film, I huddled in my bed, wrapped myself in a new quilt that's become my erstwhile adult security blanket, dimmed the lights, pressed "Play", and braced myself for the ride.

It was better than I remembered. Sad, sure; but sweeter, funnier, happier. Hopeful. Hopeful.

My favorite film of 2008.²

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1. Eternal Sunshine is generally known as "Charlie Kaufman's movie"—Kaufman having written the script—while we might or might not remember the film's director (Michel Gondry). That might be a first: screenwriters are usually household names only in households where Daily Variety is read over morning coffee.

2. I did sob, again. And yes, I am sick, again.

Matter / Antimatter 

or, Will the Real Sarah Palin Please Stand Up (and Go Away)

For all the fear last month that the new particle accelerator at CERN would unleash a black hole and end life as we know it, the event came much closer to passing last night, on NBC's Saturday Night Live, during the very-near collision of matter (Tina Fey) and antimatter (Sarah Palin).

During the brief time the two of them shared the stage, they sped past one another nearly as quickly as a pair of charged protons, not speaking or even making eye contact. Though there was no explosion, and no evidence pointing to the elusive "Higgs boson," one thing that was a scientific certainty is the obvious contempt the two women feel for one another.

Blame it on the soft focus in the above photo, but it's really hard to get a sense of who hates the other more.

Ode to a Spanish Yearn 

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

You will see it. You will see it, if any of the following things interest you, and you will probably enjoy it. In no particular order:

• wine
• sex
• art
• lazy afternoons
• Spanish architecture
• the struggle between passion and planning
• beautiful ex-patriots
• beautiful Europeans
• beautiful people fucking
• sunshine
• art-making
• chronic disaffection / dissatisfaction
• the struggle between thought and feeling
• the (im)possibility of a meaningful happy relationship
• bohemia
• wine
• the (im)possibility of anything lasting forever
• the (im)possibility of a meaningful happy life

If these things interest you, then you will watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and you will be able to overlook the fact that the script is clumsy like it was written on cocktail napkins during a trans-Atlantic flight, because it will be speaking to you, about you, and it will leave you a little more unsettled and a little more passionate than before...

The Fall of Man, pt. 2 

Pixar's Wall-E

The polluted Earth has become unsuitable for life, and all humankind has fled in deep space cruise ships, leaving the movie's eponymous protagonist to clean up the mess. He wanders through an abandoned city, tirelessly tidying up, while also collecting the charming artifacts of a fallen civilization—Zippo lighters, a Rubick's Cube, and a VHS tape of Hello, Dolly!

Wall-E is a movie about the last man on Earth, except the last man on Earth is a robot—equal parts Mars Rover and Omega Man.

It's not unusual that the hero of a Pixar movie would be inhuman: to date, the Pixar filmography has starred toys, bugs, monsters, fish, cars, and rats. The closest thing to a human hero of a Pixar film is a family of mutant superhero freaks who hide their powers in order to assimilate.

(The villains of the films, on the other hand, are almost always people....)

But Pixar's preference for machines is the converse of Lucasfilm's: Pixar anthropomorphizes them till they are not only adorable, but also more human than, well, the humans. The toys, fish, rats, and now robots, are role models who teach the people in their world (and the people in the cinema) how to be more human.

The Fall of Man, pt. 1 

George Lucas's Clone Wars

The circle is now complete. When we left George Lucas, he had open disdain humanity, preferring the company of blue screens and Jar-Jar Binks to flesh-and-blood actors. His films have continued to push at the definition of "live action," gradually replacing his real-life actors with more and more elaborate digital puppets. (Cf. Jabba the Hut.)

And when he cannot pixelate an actor outright, Lucas seems to try his honest best to flatten any humanity out of their performance. I imagine him directing on the set of the original Star Wars: "That was good, but can you say it faster?" By the most recent Star Wars films, one wonders if he spoke to his actors at all.

Finally, Lucas has gotten what he seems to have wanted all along: he's purged the Star Wars universe of any real people. The Clone Wars, coming out later this month, is a full-length animated feature, set during the time between Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3.

Given the choice between working with Ewan MacGregor and Natalie Portman, and working with cartoons, Lucas picked cartoons.

The underlying structural message of the Star Wars films—the story being told by his choice of media (muppets and models and mattes, oh my!)—is that machines are preferable to humanity. It is a kind of digital fascism whose goal is the erasure of everything flawed and analog (i.e., actors). This story invariably leaks back into the script itself: though they are fighting hoardes of "evil" robots, the ostensible heroes of The Clone Wars are clones (and clones are machines: this is why genetic engineering is called engineering).

When we can distinguish the simulacra from the real, and choose the simulacra, the preference implies the obsolescence of nuance, subtlety, and all the humanities. It is indeed a phantom menace, and no longer far far away.

In Search of Lost Time 

Voted Off the Island

Television viewers who still follow the fates of the survivors of Oceanic 815 were able to fill in some more missing puzzle pieces after this week's season finale of Lost, the episode which finally revealed the circumstances that allowed six (and only six) people to leave the island. We've known since the season's first episode that some people do manage to escape; we learned, over the course of the season, that many others do not.

And now we know why. For maybe the first time in the history of the series, the various threads and flashbacks seemed finally to come together in a single moment in time. (Lost has managed through so many seasons to dramatize the parable of the blind man and the elephant, each episode showing us only a piece of the story, and most episodes also managing to allude to another piece we hadn't previously known existed. But the series' use of flashbacks, and recently, flash-forwards, literally add a dimension to the proverbial elephant, by showing us pieces of the story as it changes across time.)

Fitting, then, that in an episode that features an overt mention of time travel (a Dharma Initiative bunny is jumped forward several milliseconds in "four-dimensional time"), many of the past narrative threads drew to a close, and all eyes turned to the future: having finally answered the dramatic question that has tied together an otherwise-twining series ("How will they get off the island?"), the writers offered another, unexpected one:

How will they get back?

On the Head of a Pin 

Luc Besson's Angel-A

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work, and their selves, to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Anton Ego, from Pixar Studio's Ratatouille1

In Luc Besson's 2005 film, Angel-A, an out-of-luck Parisian named André is ready to jump off a bridge into the Seine, when a beautiful woman (Angela) beats him to it. She takes the plunge, he rescues her from drowning, and the two team up to get their lives back in order.

Their path leads through gangsters, pimps, horse races and strip clubs (this is a Luc Besson film, after all), before winding up (less characteristically) at Notre Dame Cathedral, and nearly at the gates of Heaven itself. En route, the two of them share a few touching moments: Angela is (of course) sent down from Heaven to teach André that he is lovable, and when she has him look in the mirror to tell himself so, he can't do it: "It's difficult," he stammers, but persists, tears in his eyes, till he manages to spit it out: "Je t'aime," he tells his reflection quietly.

If a film is entertaining, and manages to inspire or interest us toward a few moment's reflection, then perhaps any further discussion of it is beside the point—as esoteric as a medieval philosopher questioning how many angels could fit on the point of a needle.

But Angel-A is just as filled with touchy moments as touching ones: at one point, Angela whores herself to every man in a club, in order to help settle one of André many debts. (Angel-A is Wings of Desire meets Risky Business.) Later, we hear an alternate version of this story, in which Angela did not actually have sex with the 99 men, but simply lured them to a bathroom, robbed them, and bludgeoned them unconscious. Whew, that's much better!

The movie is one-half a fairy tale: a sweet man, who was never shown love, learns to treat people with kindness and honesty, and thus turns his life around. But it's a half-articulated moral, because in the world of Angel-A, only select actions have consequences; everything else can be solved by the six-foot tall, blonde-haired deus ex machina in the short black dress.

By the end of the movie, Angela has helped André realize his true nature; and his thanks to her is to lure her away from her own true nature: as she spreads her wings to fly back to Heaven, he clings on to her and brings her crashing back down to Earth, to "save" her and return her to the only place she could ever be happy: at the side of a man.2

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1. I might have thought differently of Angel-A if I hadn't seen it back to back with Ratatouille, and noticed that apart from the pimping and whoring on the one hand, and the cooking and eating on the other, the two stories are almost exactly the same.

2. Luc Besson's brand of well-regarded schlock—including The Professional and La Femme Nikita—has come with its own mostly-well-regarded brand of "feminism": in his films, the girls kick ass. But they also take all their orders from men, and in the end, it is always the men who succeed or fail to make them happy.

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Sounds of Silence 

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park

Cinema is inherently voyeuristic: we, the viewers, are always on the outside, peering at something to which we should not be privy, while on the inside, the characters who occupy the world we watch seem unaware of our presence.

In the case of most Hollywood blockbusters, it is easy to forget that we are voyeurs, because our window offers us a view of the impossible—places we could never possibly be: inside a jet fighter, or amidst a zombie army, or bumbling through a romance with a witty supermodel, or in a galaxy far far away.

Gus Van Sant's recent spate of vérité-style films offer instead a glimpse into places we might have been, if only we were so unlucky: lost in the desert without food or water (Gerry), hiding under a table in the library of Columbine High School (Elephant), or living out the final week in the under-furnished mansion of a reluctant rock'n'roll hero, before his suicide (Last Days).1

Add to this list one more place we don't want to revisit any time soon: the mind of a teenager—in particular, the dreamy, lyrical, emotionally-detached mind of a skateboarding teenager named Alex, growing up in a broken home in Portland, struggling with belonging, and involved in an unfortunate and grisly incident one night at Paranoid Park. The film recounts the events before and after that incident, but it jumbles the order, skews the point of view, slows things down, speeds things up, repeats a scene several times but reveals something new each time. "I'm writing this a little out of order," says Alex of his own pencil-scribbled narration. "Sorry. I didn't do so well in creative writing."

