Author Archives: Lloydville

WILSON

Posted on by

Wilson is a new graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, the author of Ghost World.  Clowes is one of the great fiction artists of our time, and Wilson is his darkest work to date.

It's a sort of existentially bleak version of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze, a strip McCay drew in the years before he created the legendary Little Nemo.

In McCay's strip, Sammy finds himself in a new place and situation every week, and as events unfold around him he starts a build-up to a sneeze, which explodes eventually with awesome power, severely disrupting or destroying everything around him.  It's a strange idea for a strip, not really funny but oddly satisfying, in an anarchic way.



Wilson consists of self-contained one-page episodes all featuring a single protagonist, Wilson, a lost soul.  Wilson has insights into life or hopeful encounters with other people all of which explode by the end of the page in an outburst of self-deception or cruel narcissism.  As these emotional dead ends accumulate, Clowes constructs a portrait of genuine and utterly hopeless despair.  Kierkegaard said that “the precise quality of despair is that it is unaware of itself”, and such is Wilson's.



It's not satisfying on any level, but rather heartbreaking, infuriating, sickening.  It sucks us into the black hole of Wilson's psyche and makes us feel that there's no way out of it.  It's slightly terrifying.



A life's narrative emerges from the self-contained episodes, a story of sorts, and they are varied by being done in contrasting styles, usually in Clowes's familiar naturalistic mode, using color panels, but sometimes in black-and-white pages and sometimes in crude comic-book caricature style.  The variations only serve to emphasize the relentless coherence of Wilson's spiritual pathology.

It's a profound meditation on contemporary angst and one of the finest of all graphic novels.

A. I.

Posted on by

When I walked out of A. I. I truly didn’t know what to make of it.  It's an extremely weird movie, and I couldn’t decide if it was weird on purpose or by mistake.

My first reaction was that it had a lot of interesting ideas that weren't really thought through or dramatized — that it was just a kind of philosophical mess, and very cold.  But then I started to wonder . . . and I couldn’t stop wondering.

I think Kubrick must be responsible for the emotional subversiveness of the film — you root for a robot, while all the human characters seem hollow and lost.  It's like a world where humans have put all their dreams into machines and are empty as a result.



David doesn't get to act like a real hero, and you can’t fully trust his passion, because it's created, “artificial” . . . and yet his quest is so pathetic, and he's so brave and hopeless, that eventually it seems very touching (partly because Osment's performance as David is so brilliant.)

I began to think that perhaps it's not a statement about machines versus humans at all, but just a fiendish Kubrick trick, a way to talk about parenthood and divorce and self-obsession — about the way some modern parents see kids as toys or consumer goods, reflections of themselves, disposable when inconvenient.



There has certainly never been a more powerful metaphor for a child's need for unconditional love from a parent — David stares into the face of the Blue Fairy for two thousand years! — and to see that need unfulfilled is very disturbing.  And maybe, I thought, it's also some kind of cautionary tale about humanity surviving only as an echo, in the machines it has created.  And maybe, too, the robots are symbols of the stories we tell, and these stories are our only true reality . . .



A few days after seeing the film I remembered that while watching it I associated the animatronic teddy bear with an Ewok.  There are so many movie references in the film.  The fake forest with the mist and the moon from E. T., the “Flesh Fair” from the Road Warrior series, the gigolo echoing Clockwork Orange, The Wizard of Oz, of course, in many places, Titanic and Close Encounters (and even 2001) at the end . . . and Pinocchio and The 400 Blows throughout.



I started thinking about the connection between A. I. and E. T., which Spielberg has always said was about divorce, his own parents' divorce, explaining that when his world busted apart he took refuge in fantasy and sci-fi, and it saved him.  But in the end he had to say goodbye to it — to let E. T. go.  On one level, A. I. is about how hard it it is — maybe how impossible it is — to let go of such fantasies, which linger in our psyches the way the robots haunt the humans.  All the robots are like fairytale characters, simple and unchanging, and noble — even Jude Law, whose desire to please women is so sweet and heartfelt.  But they aren't real, so in the world of A. I. we see what happens when we we abandon our kids to Disney, use the TV as a babysitter.  We make it impossible for our kids to be “real”, which we can only do by loving them and spending time with them.



