Do You Believe in Magic?

Believe it or not, working at a low-level position in the publishing industry does not have many perks.  I do not spend my days clad in a bikini of diamonds body-surfing through a Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of coin, nor do I speed a company Mercedes convertible down the West Side Highway as part of my morning commute.  However, when I get lucky, I do get to see an occasional Advanced Reading Copy of a book before it's published, and this time, though I am not affiliated with Random House or any of its imprints, I was fortunate enough to get my greedy paws on Aimee Bender's new novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which doesn't come out till June.  I'm not going to write a full review here, because, as the back matter sternly indicates, the galley takes its text from uncorrected proofs and is not to be confused with the finished product.  I also feel like I need to give the book another chance, since I was suffering a lingering hangover from my latest Pynchon binge when I cracked its spine.  But it did get me thinking a bit about magical realism, so I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on that subject while they were still fresh in my mind.

In a recent interview, the New Statesman asked Jonathan Lethem if he considers himself a "magical realist."  Lethem's response was both pithy and hilarious: "I've always resisted the phrase, finding both terms - 'magic' and 'realist' - shaky at best, with unwelcome or unexamined assumptions camped out all around them. Some of this reaction is deeply rooted: as a child I hated the whole disingenuous kabuki of stage magicians. I identified with 'Hot Town, Summer in the City' but not 'Do You Believe In Magic?'"  Although I disagree with what he goes on to say about Marquez, something about this statement resonates with me (and it's not just the image of a pint-size Lethem critically assessing birthday party entertainers and the oeuvre of the Lovin' Spoonful).  "Magic" or "magical" are words that, when applied to fiction, do indeed summon up "unwelcome" associations: of pure escapism, of children's books, of deus ex machina, of "fate" or "destiny" subbing in for legitimate character motivations.  The same slipshod approach to storytelling that scared me off of superhero films as a genre until recently has many intellectuals rejecting "fantastic fiction" sight unseen.  A friend of mine recently mentioned a former professor who refused to rent the Lord of the Rings films because he wouldn't watch anything "that has unicorns in it."  Though his students explained that unicorns were in fact not in evidence in any of the three films, he would not be dissuaded.

The Fellowship of the OMG PONIES!!!!1

Yet magic is a primordial force in storytelling, one that predates anything resembling "realism" in the collective imagination of mankind.  Tales of God or gods, of talking animals, of heroes on unlikely quests, form the foundation on which our current literature rests.  A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to see a magic show at Proteus Gowanus art space in Brooklyn, where Acep Hale, street performer extraordinaire, integrated his flawless execution of classic tricks (no "disingenuous kabuki" here) with a lecture about the role of the shaman in historical narratives from ancient times to the present.  The shaman's arc -- a descent into an underworld of some kind, a reforming of the person, and a re-emergence changed -- is one of the most basic stories we as humans tell ourselves, and it accounts at least in part for our fascination with figures from Harry Houdini to Jesus Christ.  But a story doesn't need a shamanic character to take its cues from the magical.  Even superficially plausible modern fiction (like the later epiphany stories of Ray Carver, the family epics of Faulkner, the degradations of Mary Gaitskill, etc.) is often structured in ways that intentionally evoke myths, religious parables, and even fairy tales.

So why is it that when magic is literalized in a story, it often gives the reader pause?  The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake offered me some clues.

Sadness centers on an ordinary young girl, Rose, who at age nine, discovers she has a magical power: the ability to taste the emotions of the chef in whatever food she consumes.  I haven't read Bender's last novel, but her short fiction often centers around characters whose emotional states are similarly made manifest.  (For example, in her story "Marzipan," a man who loses his father wakes up with a hole in his stomach the "size of a soccer ball"; his wife gives birth to an old lady who looks and acts just like her departed mom.)  These stories read as metaphors, smart and small.  Yet in Sadness, Bender extends her conceit for nearly 300 pages.  As the story progresses, Rose comes to prefer pre-packaged food, created in factories, which, oddly enough, she distinguishes first and foremost by their geographic locations: Louisiana, New Jersey, Kentucky.  She discovers her mother's infidelity from a platter of roast beef, and ultimately finds work in a French restaurant where the food is "beautiful."  But unlike, say, Dickens, Bender isn't obsessed with the sensuality of food: for a book with "cake" in the title, her descriptions of flavors, aromas, textures are cursory at best.  When Rose embarks on a tour of LA area restaurants (seeking that elusive thing, a truly happy meal), what we get mostly amounts to a list.  And Bender's not obsessed with cooking either, its rituals and necessities and jargon, the way it carves up time: in fact, except for the initial cake-baking scene, the most memorable evocation of food preparation is in a short description of a factory with a "no touch" system where enchiladas slide off a conveyor belt without ever encountering a human hand. 