Van Sant, an American auteur who is best known for his (excellent but entirely conventional) Good Will Hunting, has since been diligently reminding us that the medium of film is one of sound and image and time, more than one of plot or character or dialogue. The most memorable moments of his recent films are the ones in which nothing is said and not very much seems to happen: the crunch of feet on the desert gravel; an ad hoc song plucked out on an acoustic guitar, performed for no one; the silent grainy home-movie footage of one skater after another, jumping off a ramp and reaching—Icarus-like—for the sky. These scenes may seem wistful, or indulgent, or narcissistic2; but then, the most memorable moments of our own lives are probably the same.

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1. Van Sant calls these three his "Death Trilogy," and indeed, they are beautiful, elegiac, fictional snuff films.

2. Marshall McLuhan suggests that Narcissus would never have become so enamored of his own reflection if he had understood it for what it was ("Narcissus as Narcosis"). Instead, perhaps he was enraptured at the discovery of one so similar to himself, and could not avert his eyes. The same might be said for Van Sant's long, longing gazes upon his subjects.

Lying Naked and Face Down 

Nominations are in for the next James Dean, and we have a winner.

There is little for me to contribute to the Web-based discourse surrounding the sad passing of Heath Ledger. (Find solid, respectable eulogies here and here.)

But I'll add this much to the heap:

The press has almost universally zeroed in on the same few, lurid details—mainly:

1. Ledger was found [like Marilyn] "lying naked and face down" by his bed; and,
2. There were sleeping pills nearby.

These two facts have been summed up with the sort of arithmetic that tabloids are best at, to conclude that Ledger must have died from a drug overdose—which, though it's possible, is pure speculation, and I'm already sick of hearing it.

I'll wager that anyone who takes sleeping pills keeps them in the vicinity of their bed, because I'll wager that this is where these people would like to sleep.

I'll also venture that there were other things near his bed which have gone unreported—say, a bathrobe, a picture of his two-year-old daughter, maybe a few unread screenplays. According to the brilliant logic of the Associated Press, the proximity of these objects, like the proximity of the Ambien, should be sufficient to implicate them in Ledger's death, and the police should bring little Matilda in for questioning immediately.

[Even if drugs are found to be the cause of Ledger's death, I'm still unwilling to acquit that nearby pile of scripts, because one way or another, Hollywood must certainly be responsible for this regrettable loss.]

The news is stupid. I'm moving to a cabin in the woods.

There's No Place Like Texas (pt. 1) 

For the first minute of No Country for Old Men (the Coen Brothers' reverent film adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy), the screen fills with gorgeous cinematic pictures of the Texas landscape at sunrise, which make it look like the most beautiful place on earth. I get a compelling urge to pack my bags, buy a truck, and relocate to anywhere south of the Panhandle.

In those opening moments, Texas looks like paradise, a perfect place to live.

For the remaining two hours and thirty-five seconds, the blood-soaked film makes Texas look slightly less hospitable. But only slightly less, because one thing that is so appealing about Texas (or at least our myth of Texas, and cinema's myth of Texas) is the rugged (and yes, violent) self-sufficiency of the people who live there. People in Texas drive trucks, wear boots, carry guns, know how to handle themselves, and when push comes to shove, they have what it takes to shove back.

Don't mess with Texas.

So the story goes.

I love that story. It makes me want to click together the heels of my cowboy boots and say three times, "There's no place like Texas."

What Would Jason Do? 

Walking by the Gare de L'Est on my way out of Paris, I got a sense of déjà vu ¹—and realized something that eluded me the whole time I'd been there:

I want to be Jason Bourne.

Sure, Jason Bourne—the amnesiac assassin played, in a trio of recent movies, by Matt Damon—is a stone killer, as liable to murder a man with a paperback book as with a knife, gun, or his own well-trained hands. But still... this corn-fed, athletic, Midwestern ex-pat boy is a role model for Americans everywhere.

1. He lives in Paris. That's cool.
2. He is fluent in no fewer than six languages (French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and English), and has no xenophobia about relating to people from outside the United States.
3. He can handle a Mini Cooper like a NASCAR driver.
4. He has great taste in women.
5. He can run really really fast.
6. He's adept at picking up new skills and new technologies.

Last, and I'm sure most important: despite his first-hand knowledge of the terrors that beset the world, Jason Bourne has a conscience. He knows right from wrong, and acts accordingly—even when it flies in the face of his own government's position. He knows, for instance, that water-boarding is torture (having himself been subjected to it by the CIA).

Bourne is smart, no doubt, but he's no brooding liberal either: he's a military man driven to action by the un-American activities of his own government. Bourne proves out that you don't have to be a fan of Bill O'Reilly to be patriotic.

1. Which is, itself, French: "already seen". And related to amnesia...

God of Small (White) Things 

Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited (like all of Wes Anderson's films, to greater or lesser degrees) is like a dollhouse made of marzipan: it's delicate, sweet, and of questionable substance that's neither fulfilling nor structurally sound. You simultaneously want to protect it, admire its preciousness, and crush it to hear the satisfying thunk of its fragility.

That's to say, then, it's everything we've come to expect of Anderson's films, and everything we love about them, and everything that drives us nuts, too. (No pun intended.)

Critics have been piling on Darjeeling Limited, eager to knock Anderson's hipster specs sideways:

Like his peers Zach Braff, Noah Baumbach (who directed the excellent Squid and the Whale and co-wrote Life Aquatic), and Sofia Coppola (whose brother Roman helped write Darjeeling Limited), Wes Anderson situates his art squarely in a world of whiteness: privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored, fusty. He's wise enough to make fun of it here and there, but in the end, there's something enamored and uncritical about his attitude toward the gaffes, crises, prejudices, and insularities of those he portrays. In The Darjeeling Limited, he burrows even further into this world, even (especially?) as the story line promises an exotic escape. Hands down, it's his most obnoxious movie yet. (Jonah Weiner for Slate, "Unbearable Whiteness.")

Weiner falls short of calling Anderson racist outright, but I won't shy from the word: parts of Darjeeling made me cringe and try to hide my own white face under my hoodie.

But I have no intention of joining the critical pile-on, either. For obvious (and probably defensive) reasons, I take issue with the implication that privileged, bookish woebegones with white skin don't have stories worth watching. And I absolutely reject his conflation of Anderson's perspectives with the films of Noah Baumbach and Sofia Coppola, which I think, for all their own whiteness, are churning full of blood and guts. Anderson's movie about Americans soul-searching in an "exotic" land becomes an essay on cleverness, true; but Coppola's version of the same story, Lost in Translation, is exquisite and heartful.

Weiner also misses the fact that there's something elusively magical about the worlds of Wes Anderson: for all their preciousness (and "unbearable whiteness"), they induce another feeling that offsets the queasiness: wonder. Anderson's gift is his ability to make us marvel (and laugh) at things that would otherwise be mundane. He reminds us there's life to be found, everywhere, and it's rich and complex—even when it's made of white confection.

Boot-Strapping 

"When something is empty, fill it. When something is full, empty it. When you have an itch, scratch it." - Dieter Dengler's advice to his shipmates, upon his rescue

There's a moment in Werner Herzog's new film, Rescue Dawn, when, after weeks of planning their escape from a prisoner of war camp in Laos, the characters played by Christian Bale and Steve Zahn finally spring (or in this case, crawl) into action—and immediately after, Zahn's character seizes up and vomits: the stress, anticipation and fear have overwhelmed his already-unsteady digestive system. In that moment, facing the unknown on an upset stomach, maybe it actually seemed preferable to him to stay in the camp. Bale (whose character has that obsessive singularity of purpose typical of Herzog's heroes) literally has to drag his friend through his own vomit toward freedom.

I'm not in a prisoner of war camp in Laos; I'm at a cafe in Boston. But I am days away from my own escape, which is months in the planning; and today, I woke up and vomited.

How typical. My body's pitched efforts to sabotage the pursuit of my own happiness have always struck me as anti-Darwinian: I have an itch, and I'd scratch it if only I weren't so anxious. Trying to lift one's self from an unhappy place to a happy place necessarily requires some amount of boot-strapping—but why is it always these moments when the laces threaten to break?¹

It occurs to me that if Rescue Dawn had been made by, say, Terrence Malick instead of Werner Herzog, then Dieter would have "escaped" from Laos through daydreams, imaginations, and voice-over—more escapism than escape.² Dieter would have fantasized about his various possible alternate lives without bothering to save his actual one. But the people who face life's stresses with escapism aren't the ones who get their lives told in movies. No—they're the ones who go watch movies in the midst of the afternoon, when they should instead be packing, and preparing for their great escape...

1. Because these are the moments when the laces are under the most strain. Duh.

2. I suppose Terrence Malick already made such a movie...

---

Hyper-Mourning 

Introduction (by Way of Harry Potter)

My sister and I have quite a few separate theories about how Severus Snape isn't really evil and how Dumbledore isn't really dead. We've argued these at length, including specific textual citations, but I think deep down we know the truth, that he actually is dead and gone. I think we just can't face our own sadness at our loss: denial, they say, is the first stage of grief. Dumbledore is dead. Long live Dumbledore.

Now, this week, I'm dealing with two new shocking deaths and finding them hard to accept. I wake up feeling empty, and immediately set my brain upon inventing scenarios that might offer an alternate understanding of these two events. I'm genuinely sad. I'm in mourning. And it's somewhat embarrassing to admit, because these two people aren't real.