A friend of mine knows some young parents in Pennsylvania for whom having kids is just something extreme to “do”, like getting a tattoo or a body piercing, something to make life more “real” . . . but A. I. warns what happens when we want to be loved unconditionally without feeling the responsibility to love unconditionally in return . . . we create robot children, with yearnings that can never be fulfilled.

In some ways, A. I. is a horror film version of E. T..



I think it was kind of cool, in a fiendish way, to relate the teddy bear visually to an Ewok.  I loved the Ewoks and I loved the teddy bear.  Just one more example, I think, of telling us that the robots are our dreams and fantasies.

I was literally raised on TV.  I grew up in a household where the TV was turned on in the morning and never turned off until the last person went to bed, even if no one was in the room with it.  But all this is different for Spielberg because of his parents' divorce.  Faced with the terror of that he turned to his fantasies for salvation, and they saved him, but only temporarily.  He had to let E. T. go and learn how to make it in real life.  I think maybe A. I. is a tragic vision of the impossibility of that for a child scarred by divorce or abuse, by what seems (at least at the time) to be a withdrawal of a parent's love.



This all makes more and more sense to me in terms of A. I..  We give our kids to TV and movies and video games, then we get angry at the TV and movies and video games for not raising them right, just as the orgas in A. I. are angry at the mechas — not because the mechas are less human than they are, but because they are more human . . . as the characters in fairytales are more human, more real, more present than many kids' parents today.



The question that’s so hard to answer about the film is “Why can't we like it?” — why is it so disturbing and unsettling?  One possible answer is that we aren't meant to like it — that it's a tragedy . . . reminding us that the only thing that creates the wonder of childhood, or goodness in a person, is a parent's unconditional love, and if that is withdrawn, it can't be recaptured, except in a fleeting moment of fantasy.  In a way, it is only David's intense, heroic need for his mother's love that “creates” the moment at the end.  This is the only reward Spielberg offers him in the film — the memory of his need, that survives everything, civilization, humanity itself.  It's a way of saying that long after our world is gone, the one thing that will echo through time is a child's need for love.

In that sense, the movie is meant to make us afraid of failing children, to hate ourselves for failing children — to judge everything by how we treat our children.  In this day and age, that doesn't make for a fun film.



In this sense, Spielberg is criticizing his own movies, to the degree that they may seem to offer fantasy as a redemption of the world we have made.  Fantasy is just a bandage for the wounds of an unhappy childhood, wounds that never heal.  It would have been so easy for Spielberg to make us cheer for David, to show him doing heroic things, to restore him to his mother forever, to have her make everything all right.  But he refuses to do this — and we hate him for it, hate the movie for it.  But maybe that's just a way of displacing the hatred we're meant to feel for ourselves, for what our society has become on the most basic level.



The movie thus becomes a deconstruction of Spielberg's own work, a deconstruction of corporate cinema, for selling us this bandage as a cure.  And this is bound to make us angry, because we love Spielberg, we love corporate cinema.  But think what it meant for Spielberg himself to execute this deconstruction — because he probably loves Spielberg movies even more than we do.  E. T. was what Spielberg, the child in Spielberg, created to take the place of his absent father.  Perhaps only finding a substitute father in Kubrick allowed Spielberg to really let E. T. go — to upend it, to subvert our memories of it.



If Kubrick and Spielberg were doing this on purpose, then perhaps A. I. does become one of the greatest movies made in our time — an analysis of the narcotic cinema that distracts us from real things.  If they did it by accident, then it still might be one of the most important films made in our time.  It opens a way to the future of movies, not by showing us the future of movies but simply by blasting an opening through the movies of today.

A friend of mine said the audience he was in laughed when the teddy bear climbed up on the bed at the end.  It was ridiculous and pathetic, totally anticlimactic.  But maybe we are laughing at ourselves, maybe Spielberg is laughing at himself, maybe Kubrick was laughing at Spielberg.  We thought the Ewoks would save us.

SEVEN SAMURAI

Posted on by

Watching Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece for the fifth or sixth time, in the wonderful DVD edition from Criterion, I finally realized what it's all about — not war, not courage, not sacrifice, but character.  It's a movie about how to live.

The down-at-heels samurai who get recruited to defend a village of farmers, for some rice and for the hell of it, have trained themselves meticulously for a profession which is no longer in demand.  Their dream of attaining wealth and status through fighting has vanished.  Isolated and impoverished, their kind is often hunted down, robbed and killed by the peasants they used to dominate.  These samurai take on a job which their leader tells them “could be the one that kills us”.  They are truly past hope, even of surviving.  But that's not the end of it — only the beginning.  I'm reminded of a moment in a Terence Rattigan play, pointed out to me by my friend Paul Zahl, in which a character is asked, “What is there beyond hope?”  He answers, “Life.”  So it is in Seven Samurai.



In facing and accepting a life without hope, the seven warriors are able to live it to the fullest.  They find out, at last, who they really are, and they have a chance to prove who they really are to others, to us.

The farmers they set out to save turn out to be hardly worth saving — this is not a tale about defending the good, the innocent, the worthy but weak.  The samurai come to have affection for the farmers in spite of their imperfections, with the full knowledge that the farmers would betray them at a moment's notice if it served their interests.



It is altruism for its own sake, just as fighting the bandits is warfare for its own sake.  The odds are never calculated too finely.  If they were, everybody in this film would just go out and hang themselves, as one hysterical farmer suggests doing at the beginning of the film, when warding off the bandits seems impossible.

Most importantly, this is not a movie about redemption, of the sort that almost every Hollywood film for the past twenty years has promoted.  It is not the story of some losers who, by hard work and gumption, achieve the goals they have set for themselves, redeem their lot in life.  Nothing is changed by the epic battle fought here — it has not made the life of farmers better as a general rule, nor has it fulfilled the thwarted dreams of the samurai.  Something changes, or is revealed — a terrible beauty is born, in Yeats's phrase — but it's all interior, some might say spiritual.



There is nothing programmatic about the existential gesture of the samurai — each one faces hopelessness in an individual way, one with philosophical calm, one with steady resignation, one with cold competence, one with good cheer, one with irony, one with idealism, one with self-hatred.  Each response offers its own strength to the collective, and it is the collective acceptance of and respect for difference which make this aggregation of strength possible.



It is a warrior's code, on one level — there is no fudging things in mortal combat, good intentions don't matter, illusions can be fatal.  One faces the world as it is, one plays the hand one is dealt.  But the code of these hopeless samurai, a warrior's code divested of self-interest and expectation, transcends the profession of arms.  It seems to suggest a way of living for all men and women — the only way of really living, really being alive, in a brutal, ugly world.



Once, in a time of despair about his life and career, and perhaps about his faith as well, Bob Dylan says that these words popped into his mind — “Here I will stand, whether God will deliver me or not.”  He says that his despair immediately vanished.



To make a stand without hope is where life begins, and eternity as well.  In this film the seven samurai, the ones who live and the ones who die, become immortal.

THE BIG COUNTRY

Posted on by

William Wyler’s The Big Country, from 1958, could almost serve as a
textbook on how to shoot a Western — it has some of the most amazing
images in the history of the genre.  Unfortunately, it’s not a very
good Western, not a very good film of any kind, and ends up being
terribly depressing.

Like John Ford, Wyler started out in the silent era directing
low-budget Westerns at Universal.  He graduated to more prestigious
material in the sound era but returned to the Western occasionally for
A-pictures in the genre, and made some fine ones, like The Westerner
with Gary Cooper.



The Big Country was a prestigious Western all the way, co-produced as
an independent film by Wyler and the film’s star Gregory Peck.  It had
a first-rate supporting cast including Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons
and Burl Ives.

Its story strove for the grandeur of a saga, and that perhaps was the
cause of its downfall as a film.  It proceeds at the stately pace of an
epic and clocks in at over two and a half hours, but it doesn’t have
the power or range of an epic, being a somewhat stodgy melodrama about
a feud between two ranching families over access to water for their cattle.