Part One: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar

I've been mostly shielded from death in my life: my friends are, for the most part, thankfully alive and well; I was young when my grandparents died, and the relatives who have passed have mostly been distant—geographically if not genealogically. As a result, I've developed a (quite active, vivid) fear that when my loved ones do die, I won't know how to react, that I'll react inappropriately, or, emotionally short-circuited, having no practice at the mechanism for processing these things, I'll react with no emotion whatsoever.

Real-life death is part of a natural cycle, predictable even when it's surprising, and meaningless. Sad, but not meaningful. Fictional death, though, is intentional and not-at-all arbitrary: some (malicious?) writer wills each and every death. To look for meaning in the death of a real person is futile; to look for meaning in the death of a fictional character is simply reading.

So I'm not embarrassed to admit that fictional death leaves me sobbing, metaphysically soul-searching and pulling my beard. Fiction, in all of its forms, is a emotional training ground for real life, a chance to practice at experiences that will (hopefully) be rare in our own lives. A safe place to try out mourning.

That is what I've been doing since last week, when Starbuck died. ¹

Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the derring-do fighter jock of the Sci Fi network's TV series Battlestar Galactica, was probably the show's most interesting character, carrying the series on her emotionally-unstable shoulders till exploding her ship like a Roman candle last week. The episode purported to be dealing with "Kara Thrace and her special destiny" (an idea the character herself mocked, saying it "sounds like a bad cover band"). I'm not at all clear, though, what was so special about her destiny: in the end, it didn't connect any plot points, offer any new insight, or have a higher end. Her destiny was simply to die meaninglessly, which isn't special at all.² It happens all the time. It happens, eventually, to each one of us.

So, in addition to the feelings of sadness and loss that accompany death, this fictional death opened up a third uncomfortable feeling, which was that this fictional (and therefore ordered) universe has no meaning.

Battlestar Galactica has always been more about faith than flying spaceships, and I was suddenly losing mine in its writers.³ As with their shocking second-season finale (when they turned the show inside-out by landing their entire fleet on a planet), this recent episode has me wondering:

Has Battlestar Galactica (hyper)jumped the shark?

Maybe they'll surprise me. Maybe Kara Thrace will have a special destiny after all, to take some of the sting out of the sadness...

Part Two: The Map Preceding the Territory

I'd barely had time to begin processing the loss of this first fictional character when I learned of the passing of another: French philosopher Jean Baudrillard died this week.

Ostensibly, Baudrillard was a real person⁴, though not to me personally: I never knew him and have probably spent more time (and better time) with Starbuck. Baudrillard occupied the same space as celebrities, situated closer to fiction than reality—so his death seems to me to belong more to the former than the latter, just like his life. My only connection to Baudrillard were the books themselves, which won't be significantly altered by the passing of the man. As if there should be a bumper sticker: "French philosophers don't die; they just get reissued." Baudrillard is dead; long live Baudrillard.

1. I realize I'm outing myself as an even bigger dork than most of you probably already imagine any time I so much as make reference to Battlestar Galactica—let alone admit it sometimes makes me cry. And on the subject of dorkiness, though I feel some urge to apologize for maybe spoiling this surprise plot twist, I'll have you know I myself discovered before I'd seen the show, by watching a headline pop up on the Digg "Swarm"—"Is Starbuck Really Dead?" That's how I found out.

2. That her final hours were guided by a cylon "Ghost of Christmas Past" doesn't make the death any more meaningful.

3.Writers who will no doubt be applauded for their "bravery" in taking this unconventional turn, as though throwing out the baby with the bath water is brave. It remains to be seen whether or not their baby will be reborn, i.e. in the bath water of a "resurrection ship"...

4. As real at least as the Gulf War.

Klaus Kinski's Hairline 

In Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, Klaus Kinski (as the titular main character) marches through the jungle (and the film) wearing a white suit, a wild-eyed look, and hair that looks like it was styled via electroshock therapy. Fitzcarraldo is confident, and passionate to the point of desperation—two qualities of which I'm extremely jealous. Maybe that's why I felt more-than-normal kinship, and why I fixated on the idea that he and I have the same hairline.

Watching the movie, and seeing Fitzcarraldo's ambitious plans come to such a catastrophic end, threw me into a three-day funk and at the end of it I cut off all my hair.

Problem is, with no bangs to hide behind, I had to confront my own face. It's older. Gravity is hard to deny.

* * *

The trash can is full of brown (not blonde) hair, which for a moment makes me conclude that the hair I've cut off belongs to someone else, that the reflection in the mirror belongs to someone else, the hairline belongs to someone else, the tired eyes belong to someone else.

* * *

In Studio City, a fortune teller once singled me out from across a parking lot and made a beeline through the cars, shouting, "I see your forehead! I see your forehead!" I'd just recently buzzed off my hair, and as far as I knew, everyone could see my forehead: I was all forehead; there was nothing to see but my forehead. Still, this would-be phrenologist felt it was particularly important that I know I have a "very auspicious forehead."

Gradually, as my bangs grew back and covered over my vast, auspicious forehead, I forgot about the incident—until a year later, now in Larchmont Village, I ran into the same fortune teller: he walked across the street, in front of traffic, again to tell me, "I see your forehead!"

Well, I've cut my hair again, and I too see my forehead. Auspicious indeed.

---

Lost (We Are) 

I've watched only the first few episodes of ABC's hit series, Lost—that's the one where forty-seven survivors of a plane crash are stranded on a tropical island—and I'm already seeing it as the moral allegory of our time.

One joy of this show is imagining it's happened to you. If I found myself on a deserted island with nothing but my carry-on bag, I'd be forced to survive with a couple t-shirts, a bottle of Aveda leave-in conditioner, and a set of electronic devices (iPod, BlackBerry, and, on my last flight, even an Xbox) which would probably be out of power because I'd have used up the batteries on the plane. The last square meal I've had would have been those two packets of unsalted pretzels and that half-can of Diet Coke I was given once we'd reached cruising altitude.

The odds would be stacked against, is what I'm saying.

Once I pull myself and my carry-on out of the wreckage, I would bring all of my skills to bear to help us survive—valuable life skills such as the ability to differentiate between various Highland scotches and Kenyan coffees. (I prefer French Kenyan AA for its low acid content, though it's a lighter roast than I usually enjoy.) I consider myself a practical man: I can thread a film projector and run a sound mixing board, replace a computer's video card and logic board, work a hand saw and a power drill, drive stick, drive a motorcycle, drive a Zamboni—skills which will be of absolutely no use to me or the other survivors.

That is where the morality play begins. It matters what is of use to the other survivors. When I got on the plane, I didn't have any reason to care about the person sitting next to me, except insofar as hoping he doesn't have stinky feet. Now my life depends on him.

In the context of a city, where I can shop for Kenya AA coffee at half a dozen places within a few blocks of my apartment, I don't have a single reason to care one iota about anyone (except maybe my barrista). In New York City, there are over five million people. That guy you just bumped into in Times Square? You'll never cross paths again. That old lady looking for a seat on the subway? You could give her yours, but why? You will never see her again.

You might as well keep the seat for yourself.

You might as well spit on her shoe.

You might as well knock her over.

It's amazing we're all as civil as we are.¹

People, I reason, aren't made for cities. We're hard-wired to live in villages, caves, islands—communities small enough that actions have implication. If we have to share a cave, you and I, well, then it's probably worth the effort it takes to work out our differences. I'm probably not going to sleep with your wife, because sometime next week or next year, I'll need you to save me from a polar bear.

Lost reminds us that our actions have implications, and that it's worth it to work out our differences. ²

1. I'm not advocating that you knock the old lady over. In fact, if you do, I imagine you'll find yourself getting knocked over yourself, when the rest of the subway car rises to her defense. Boston is a notoriously unfriendly city; but people are also often surprised to discover how friendly New Yorkers are. They're surprised because they misunderstand what New York is. It's not an enormous metropolis of five million people; it's a vast collection of small towns that butt right up against one another. (I might not see that guy who bumped into my in Times Square, but I'll certainly see the guy who runs the bodega across the street.)

2. I just made it to the episode where they torture one of the people in their "village" with bamboo under the fingernails, so I might wind up back-pedaling on the "moral beacon for our times" thing.

Fish in the Sea 

"When from our better selves we have too long Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, How gracious, how benign, is Solitude."
- William Wordsworth, "The Prelude"

"You have 64 new messages," says the mechanical voice of Hope Davis' answering machine in the 1998 Brad Anderson movie Next Stop Wonderland. Her mother, dismayed at her daughter's stagnant love life, has done her the favor of placing a personal ad on her behalf. "I'm not lonely," she argues, "when I sit at a bar by myself. I'm not even lonely when I'm home alone. I get lonely in a crowded room, or a subway that's packed with people."

If her final destination is Wonderland, as the title would have us believe, then first, she's got to go through the aquarium...

* * *

"There are plenty of fish in the sea" (or at least that's what Grandma always said), and this weekend at the New England Aquarium I saw a good many, including a rare, entrancing and almost unnaturally complex one.

This is a fish you might be afraid to touch.

* * *

Pisces (The Fish): You're feeling a new surge of personal power. It's like suddenly others become aware of your real potential. Perhaps they've underestimated how clever and determined you can be. Your words and actions will be extra powerful, so it's best to "start things slowly" and gradually increase the tempo and intensity. New people enter your life who can play significant roles in your future development. Get ready for some bizarre things to happen.

---

Ghost in the Machine, pt. 2 

I can't remember.