Peck plays a peaceably inclined Easterner who’s about to marry into one
of the families and isn’t impressed by the code of honor behind all the
violence he sees.  He gets mixed up in a couple of inconvenient love
triangles as the range war rages and eventually proves his manhood on
his own terms.

These are all familiar Western themes but they seem to have been
cobbled together without much conviction.  The central love story is
satisfying but takes a long time to get under way.



We are left with . . . the big country, shot magnificently by Wyler in
his usual elegant style, with stunning tracking and deep-focus shots in
spectacular scenery recording beautifully choreographed action playing
out in vast spaces.  It’s breathtaking, visually, but since we’re not
deeply invested in the story, the visuals have a limited impact.  We’re
seduced into magical spaces where nothing all that exciting happens
emotionally.  Big country, big production — little movie.

THE RETURN OF THE WESTERN

Posted on by

America, having lost its way in the 21st Century, is in desperate need of the Western, which it cast aside too heedlessly and too cynically in the 60s.  The Western keeps coming back, successfully when it celebrates the old values Americans are hungry for — the traditional, unifying national myth — disastrously when it tries to peddle the old 60s cynicism one more time.

The Coen brothers understand this if any filmmakers working in Hollywood today understand it, which gives me hope that their remake of True Grit, coming this Christmas, will offer a way back into the Western for modern audiences.



They've chosen the perfect vehicle.  When the Western was buried prematurely it was just starting to expand its horizons, just embarking on the next logical phase of its development, which was to incorporate a female perspective into the myth.  Charles Portis's novel, the story of an alliance between an aging lawman and a 14 year-old girl, may not offer a mature female perspective, but it's on the right track — it suggests a future.  14 year-old girl heroes grow up eventually into women heroes.

Portis's novel also deals with a social phenomenon that has only grown more pronounced since the book was published in 1968 — fatherlessness.  In the tale, Mattie Ross's father has been murdered, and she hires a broken down gunman to help her get revenge.  The gunman, Rooster Cogburn, must reconnect with his heroic youth in order to fulfill his mission — an image of manhood in need of redemption, of a kind of surrogate father given a second chance to do his duty.



The Coens are also among the few filmmakers working in Hollywood who understand how to use cinematic space for emotional effects — an understanding which is crucial to the success of any Western, which depends so profoundly on the truths about themselves people reveal in the ways they move through space, through iconic American landscapes, on foot or on horseback.

If the Coens pull this one off, it will be a grand Christmas present to cinema, and to the nation.

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE

Posted on by

This is one of the saddest films ever made, but the depths of its sorrow don't reveal themselves on a first viewing, when we have the tension and suspense of the narrative to distract us.  But it's a tale told in retrospect, beginning with the death of one of its protagonists, and it's best appreciated, or most fully appreciated, on a second or third viewing, when you know what's going to happen — when you can relish all the small details layered into it to reinforce its melancholy, elegiac mood.



In 1962, when the film was made, the twilight Western was becoming a regular form of the genre, telling stories about the passing of the Old West and its heroes and their values.  It signaled a suspicion that the Western itself was almost played out as a commercial form, and an acknowledgment that the great stars of the genre were aging and not being replaced by younger stars of equal stature.



Ford was the only director who had the grace to try and give the Western a proper burial, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that burial.  Sam Peckinpah, who made one of the great twilight Westerns in Ride the High Country, was driven by his demons to mutilate the corpse of the Western (in The Wild Bunch) before throwing the sod o'er it.

As with The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has at its tragic core the story of a love that might have been but never was, regret for which consumes the female lead here, as it consumed the male lead in The Searchers.  This is what gives the film its emotional power, in a way that a tale of the civilizing of the West, the passing of an old way of life, would not have.  What might have been an exercise in nostalgia or sociology becomes something much deeper.