What was I watching when your careworn face showed up on screen?—reminding me, first of all, that you existed (I just hadn't thought about you in a while...), and then, only a moment later, reminding me that you didn't. You didn't exist anymore.

I really can't remember what I was watching.

Fact is, I've seen you a dozen times on TV, and it's never made an impression on me. Your craggy voice is what strikes people, and your tiny body, and sometimes they get a lucky hint of your intensity: more intensity per pound than anyone I've met.

But to people who know you, these things are already familiar, and the feeling from seeing you onscreen isn't much different than seeing you anywhere else. "I ran into Pamela the other night," I'll find myself saying to some mutual friend. "Where?", they might ask. And then I realize: Freaks and Geeks. A TV show.

* * *

That's where it was—Freaks and Geeks. I remember now. You growled something funny in that voice we used to call "emphysemic" (till we discovered this was actually true). And then you were gone.

And then I realized, you were gone.

I also have trouble remembering where I was when I learned this fact. Far away, that much is certain: I left you as suddenly and certainly as I left all of you, that whole crew. I learned it by telephone, from the woman who introduced us. I can't remember if we talked, or if it was a voicemail. I recall being shocked, though I don't know if that's a fair word: you sometimes seemed so frail that I wondered if you were dying from the moment I met you.

[They say we're all dying from the moment we're born, but you somehow turned this on its head: living right up until the moment of death.]

* * *

"How old are you, Pamela?", we'd ask now and then. We had an idea that you'd been around forever, that you were maybe a beauty from the silent film era; the math didn't work, but still it made sense, because you behaved as though you'd been there since the Beginning. The beginning of something, anyway.

You'd cackle at the question, that signature laugh: "Even the coroner won't know how old I am," you'd say, "on the day I die."

You were wrong about that. That's the day I learned—on the day that it no longer mattered.

Maybe it never mattered.

[I think I wanted an answer because I needed to know how fragile you were, how brittle. I wanted to know how hard to squeeze when I hugged you. Your refusal to answer was your way of saying you weren't brittle at all. Maybe it's also the reason you never told us you were dying. Maybe you thought that if you told us, we wouldn't hug so tightly anymore.]

* * *

I was in the northern part of California, you know, when they buried you in the southern part. Closer than I'd been, but still not close enough. I wanted to be there. I doubt you'd have cared; you never thought much of ceremony. I expected, as always, you'd stand and watch from the wings, halfway heckling, but also mouthing our lines as we spoke them: your silent support.

I wanted to be there and I wanted to bury you with a bottle of cheap red wine, and my love.

I'm glad to see you show up on my television screen now and then, answering a door, peering into a crystal ball, pulling on a cigarette—typecast somewhere between mystic and sight-gag. You'll say something in your husky voice, you'll laugh your signature laugh, and you'll be gone. And later, I'll think, "I ran into Pamela the other night.

"It was good seeing her."

Syncopation 

Damn Sofia Coppola.

I assumed there would be nothing in the world—even Sofia Coppola—that would make me want to see a high-budget Hollywood costume pageant about Marie Antoinette. When I heard that the new film was booed at Cannes, I (like so many other people who hadn't seen it) was sure she'd stumbled—that after two exquisite movies, she'd gotten caught up in her own hubris. Or whatever. What else would explain all of those horses and rapiers and wigs? Wigs! What was she thinking?

Oh, Sofia.

Poor Sofia.

Young geniuses rarely fare well. (Even the ones who aren't fighting against the unforgiving contempt of die-hard Godfather fans.)

All that changed for me yesterday when I saw the trailer, and Marie Antoinette became, for me, the most anticipated film of the year:

People hate this trailer. The juxtaposition of corsets with 80s synth pop is counter-intuitive, offensive, impossible, unprecedented.

In other words, it's everything art should be.

In one short spot with no words (and what films that aren't from China have trailers with no words?), Coppola establishes pre-revolutionary France as a Reagan-esque binge of decadence and fun. Fun! In corsets! Who'd have thought?

How many days till this is released?

* * *

That Sofia Coppola has had any success at all as a filmmaker has always amazed me, not because I think her films aren't good, but for the opposite reason: I love them so much that I assume they are made for me personally, or at least a very narrow demographic who happens to share her record collection (and yes, I mean records: I owned less than a dozen, but she uses all of them): My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain, and relatively obscure New Order—the difference being that Sofia remembers the songs the rest of us have forgotten, and gets the chance to remind us how much we love them.

Have you ever loved Roxy Music more than when, in Lost in Translation, Bill Murray sings his karaoke "More Than This" to Scarlet Johansen?

Have you ever loved life more than in that moment?

* * *

I've been high on this trailer for two days; it's the best thing that happened to me all weekend: I can't get that guitar and those galloping horses out of my mind. From the album Power, Corruption, and Lies. Marie Antoinette. It makes perfect sense. Sofia Coppola strikes again, reminding us that the clamor of life throws things together in unexpected ways—but that's okay: she's here to help us through it. With the right conductor, the clamor isn't noise; it's syncopation.

TV 2.0 

I've never had a casual relationship with television (or, for that matter, much of anything else). I haven't had a TV for the whole of my adult life; I've aligned myself instead with the snobs who read The New Yorker and donate to NPR, and it's made me mostly happy.

But somehow, week after week, there I am, tuned into Veronica Mars, to Battlestar Galactica, to Smallville. Though I've long forbade television from my home, the miracles of DVD and the Internet have allowed these nefarious influences to creep in through every available port: there are movies in my mailbox and in my Xbox, on my iBook and on my iPod.

I spend at least four hours a week watching TV, and I don't even have a TV.

* * *

"Television is dead, long live television. A new study from IBM Corp. confirms many fears that today's television industry is being killed by technology, but it also outlines many ways those same developments are creating new opportunities for creativity and revenue. "The End of Television as We Know It: A Future Industry Perspective" gazes out to 2012. It basically sees a landscape fragmented by consumers now being drawn to specialized content on the multiplicity of channels currently available and predicts that these viewers will move "beyond niche to individualized viewing" as they embrace on-demand, self-scheduling, portability and other emerging options. "Look to see the networks' oligopoly diminish, along with a significant decline in the share of revenue generated from broadcast advertising," said the report's author, Saul Berman, global partner at IBM Business Consulting Services, Media & Entertainment. (Chris Marlowe, Hollywood Reporter)"

* * *

A friend accuses me: "You'll never understand TV because you don't watch it in its natural element." I'm not sure what he's getting at. Does he mean commercials? Because I watch commercials. Does he mean addiction, how some people will build their whole week around the schedule in the TV Guide? Because I am on a schedule.

My friend, I conclude, is an analog snob.

What my friend doesn't know ... My personal TV war is escalating: I've contracted with Comcast for the first time in my life. (It was cheaper to get both basic cable AND high-speed Internet than just the one.) I'm losing more and more time to these infernal shows. And you'll never guess what came in the mail today...

Save Me 

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Guess Things Happen That Way 

James Mangold's Walk the Line

The Christian right must be thrilled to find a sudden, unexpected friend in that modern-day Gomorrah, liberal Hollywood. The Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line is a straight-up, old-fashioned morality play about a hell-raising, pill-popping sinner (Cash, channeled through the soulful doleful boyishness of Joaquin Phoenix) and the straight-laced woman who leads him back to church, and to redemption. "God," she tells him, "is giving you a second chance."

It's not that I have anything against redemption. But ... bor-ing!

"I guess things happen that way"...

The only thing that separates Walk the Line from any Lifetime "Movie of the Week" is the music, and the attention-grabbing performance by Phoenix, which seems to be eclipsing the fact that this film is a grossly over-simple depiction of a life story that should have been interesting.

Not enough can be said to debunk the myth of "liberal Hollywood." I've become interested lately in Christian movie reviews (because it's so rare that movie reviewers are this up front about their biases); such reviews of Walk the Line are quick to point out that the film is "unapologetic" in its depiction of drinking, drug use, adultery, and "the Lord’s name being taken in vain"—more examples of Hollywood's godless leftist debauchery. But this grossly misunderstands the movie industry's agenda: sell tickets, and make money. What could be more conservative than that?

Walk the Line is an excellent example of Hollywood's true agenda. It reduces Cash's rich autobiography into a basic morality tale, specifically because it will play in Peoria. It gets to pretend to wrangle with moral issues (how titillating!), while overlooking any complicated ones—and play a lot of good music along the way. Nothing wrong with that, as long as no one takes it too seriously...

Freaks and Geeks 

I slipped away early. I needed to see for myself if what I'd heard was true. I wound through labyrinthine alleyways, slipped quietly into a darkened corner of a cavernous room, and peered through the darkness to see it with my own eyes. And it is true, every terrible bit of it! Lord Voldemort is back.

And boy is he ugly!

How in the world is that guy ever gonna get a date to the Yule Ball?!?

Let me start over:

Like so many dweebs, I lined up on Friday to watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I went at what I guessed might be the worst possible time—not quite the end of the work day, but just after school had let out. The theatre held 300; I thought it would be me and 299 grade-schoolers high on Junior Mints.

The theatre was packed, but with people my age, enjoying an afternoon of legitimized regression. I swear there might not have been a kid in the whole place. In retrospect, I realize the parents were still at work and couldn't bring the young ones; in retrospect, maybe it's too dangerously uncool for a teen or even a pre-teen to watch a kid's movie; in retrospect, maybe people really are taking heed of the PG-13 rating, or the countless reviews that caution just how scary this movie actually is.

Which brings me back to that Yule Ball.