Hallie, played by Vera Miles, is the key to almost every scene in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  As a general rule, if you want to know what Ford is interested at any given moment, watch her.  Watch especially the early scene in which Link, the old retired sheriff, played by Andy Devine, drives her out to the desert.  His delicacy in knowing what she wants to see but not speaking of it, her reliance on his unspoken understanding and sympathy, evoke something far more momentous than the passing of old times.

What we are seeing is the wisdom of age, a celebration of consideration, of the potent, consoling force of etiquette in human affairs.  It's the passing of chivalry, gallantry, self-sacrifice which the movie grieves over — not the rowdy freedom of the old days, but their silent and graceful formalities of mutual respect.

The idea is even more poignant now than in would have been in 1962, when it was genuinely prophetic.  There isn't a director working in Hollywood today who's wise or grown up enough to create a scene like that one between Link and Hallie, and even if there were, there isn't a producer or a studio with the guts to let a director create such a scene.  Ford was mourning more than the death of the Western in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — he was mourning the death of humane cinema.

Ransom Stoddard, played in the film by Jimmy Stewart, embodies the logic of the law, right and true and admirable in every respect, but Tom Donophon, played by John Wayne, embodies the spirit of grace.  It's a spirit Hallie has come to cherish too late, but she pays due respect to it as it's laid to rest.

Stoddard once taught her how to read, but Donophon gave her a flowering plant, bearing cactus roses.  She never repaid the gracious gift in his lifetime, but she knows, with his death, what she owes him, has always owed him, and repays it symbolically, the only way she can.

The director Paul Schrader once said that Sam Peckinpah's contribution to the Western was carving its tombstone.  John Ford, by contrast, had the decency and the humility to lay a cactus rose on its grave.

THE WESTERN ARIA

Posted on by

Westerns used to be referred to sometimes as “horse operas”.  The term was slightly dismissive but has a kind of logic.  In good Westerns — good A Westerns and good B Westerns — the drama is punctuated and often driven forward by passages of action which have a musical quality.  For lovers of the genre, these passages are like arias, the great memorable numbers in the classic operas that you walk out of the theater humming.  In some ways they're what the show is all about.



The makers of most modern Westerns have forgotten this basic organizing principle of the form, if they ever understood it at all.  Horses in modern Westerns, as I've remarked elsewhere, are props, accessories, means of conveyance — not tenors or sopranos with a vital function to play in the show.  Phoning in the horse action in a Western is the equivalent of an opera director playing the great arias as recorded background music while the performers get on with the serious business of speaking the dialogue of the libretto.



Some Western “arias” don't require horses — these are the shoot-outs in which enemies face off and battle to the death.  These arias are all about space — about the camera making clear what spaces the combatants are in and what problems it confronts them with.  Their negotiation of these spaces becomes a kind of violent dance — like the violent dances that take place in a boxing ring or a bull ring, which become legible and beautiful only when the limits of the arenas are clear to the spectators.



The spaces can be intricate, as with a running gun battle through rocky terrain or through the streets and between the buildings of a town.  The spaces can also be very simple, as in the ultimate Western aria — the face to face showdown between two small groups of men or just two men in an empty street or corral or farmyard.  The dance here is usually very stylized and formal — from the challenge to the slow walk towards the meeting to the lightning-fast denouement.



In all these arias, the director needs to know how to elaborate and arrange “the kinetic melody of movement”.  When the directors of Westerns forgot how to do this, it was like that development in modern opera when composers forgot how to incorporate, or lost interest in incorporating, memorable melodies in their scores.  Opera ceased being a popular art form with this development, and Westerns will never again be a popular film genre until the modern directors of Westerns re-learn the art of the Western aria.

THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE

Posted on by

Just a few months after he delivered The Wild Bunch, in 1969, Sam Peckinpah started work on its unlikely follow-up, The Ballad Of Cable Hogue.  Hogue is so sweet and sentimental that one is tempted to read it as an attempt to atone for the brutishness and meanness of the preceding film.

It’s a film that defies category.  Part revenge saga, part love story, part romantic comedy, part sex farce, part elegy, it’s a work that delights mostly in telling stories, in the slow rhythms of a good yarn spun out before a fire on a chilly night.  Audiences of the time were baffled by it and uninterested in a sweet and sentimental film from the director of the The Wild Bunch.  The studio that made it seemed equally baffled and uninterested and did not promote it aggressively.  It was a colossal flop at the box office in 1970, but its reputation has grown steadily over the years, and rightly so.  It’s a really wonderful film.

Like Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch it’s a twilight Western, a film about the passing of the Old West, but it’s neither tragic nor savage on the subject — more bemused and fatalistic.  It has none of the nihilism and bitterness of The Wild Bunch, and one is further tempted to ascribe this to the fact that Peckinpah didn’t write the script, but that would be unfair — his commitment to the material is absolute.  In his later years he called it his favorite film, and it was the one work he wanted young people to see when he lectured on college campuses.

The love story is the heart of it, and it’s one of the best and most powerful love stories ever told in a Western — all the more so for the fact that it starts out so conventionally, even crudely.  Cable Hogue, visiting a nearby town to file a claim on some desert land where he has improbably found water, catches sight of Hildy, a cheerful whore with a heart of gold.  She’s lovely and magnificently sexual, and Peckinpah concentrates his camera on her cleavage — pointedly, almost obsessively.



Hildy is presented as a sex object, something to leer at, and Peckinpah leers at her with gusto.  But that changes.  It changes because of the way Cable, played with charm and intelligence by Jason Robards, treats Hildy — with respect for her humanity — and because of the way Stella Stevens, in an equally fine performance, expresses that humanity in Hildy.  By the end of the film, one is not ogling her boobs — one is studying her eyes to see what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling.  These things have become matters of paramount importance.



It’s an amazing bait and switch, turning this sex object into a complicated woman we care about, and it’s almost unprecedented in the Hollywood Western.  It becomes unbearably moving.  The climax of the relationship, and in some way the climax of the film, occurs during a scene in which Hildy visits Cable’s cabin on his claim.  She slips into a nightgown in the cabin and then opens the door for Cable, who’s waiting outside.

Cable looks at her, half-silhouetted in the lamplight behind her, and says, “That’s a sight for sore eyes.”  “You seen it before,” she reminds him, but he shakes his head and replies, “Nobody’s seen you before, lady.”  To her, it means being seen as someone reborn, with her shady past gone, irrelevant.  To lovers of the Western genre, it means looking at a woman as a full person, not just a reward for male heroism or an occasion for male gallantry.

It’s a tentative venture into territory the genre might have explored more fully if cynical Westerns like The Wild Bunch hadn’t sounded its death knell.  John Ford, for all his courtliness towards women, only created one female character in a Western as rich as Hildy — Maureen O’Hara’s Kathleen Yorke in Rio Grande.



The Ballad Of Cable Hogue is full of fabulous incidents and subplots, but in the end they all really serve to set off the story of Cable and Hildy — and the love of Cable and Hildy irradiates the rest of the narrative.  It leads to an act of unexpected forgiveness between mortal enemies, and seems to be the real source of Cable’s love of the desert, and even of his country.



When Cable signs a contract with a stage line to make his spring a station on their route, assuring his fortune, one of the stage drivers presents him with an American flag, which he flies proudly over his lonely outpost.  He’s lowering it one evening when Hildy shows up to stay with him for a while, whereupon he runs it up the pole again, as a kind of salute to the woman.

Hildy becomes by implication the spirit of the nation — the Eternal Feminine that leads it on.  Ford’s work often suggested this idea, but rarely personified the feminine as acutely as Peckinpah and Stevens managed to do in this film.  It’s a startling achievement.



The image of the flag flying over Cable Springs at twilight in a beautiful wide shot is grand and iconic, worthy of Ford.  The film is filled with such images, but cluttered with stylistic tics like split screens, zooms and extreme telephoto shots.  “This is a modern film, totally up to date!” they scream, in the language of 1970.  In the language of today they have another message — “This is an old film!”  Hogue has dated on this score to a far greater degree than other films made around the same time in a more classical style, like The Godfather.

This is the only thing that keeps Hogue out of the front ranks of the Western, but it doesn’t vitiate the radical humanism and deep emotion that drive it.