The absolute, hide-your-face, cringe-in-your-seats scariest moments of this movie aren't when Harry is chased by the ornery fire-breathing dragon or threatened by the mean-spirited mermen (though the mermen are pretty scary, too...), not even when the hairless (noseless) Dark Lord seeps out of his bubbling cauldron—Harry's actual nightmare, actually come to life. These moments are scary in exactly the way we expect: they're why we've plunked down $10 and skipped out of work in the first place. They're pure indulgent escapist fantasy—and in that, they're not really that scary, after all.

What's scary is when Harry and his friends have to find dates to the upcoming ball. (My own palms broke into a sympathetic sweat while Harry tried to pluck up the courage to ask his sweetheart.) What's scary is how badly these kids treat each other, out of their own awkwardness: by the end of the dance, they've reduced each other to tears—so much wasted hope and pretty dresses.

Dragons, wizards, these things can be defeated. Adolescence can only be survived.

Difficult times lie ahead, Harry.

My Girlfriend 

My girlfriend Sarah Silverman has a movie that just came out this weekend, and though I can't watch it ("The movie is NOT playing in your area"), I can certainly read about it, in Rolling Stone, in Maxim, in the New Yorker, on Salon, on Slate, on Slate, on Slate.

The girl is fun-ny. I vote her "Most Likely to Make Milk Squirt Out My Nose," because she's perfected the art of the comedic sucker-punch. She'll be driving along familiar territory (sex, race, poo) and then veer hard left, just where it says "Do Not Enter."

She didn't just say that?!?

Yes she did.

"I'm just sensitive. My skin is paper thin. People don't realize it, because I'm sassy and I'm brassy, but I just—I see these CARE commercials with these little kids with the giant bellies and the flies, and these are one- and two-year-old babies, nine months pregnant, and it breaks my heart in two.

"It breaks my heart in half. And I don’t give money, because ... I don’t want them to spend it on drugs ... but I give. You know I give. I, this past summer, sent fifteen really fun cowl-neck sweaters to this village in Africa, in really fun colors..."

Sigmund Freud believed that jokes, like dreams, offer a glimpse into our unconscious beliefs and desires—which would explain the guilty laughter that bubbles out after her jokes: the entire act is just one Freudian slip after another, and I'm just so relieved she said that nasty thing, instead of me.

Freud also believed, as does Silverman, that there's something really potent about making doody.

If you also live in the boonies and are stuck watching the Jesus is Magic trailer over and over, you might catch Sarah in The Aristocrats, or, if you're really desperate, in Rent.

Movie of My Life (pt. 3) 

First of all, Cf. the original entry, if you care to gander.

Second, I always feel bad repurposing an email. But here I go:

"I'm in a mood and I'm wondering if Freddie Prinze Jr. can play me in the movie of my life. I'm thinking about She's All That, where he's so popular, which means of course we're all jealous of him because we want to be popular. But we also assume if he's popular, he must be shallow. Then, there's a scene where he does a painting that's interesting and sincere, and we're like, "Wow, there's a real person in there." And, from them on, the movie is filled with this subtext about how he's a sensitive person, trapped in a popular person's body. Oh, so sad for him, etc.

"The woman with the sublet in Davis Square, the one that fell through a while back, has been a bona fide buddy since I've been here (i.e., yesterday, without any bidding, she tracked down a second-hand Aerobed for me on Craig's List). But she teases me because everywhere I go, people seem to want to talk to me. I'm the guy who gets asked for directions. She's right: I am that guy. And it's good, I guess, if one moves to a new city, to be that guy, the guy people want to talk to, instead of the other way around. But it doesn't really account for the fact that most of the time, I don't especially want to talk to these people, that it takes some effort to put on the happy face, and that really, I take a good amount of pleasure from sulking alone...

"So it's that kind of mood..."

Stranger Than Fiction 

MP3 audio track

or, The Movie of My Life, part 2

"I'm going to let you in on a little secret: every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it; don't wait for it; just let it happen. It could be a new shirt in a men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black, coffee."

- Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

"Damn good coffee!" exclaimed the passenger sitting next to me on JetBlue flight #176 from Seattle to New York. "Damn good coffee." He actually said this. I had to bite my tongue to keep from chiming in, "And hot."

This passenger had rung the flight attendant with what seemed to be a very specific, elaborate, whispered coffee order. The cup she brought back looked normal enough. She stood around, as if waiting for his approval, and he sipped it while she watched. That's when the phrase left his lips: "Damn good coffee!" And the phrase nearly left mine: "You've got to be kidding me"—not because I thought the coffee was bad, you understand, but because the passenger sitting next to me was Kyle MacLachlan, who, in the 1990s, as Twin Peaks' Special Agent Dale Cooper, enjoyed nothing more than a good cup of coffee, and maybe a slice of pie.

"And you," the flight attendant asked me. "Anything to drink?"

"I'll have what he's having."

* * *

PASSENGER ON MY LEFT: (nervous) Excuse me, aren't you Kyle MacLachlan?
PASSENGER ON MY RIGHT: (friendly, collected) Yes I am.

Awkward pause. No further conversation.

End of scene.

* * *

Movie stars in public. What a surreal phenomenon. Years of living in Los Angeles and working in (or at least near) the entertainment industry have numbed me to it a little bit; I've gradually chalked up the oddness to this:

Movies and television are alternate (better?) realities from our own. To see someone from that dimension in our world ruptures some kind of fabric; it is no less disconcerting than seeing a person from the future or from a faraway planet. "You are fascinating! You don't belong here!" In its best instances, the celebrity is like an errant cartoon character in our otherwise 3-D world, à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In its worst instances, it's as if the celebrity crawled, obnoxious and horrifying, straight out of the television set itself, like Samara from The Ring.

Kyle MacLachlan might have been coming from a mundane visit with his family, or a banal school reunion—but he brought a piece of Dale Cooper with him on to our airplane. Shouldn't he have to pay for two seats, like the woman with the cello, or the man with the pet cat?

* * *

I fiddle furiously with the brightness control on my little 4" JetBlue television, trying to bring it to life. No matter how many times I press the button, the screen will not come on. Typical: 230 seats and I get the one with the broken TV. Just to be sure, I try changing channels a few times and finally punch it in frustration.

Kyle MacLachlan leans over: "Actually, that one's mine. Yours is on your left."

Thanks.

* * *

Last month, while pretending to cast a movie of my own life, I wondered about the "rules" of the game. "If I have blonde hair," I asked, "do I have to cast a blonde actor?" The reason I asked had something to do with Kyle MacLachlan, whom Rolling Stone once described as the "boy next door, if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement."

He was right: it was damn good coffee. And hot.

The Movie of My Life 

You ever play this game? Imagine your life is a movie, and you are the casting director. Who plays you?

It's a grossly narcissistic, self-indulgent game, which is of course what makes it fun to play. It's also nice because, in the movie versions of our lives, we're generally funnier and better looking than we are in real life.

Well, my life is so interesting that it won't be reduced to a single film. Though New Line approached me about a trilogy à la Lord of the Rings, I declined, opting instead for three distinct genre pix, which will give me a chance to offer up a different aspect of my personality to three of Hollywood's finest:

Teen Angst Drama
As you'll guess from the heading, this film will focus on my troubled teen years, and will star Kieran Culkin (Igby Goes Down) in the title role: "[Culkin] shows poise, a fatalistic self-deprecating personality, and great comic delivery of the sophisticated lines.... When life beats down hard upon him, sometimes literally, he shows an inner resilience that allows him to somehow continue. At the same time, his acceptance of the strange hand life has dealt him has a real note of sadness to it, the perfect ying-yang of the comic mask." Does that sound like anyone else you know? My thoughts exactly! Culkin's performance came to an abrupt end in The Secret Lives of Altar Boys, and he had a habit of getting the shit kicked out of him in Igby; I hope in my life story he'll fare a little better...

Sweeping Love Epic
This broad, beautifully-shot epic will be at least three hours long, will feature a tragic love story, and will make you cry. The obvious casting choice here is Ralph Fiennes, who has proven himself in this role time and time again (The English Patient, The End of the Affair, Oscar and Lucinda). Articulate and iconoclastic, he's also eccentric and tends to come unhinged. Notice too that he's wearing my signature blue shirt. I'll probably shoot this film in an exotic locale like Africa or South America (though I've never been to either), and he will fall in ill-fated love with Asia Argento, Helena Bonham Carter, or Juliette Binoche. The film will win an Oscar for Best Cinematography and will doubtless be a contender for Best Picture.

Buddy Movie
This one is problematic since I don't actually have a buddy. But I really do want to offer up my life story to Owen Wilson, for what could be his first-ever dramatic role—and I don't know if he can do anything except buddy movies. I admire him most in his first movie, Bottle Rocket, and I'd like to find a use for the jumpsuit he wore in that movie. I'd also like to use that Zoolander loft. But who should my buddy be? Hmm. Maybe it's best to work backwards, and start with Owen's own buddies: Luke Wilson could be my loyal, mild-mannered friend Pete, and Ben Stiller could play my Pakistani brother-in-law. Bill Murray will be double-cast as my expatriot-mentor-poet-friend Stewart, and also my Dad (how Freudian!). I'll bring in Drew Barrymore to play my sister, and there will be a great car chase through the streets of Los Angeles in my old Volkswagen Cabriolet. I'm not really clear yet on the story, but even now, I'm sure you can see its potential. Right?

Runners-up:
Campbell Scott; Mathew Modine; all of the Culkin brothers in a series.

---

The Legacies of Darth Vader 

1. Forensics

"[The patient's] spinal injury also leaves him unable to breathe unaided. It severs the connection between the lungs and the medula oblongata. A person requires a respirator if the spinal cord is severed at any of the first three cervical vertebrae. At the fourth vertebra (C-4), a respirator would be beneficial."

- from a website dedicated to medical analysis of the injuries of Darth Vader, based on x-ray evidence and professional medical opinion

2. Histrionics


- a postcard submitted to the confessional blog PostSecret

3. Plastics

"The Darth Vader helmet is not just ludicrously well made, but is the first of its kind that has an integrated voice changer and sound effects box. Become the most evil man alive! Pre-order yours now."

4. Polemics

"What was deemed suitable fare for children or teenage audiences in 1977 has
become the dominant entertainment genre for the American adult in 2005. Slowly, inexorably a kind of backward-hurtling, intellectually arrested development has devolved and coarsened populist tastes to the most undemanding, least sophisticated level, content with funny costumes and spectacular explosions. Why read Dickens or listen to Mozart when you can smirk with Adam Sandler or tune in to The Bachelor? Even the dumbest American can watch Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie and feel superior."

- from Lawrence A. Johnson's op-ed on Star Wars, in South Florida's Sun-Sentinal

---

Death of the Author 

When Donnie Darko was released during the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, first-time director Richard Kelly took home the Grand Jury Prize (and the admiration of many of his peers) for his perfect balancing of suburban angst, science fiction, and schizophrenia. The film was simultaneously familiar and strange, and the uniqueness of its director's vision was undeniable: Hollywood had found a new auteur.

So, fans of the film may have been confused when, in 2004, Kelly released Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut. Wasn't the first film the "director's cut"? It was almost as though a "tangent universe" had opened up.

The first "directors' cut" I remember noticing was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: he'd reinserted some cut footage, including a dream sequence that actually changed the story a bit. I remember the revision of Luc Besson's The Professional, in which the pre-teen Matilde is so sexy she's uncomfortable to watch. These were scenes the directors wanted in their original movies, only to have the studios edit them out, to shorten the running time or appease the censors. These "director's cuts" make sense.

But as these things become more and more common, their significance becomes more and more confusing: Will the real movie please stand up?

The other day I got a desperate call from my sister: "I was watching Return of the Jedi and they changed it. They rewrote the music and now it's out of sync. This is awful."

George Lucas may not be everyone's ideal of "auteur", but he finances his own movies and he answers to no one—so if that first version of his movie wasn't the "director's cut," there's no one to blame but George. George, it turns out, wanted more special effects: he wanted more dinosaurs and prettier explosions. George gets what he wants—which is why it is impossible to get the original cinema version of Star Wars on DVD.

The text is moving. "Director's cuts" and "extended versions" and "unrated editions" add up to mean that there is no longer a definitive version of the film, only various edits and incarnations, none of which can be called the "real" version. Each installment of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy existed in one form in the cinema, but when released to DVD, each of the three films had both the cinema version and an "extended" version. The "extended" versions added scenes and gave new information about characters and their motivations. By mixing and matching different versions, various audience members could watch any of eight different narratives of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, each one offering up a slightly different "read." This doesn't even take into account "deleted" scenes excluded from any of these "final" edits.

Roland Barthes wrote that "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." Now, ironically, thanks to director's cuts, the death of the director is at hand. In lieu of any definitive edition of a film, provided with varieties of deleted scenes and DVD extras, we assemble the movie in our mind, into the edition we most prefer. In fact, with the right software and enough free time, we can literally make our own edit—we can cut out any scene we find dull or gory or self-indulgent, mix in music we like in place of the original soundtrack. We can splice our favorite films into a definitive "audience cut," a tangent universe to the many various versions with which we've already been provided.

The director is dead. Long live the director.

Once You've Been in Serenity... 

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, made clear that his views on God may be slightly unorthodox in that show's first episode, when Giles, the wisest character of the series, refers to the Bible as "popular mythology." But Whedon has more reason than most to believe in life after death. Buffy, the TV series, rose brilliantly from the ashes of a failed movie of the same name, and Whedon's latest TV project, Firefly, though cancelled after sixteen episodes, will be reincarnated this summer as a feature film titled Serenity.

Ever notice how every reference to Whedon that you're likely to find will also include the word "wunderkind" or "genius"? I'm unabashed in thinking that Buffy was the best television show ever, but I wasn't impressed by the first few episodes of Firefly when they aired on Fox over a year ago. I am, however, a believer in Whedon-as-Boy-Wonder, so when the show became available on DVD, I went back to it, looking for traces of "Joss-ness."

I've since watched all sixteen episodes, some twice, one ("Out of Gas") three times. I watched the Featurettes and Deleted Scenes, listened to the Commentary, and would even have played the Music Video, if there had been one. I bought the DVD box set for someone as a gift, and eagerly look forward to the show's second season, though there will never be one.

How did this happen? How did a show that, at first look, failed to make any impression at all, suddenly turn around and earn so much of my brain-share? (I've even added the theme song to my iPod....) One explanation that shouldn't be discounted out of hand is that I am an obsessive-compulsive freak with indiscriminate taste. Another is that Joss Whedon is a wunderkind genius.

Firefly, poor little show, never stood a chance. A genre-bending sci-fi/Western, the series follows the ragtag crew of a spaceship called Serenity as they drift between odd jobs and moral ambiguities at the outskirts of the galaxy—and the network, it seems, just never got it. In what would appear to be the stupidest decision ever made by TV executives (and that's saying a lot), Fox aired the episodes out of order, kicking off with the third episode, and finally, four months later, closing out the series with the pilot (the episode meant to be aired first, the one that explains who the characters are).

[Fans who persevered to puzzle their way through the network-butchered narrative were given the added brainteaser of trying to figure out when the show would air: Fox switched its timeslot almost every week.]

Genre-mashing is clearly one of Whedon's gifts, but ultimately, it was another signature "Joss-ness" that won me over to the show—his ability to find family in the strangest of places. In Buffy, it was a set of teen misfits holding each other up through the hell that is high school; that they were fighting their way through creatures from a literal hell was almost incidental. The crew of Serenity is peopled with what first seem to be stock characters—a pirate captain, an angelic ingéIt's when the series riffs on this theme that it is strongest. "Out of Gas" not only borrows from the best of Buffy (its use of silence hearkens back to "Hush", and its jarring pacing and flashbacks are reminiscent of "The Body"), but like those Buffy episodes, it wouldn't do to begin with "Out of Gas" as an introduction to the series: it is powerful specifically because of how much we've grown attached to the characters. (Tellingly, though this episode was originally intended to be shown halfway through the season, Fox chose to air "Out of Gas" fifth. Desperate for action in the chase-'em-down, shoot-'em-up sense, the network forgot why people tune into a television show in the first place—because they like spending time with the characters.)

Firefly, like other brilliant-but-cancelled shows, has left behind unexplored plot points and unanswered questions—and, as in any premature death, it's the things left unsaid that haunt me most. In that unaired pilot, we're told that these characters fought for independence in a civil war against "The Alliance," and suffered their bitter loss in a battle called Serenity. When asked about the masochistic urge to give their ship the same name, one character answers, "Once you've been in Serenity, you never leave."

In Joss Whedon's own struggle for independence, it's easy to imagine he must feel the same way.

Don't leave Serenity. See the movie.

---

Reach for the Stars 

Forget about Chuck Yeager; he's so 1983. The movie-going public is currently zeroed in on a different breed of test pilot, thanks to Martin Scorsese's biopic The Aviator, about billionaire eccentric Howard Hughes. The story follows Hughes from the late 1920's (when he was making movies about airplanes) to the 1940's (when he was making movies and airplanes).

Perhaps because he was drawn to brilliance, or maybe out of plain vanity, Hughes surrounded himself with Hollywood's brightest stars (Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and others). With The Aviator, Scorsese does the same thing, and maybe for the same reasons. The film is a reminder of that old adage, "There are no small roles, only small actors"—except in this case, there are no small actors, either. Every time the camera cuts to a new scene, another Hollywood A-lister appears. And no role is too small: Willem Dafoe sports his toothy grin as The Random Newspaper Reporter, and Sir Ian Holm shows up now and then as The Slightly Stupified Weatherman.

The light from all of these stars is a little blinding—so much that it's sometimes hard to watch the movie. Cate Blanchett looks like she's having a blast as a stylish Katharine Hepburn; Jude Law smirks and swashbuckles through a gratuitous scene as Errol Flynn. What a hoot. The whole thing is more of costume party than an acting showcase, and at every turn, someone new shows up with a clever outfit: "There's Alan Alda as Senator Brewster. Hi, Alan! Love the glasses!"

There must come a point where a celebrity's star power will eclipse their ability to do their job, which is to convince us that they are someone else. How can I watch Jude Law pretend to be Errol Flynn if all I can see is Jude Law, the man who has monopolized magazines and marquees all fall and winter? How can I listen to what he's saying, while I'm also remembering this morning's tabloid headline that his girlfriend was partying all night without him—partying, in fact, with The Aviator himself, Leonardo DiCaprio?

And the corollary question: when did Martin Scorsese become such a star-fucker? Safe to say this nasty habit of his had already set in by the time he was casting his very own "Spruce Goose," Gangs of New York. What else could explain giving the female lead to everyone's favorite cheerleader, Cameron Diaz? Why else ask Liam Neeson to do yet another heroic, knife-toting cameo? (Hasn't the man done enough?) How did this happen? Did Sharon Stone make Marty feel lucky in Casino? While shooting The Age of Innocence, was he thinking, "Winona Forever"?

It all compares interestingly to Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, a film that spans roughly the same era as The Aviator, and also has its share of movie stars playing at being movie stars, though it somehow navigates it all so much less obtrusively. (It's probably unfair to compare Kevin Kline's portrayal of Douglas Fairbanks with Law's hammy Flynn, so instead let's just simply applaud Kline for crafting such a rich, exuberant role in so little screen time.)

The two movies are wonderful companion pieces: with Kline, and especially Robert Downey Jr. in the film's title role, Chaplin shows us that it is possible for stars to act, despite what we might know about their lives off the big screen. Meanwhile, The Aviator, with its garish, blinding star power, reminds us not to take this for granted.

This So-Called Idolatry 

My fascination with Sam Shepard has been going on for so long that I can't remember with any veracity how it started. Like the facts of Shepard's own life, the details are deeply private; the ones that do make it into the public light may or may not deserve the significance that gets attributed to them. And like a character in one of Shepard's plays, my feelings about this father-figure are complicated, and complicate my memory of him.

These things, I think, are true:

While in junior high (and probably while still under the embarrassing influence of Top Gun), I watched The Right Stuff. I liked it well enough, for something so long and so righteous, though all I really remembered later were three scenes—Chuck Yeager, staring intently at the moon; Chuck Yeager, racing after a woman on horseback; and Chuck Yeager, walking away from a plane crash after nearly piloting his plane straight out of the Earth's orbit. Chuck Yeager, of course, was Sam Shepard—though this meant nothing to me at the time.

My first year of college, I saw the Steppenwolf production of Shepard's True West (also my first introduction to John Malkovich), and later that semester, I acted in my first play, a Shepard one-act, Cowboy Mouth. By the end of the year, I was a theatre major.

It's easy to remember when I saw Paris Texas, and Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (with Shepard as The Farmer); it's easy to look up when I finished my undergrad thesis ("Tragedy in B Flat: Theories of Classic Tragedy in the Work of Sam Shepard"). It's harder to quantify how or when all this grew from academic interest into something more—a fixation, a cataloging of improbable or impossible details ("He wrote his first play on Tootsie Roll wrappers!") and irrelevant facts ("He's living in Virginia!").

And it's harder still to explain why it happened. Shepard wrote about broken families, alcoholic abandoning fathers, horses and pickup trucks, which had about as much to do with my suburban upbringing as, well, nothing. He was a product of the Seventies: he'd done his most interesting work while I was in elementary school; and by the time I'd discovered him, he'd was working instead on The Pelican Brief. Still, Shepard somehow came to stand for everything that I thought an artist should be—fiercely independent, passionate and impulsive; articulate but not "literary"; visceral, shocking, sexual, strange; cool. I liked Shepard because he was part Hank Williams, part Cormac McCarthy, and part Mick Jagger. But most of all, I liked Shepard because he was himself, and the rest of the world could go fuck themselves.

I've never met him. I remember being completely foolishly awestruck when I met the original director of Cowboy Mouth, years later. ("You knew Sam Shepard!", I gasped, and this guy, Bob, replied, poker-faced, "Mmmm."). I was entirely stupidly speechless when I met O-lan Jones, who had been married to Shepard. ("You knew Sam Shepard!" I said, typically. "Saw him naked," she answered.) But I very nearly sat in a room with him tonight. I didn't; it didn't work out—and maybe that's for the best, because I'm not sure I could have handled it. The way I figure it, if the man is in fact as blindingly brilliant as I imagine, I'd be reduced to babbling gibberish and probably catch flame. Mere mortals are not meant to gaze upon the divine.

Alternately, I could meet the man and discover that he's, well, just a guy, a normal mumbling human being with a short temper and blotchy skin and as much self-doubt as anyone else who makes his living doing schlocky Hollywood movies. Maybe he's wrestled all his demons to the ground already—maybe his demons were named Youth?—and now he just wants to live out his days in relative peace and quiet.

I don't know if I could stand losing my religion.

But I guess now I'll never know.

P.S. Shepard has been in town acting in the U.S. premiere of a Caryl Churchill play, A Number. Shepard was asked if he felt a "kinship" between his work as a playwright, and Churchill's, and he replied "Not really."

Really?!? A Number focuses on the failed relationships between a father and the sons he has abandoned, in five short scenes and a single act, in a style that is tight and almost musical, a theme and variation. The characters of the play even indulge in signature-Sam Shepard "arias," riffing for minutes on childhood memories of dogs, dust bunnies under the bed, calling for daddy. A critic once described Shepard's plays as exploring the "metaphysics of the kitchen sink," and if that's true, then A Number isn't just a kin; it's a clone.

The play is so terse and minimalist, it feels like a stylistic step back for Churchill: it's as smart as her other plays, but not nearly as lavish, not as soft or rounded or (I hate to say it) feminine—as if, stylistically, she's trying to simplify, reaquaint herself with theatre's experimental basics, get raw—in other words, be more like Sam Shepard.

I'm Not Funny 

Principal: Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

- from Billy Madison

I watched Billy Madison this week and I didn't like it. If this sounds like a confession, it's because it is.

Billy Madison is the 1995 Adam Sandler vehicle in which he goes back to grades 1-12 as a prereq for inheriting his family fortune. Along the way, he bonds with some ten-year olds, falls for his third-grade teacher, and has a few run-ins with fat people.

A lot of people think this movie is funny. ("Billy Madison is hilarious!", "Adam Sandler had a very funny role!", "This movie was hilarious!", "Adam Sandler and Bridgette Wilson did a funny and terrific job", "This movie is one of the best comedys", "The movie is pretty funny, and very enjoyable.") I'm not one of those people. Of course the movie is childish, but I also thought it was half-assed, poorly-constructed, an overgrown sketch rather than a scripted feature film.

But now I'm wondering if the real reason I didn't like the movie is that I'm not funny. It seems pretty universally accepted that Adam Sandler is funny, which means, by deduction, I'm not funny.

I like Adam Sandler. I do. I enjoyed him in Punch Drunk Love, had a good time with him in 50 First Dates and look forward to watching Spanglish (uh, on DVD, anyway…). But Punch Drunk Love is hardly a comedy, and the others, romances, aren't really in the Billy Madison genre either.

I think about other movies I've watched recently; I think about my recent praise for Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (not a comedy), how I fairly admired him in Man on the Moon (not a comedy), and I find him generally unwatchable (Bruce Almighty, Ace Ventura—comedies). Maybe it's not Jim Carrey; maybe it's that I'm not funny.

The last joke book I read was by Sigmund Freud. That was a hoot. I also yucked my way through Bergson's On Laughter. Ha ha. And if this paragraph is supposed to be funny, well, at least I'm proving my point.

I do like things that are clever. I like sarcastic. I feel kinship with Barthes when he says, "I claim to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." But Barthes isn't funny.

I like wry. Wry is good. But wry isn't funny. Wry is whiskey, wry is bread.

Even that wasn't funny. Damnit. And I'm here all night.

Spotless 

The ha-ha, very funny joke in these parts lately is that, "It's okay, it's not like anyone ever died from pneumonia." Fact is I'm too bored to be dying. Watching the washing machine go round and round and round. Watching the soup simmer. Watching the bubbles on the bottle of ginger ale. Watching too many DVDs even to keep track. Watching so many DVDs I make a list so I don't lose track. Probably thirty movies in the last ten days.

Figuring an average of ninety minutes each, that's 45 hours . A whole heckload of time. Not only are the movies starting to blend together, but the boundaries between the movies and my own brain are getting a little sloppy. I've been witness and voyeur to so many intense, dramatic, revelatory conversations, and now I'm starting to think some of them are mine. I quote passages without knowing I'm doing it: "What are you, twelve?" "Good things come to obsessive-compulsives who fixate." "I'm here for the gangbang."

But I quickly start to "fixate" on my own ability to forget, not just the movies I've seen, but ... everything. It's horrifying. Books I've read, meals I've eaten, family vacations, conversations with people I really care about, the name of that cute girl I went out with for a few weeks back in ... what year was that, anyway?

Is this why people keep journals and photo albums—not to keep them from forgetting, but because they've already given over to the inevitability of forgetting?

Is this why people write blogs?

---

"The struggle of mankind against the powerful is the struggle of the mind against forgetting."

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

---

I "fixate" on a few of the films I've seen recently. They're an unlikely set: Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the romantic comedy 50 First Dates, the metaphysical classic Groundhog Day, and the original Resident Evil. They're all about forgetting. In each film, people have had their memories erased, sometimes by accident and sometimes by intent, in favor of a clean slate.

But the action of each movie is a struggle against the forgetting: Jim Carrey hops from one memory to another, trying to salvage each one before it gets erased; Adam Sandler woos Drew Barrymore each day, convinced he's making some impression on the forgetful Drew Barrymore; Bill Murray lives the same day over and over and over, getting to know the goings-on of an entire town, only to have all of his actions reset at 6am each morning; and Milla Jovovich wakes up in the middle of a zombie-filled "apocalypse" she may have helped cause, but can't even remember her own name.

Eternal Sunshine is a heart-wrenching reminder that memories are beautiful and cruel, and that forgetting is bland, and crueler. (I agree with David Edelstein, "a little dismayed that not everyone shares my conviction that [Eternal Sunshine] is an inexhaustible masterpiece and, by a wide margin, the best film in many years.") And it is a champion among these recent films that choose cruel beauty over bland forgetfulness.

Why so many recent films about memory? Is our cultural zeitgeist one of growing forgetfulness? And if that's the case, what is the lesson we're to learn from these movies? There's an obvious moral to the story, one which tells us that of course it's better to remember, even the most painful details, because they are ours. But what makes these movies more remarkable and more ominous is the suggestion that maybe what we really want is to forget. Maybe what we really want is a clean slate. Maybe what we really want is spotlessness.

The Country of Lost Children 

If you watch the trailer to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, you'll see a sweeping love story set during wartime and shot from some interesting angles. You'll see Audrey Tautou's cute bob haircut and adorable doey eyes.

So it's a bit jarring when the film begins in a muddy trench with a parade of five soldiers about to be executed for self-mutilation. Before the star actress is even introduced, men have been shot in the head, shot in the hand, drowned in mud, bathed in the exploded guts of their comrades, and driven insane. It gets worse — a syringe full of syphilis-infected blood, a hydrogen-filled zeppelin exploding in a hospital ward, a guillotined body perfunctorily dumped into a too-short coffin. And, in the midst of so much brutality, there is a sweeping love story set during wartime and shot from some very interesting angles.

If I could be any filmmaker in the world, I would be Jean-Pierre Jeunet. His career has been as eclectic as it has been erratic: it's hard to say with any sincerity that I wish I'd made Alien Resurrection; and though I describe The City of Lost Children as one of my favorite movies, I then go on to explain that I've never been able to stay awake through the whole thing. My envy of him is misplaced: part of Jeunet's charm is that no one else could have made City of Lost Children; his films are filtered through a lens that is unique to him.

But the larger part of his charm comes from his unabashed love of the sublime. Amélie was an homage to the minute loveliness of life, a lavishing of attention on whimsical details. A Very Long Engagement does the same, though it trades Amélie's bright colors and Parisian accordions for the gray skies and gory mud of the trenches of World War I. But, oh, votre pays a une saleté vraiment charmante!

One wonders why Jeunet would make a lavish war film, bankrolled largely by the United States, at a time when the French and the U.S. are very much at odds about the merit of a certain current war. The project was funded by a "coalition of the willing" — Warner Independent Pictures in the United States, and Warner French and a newly-formed 2003 Production in France. But it was criticized in that nation for not being "French enough", instead seen as another example of America's bullying cultural imperialism. It's a shame, because Jeunet makes France look beautiful at every opportunity. He does not, however, feel the same aesthetic obligation to war. Though the story has its share of bravery and heroism, they come from the places you might least expect — one condemned man carries another on his back to safety; a compassionate German woman helps the story's heroine track down the very soldiers who killed her brother. Conversely, the film is less than inspiring about the glory of war and its "band of brothers": its worst atrocities are performed by the French, upon the French. (The five men condemned to death for treasonous self-mutilation are simply thrown into the "no man's land" between the trenches, and left to fend for themselves against the shelling, strafing and land mines; one of the five gets gunned down by a French sniper who seems annoyed that the man is still alive.)

Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan tries to depict war with so much brutal detail that we can call it "honest," but in the end, it could still be used as an Army recruitment reel: its heroes are heroic, and though war is hell, the Americans give 'em hell, too. The scene in Jeunet's film that most evokes Spielberg has the French storming across the no-man's land toward the German trench, brandishing bayonets against the German machine guns, and getting slaughtered almost to the man. The charge lacks the bald derring-do of Private Ryan: it isn't made for the sake of a rescue, or some larger strategic gain; it doesn't have much purpose at all, except that the commander reasons it's better to die while attacking than while cowering in a hole. Jeunet drives this pointlessness home when he returns to this same hard-fought tract of land a few years later: it is an innocuous field of wildflowers. There's nothing there, no single sign of what should have been indelible carnage. All those lives were spent almost without a trace.

The City of Lost Children is a fantasia about a scientist who is unable to dream and, to make up for the deficiency, kidnaps children to steals theirs. So, too, is A Very Long Engagement. It dresses up as a war movie, but at its heart, it's as full of sweeping allegory and metaphysical wonder, and just as concerned with the stolen dreams of youth. It's easy to see in the long, slow final shot of the film that Jeunet is doing his best to assure that the children get their dreams back. The children are limping and scarred, but they have won the war.

Sad Strangers, Photographed Beautifully 

Dan: What do you want?
Alice: To be loved.
Dan: Is that all?
Alice: It's a big want.

- from Patrick Marber's Closer

Last week, I was photographed by a girl who explained, "Photography is easy. Just look, then figure out what made you want to take the picture in the first place." I didn't ask her what made her want to take my picture. But later, I thought of those (apocryphal?) tribes who believe that the camera captures a piece of the soul. I wondered, in this case, which piece I'd just given up; I wondered if it was too late to ask for the picture back.

A few days later, I was watching the Mike Nichols / Patrick Marber movie, Closer, that oh-so-grown-up homage to desire, deceit, and betrayal. The four characters are ostensibly in search of love, but pursue it with more meanness than kindness. In the end, their time together is a tattered scrapbook of snapshot-memories, and contained in each one is a fragment of someone's soul. "The people in the photos are sad and alone, but the pictures make the world seem beautiful."

A lot of responsibility, then, in the collection of these "snapshots"...

Bogus 

"So what Jefferson was saying was 'Hey! You know, we left this England place because it was bogus. So if we don't get some cool rules ourselves, pronto, we'll just be bogus too.' Yeah?"

Sean Penn's had his share of words on domestic and world politics since Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A lot of them are pretty bone-headed, and all of them could stand a going-over for grammar, which might make Spicoli's summation the clearest and truest among them. But Spicoli is a genius compared to Penn critic Steve Darnell at Pravda:

"Most liberals are still unable to accept the fact that after four years of trying to discredit President Bush using the New York Times and the rest of the liberal media, along with moronic statements by Sean Penn, Barbara Streisand and other idiotic liberal entertainers, the President still won. The liberals took the news so hard a few are actually looking for citizenship in Canada and France. I guess they cannot take four more years of inspirational leadership by President Bush, but would rather live in a socialist country that appeases terrorists."

Yikes! Socialist? Where??? Actually, Steve, I don't know about that "terrorist-appeasing," but France is actually what they call a republic, which is, you know, what we have here in the States. Up there in Canada, they have this radical system they call a parliamentary democracy: that's one where everyone's vote actually counts. Pretty crazy, eh?

I understand how you might see all that vote-counting as a kind of terrorist activity, especially since some of their electorate is liberal. How does backwater Canada manage? They don't even have an offshore prison for undesirables, like we do.

The is U.S. History, Steve. I see a globe right there.

Just Because You're Paranoid 

An excerpt from an interview I just watched on terrorism:

INTERVIEWER
Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?

MINISTER
On yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.

INTERVIEWER
But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year ...

MINISTER
Beginner's luck.

The "minister" in the interview is not Donald Rumsfeld, but rather Deputy Minister of Information Helpman, in the opening scene of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. (If you like, you can read the full text of the "interview", and the rest of the script at http://www.trond.com/brazil/brazil_script.htm.)

As if the news media's fear-mongering isn't enough, I've decided to round out my paranoia by entertaining myself with Brazil, and Gilliam's other homage to paranoid delusions-which-turn-out-to-be-real, 12 Monkeys. Both imagine a "future" (really now a past, since one is set in 1996, and the other "sometime in the 20th century"...) of broken-down machines and institutional information mismanagement — in other words, the United States, maybe ten years from now, after a decade under the Patriot Act and a $5 trillion deficit.

In Brazil, a paperwork error results in the stratosphere abduction of a man named "Buttle" (they were looking for "Tuttle"), and the protagonist, Sam Lowry, struggles through imbecilic, gun-happy bureaucracy as he tries to clear things up. If the movie were made today, perhaps it would be set in Guantanamo Bay, with a soundtrack by Cat Stevens (aka Yusef Islam). In one scene in the movie, Jill asks Sam to justify the state's many invasions of privacy: "How many terrorists have you met, Sam? Actual terrorists?"

When it came out (read: before 9/11), Brazil was considered an odd, if visually-stunning tale. Perhaps now, twenty years later, we're twenty years closer to Mr. Gilliam's vision...

America's Fantasyland 

The golden age of New Zealand cinema is at hand. Even as Peter Jackson and his Lord of the Rings colleagues ship their Oscars back home, another film franchise is setting up camp in Wellington. The Walt Disney Company, along with U.S.-based Walden Media, is in production for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first in who-knows-how-many adaptations of C.S. Lewis' classic "Books of Narnia" series. The swordsmiths at the New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Workshop are firing up their forges to work on the project; they must be the busiest armorers since the Crusades.

New Zealand has proudly claimed The Lord of the Rings as its own since its very earliest press release: "It will certainly be the largest New Zealand feature film cast and crew ever assembled." Their pride must only have swelled straight through the recent Academy Awards, when host Billy Crystal quipped, "It's now official: there is nobody left in New Zealand to thank."

But is it New Zealand in particular that we should be thanking? The Lord of the Rings stands as a textbook example of what Toby Miller, John McMurria and company call the "new international division of cultural labor," a system of multinational co-production which, the authors maintain, helps Hollywood preserve its stranglehold on the financing, production, and distribution of the culture industry. In particular, The Lord of the Rings — a vast, three-movie, six-year project — demonstrates clear examples of both treaty and equity co-production. (Treaty co-production, according to McMurria, "is a strategy by non-US film industries to combat Hollywood's long-time domination of feature-film production and circulation," usually through state sponsorship and aimed at the preservation of a culture's property. He describes equity co-production, on the other hand, as Hollywood's growing tendency to include international partners in the financing of a film, thus minimizing its own risk while maintaining control over the intellectual property.)
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