I think what interests Bender most is the psychology of the characters.  But that psychology is glossed over, too.  The problem here, as I see it, isn't the magic but the realism.  It's clear from the way she writes Rose that Bender wants her to be a relatable character -- ordinary, likable, familiar -- living in a world very like our own.  Rose loves a handsome older boy, a friend of her brother's; she worries about popularity and her parents; she learns to drive.  Bender makes a point of telling us that Rose has no particular interests, nothing to set her apart; the great tragedy of her young life, along with her parents' troubled marriage, is that her brother is the family genius, tormented and beloved, while she's only average.  Bender also endows her with a magical power, one that would, realistically, make anyone she described it to think she was crazy, or lying, or both.  It's a power that disorders her relationship with food, that allows her to read minds, a power that was granted by an unknown force or that results from a profound, unheard-of mutation in her genes.  Yet somehow, Rose does not fear she's going insane; she doesn't use her ability to manipulate those around her; she doesn't research the phenomena and find others of her kind; she does not become convinced that her superpower makes her superior to her peers, called for some peculiar mission, or inferior, cursed by an unseen Creator.  She doesn't go to great lengths to keep it secret, but, until the final pages, she also doesn't press the issue with anyone who would feel compelled to react: her parents, a teacher, a psychiatrist.  (At one point she mentions it to a distracted school nurse, but they speak at comical cross-purposes; her one childhood freak-out is easily resolved when she eats a bowl of chicken soup.)  She does not even become anorexic or obese.  Bender does not allow the magic to bear meaningfully on the realism, and so the magic stays removed from it -- abstract, fanciful, and therefore tough to swallow, if you'll pardon the pun.

Because, as I said, I'm not reviewing this book here, I won't delve into the subplots about Rose's brother's disappearances, her grandma's care packages, or her father's fear of hospitals, and I won't try to address the overall structure or prose.  I'd also like to add that Bender is a highly original writer, and I'm not coming to any final conclusions about the novel just yet.  But I will say that it's this kind of magic that gives me pause as a reader.  I will accept anything in the world of the story: an apocalypse, dream logic, clones, time travel, a tiger loose in Manhattan, a boy who can fly, yes, even unicorns.  (Thank you, Haruki Murakami.)  All that I ask is that the author stay as fascinated with her own magic for long enough to explore its natural conclusions.

The Mid-Day Report

If a short story is shorter than a novella, and a novella is the kid sister of the novel, then it stands to reason that there should be something that dwarfs all of these: a novellum?  A novelot?  Though we may not have a name for the form, that doesn't stop Pynchon from writing them.  It's not just the length I'm referring to here: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, for example, is hardly shorter than one of Pynchon's tomes, and the Harry Potter series, viewed as a single work, is double the length, if not triple, of any one of Mr. P's masterpieces.  But I'd hardly claim Clarke or Rowling's books exist outside the category of Mansfield Park and A Tale of Two Cities.  Their plots obey familiar rules; their structures fall into patterns the average novel-reader can easily predict.  The fact that they can be serialized easily, as multiple volumes or as a series of films or miniseries, reveal them to be nothing more than a series of friendly, approachable fictive units, sitting atop one another's shoulders, clad in a stiltwalker's clothes.

Pynchon, though, is different.  Just as a giant is distinguished not only by his height, but by his curious phrenology, the otherworldly proportions he displays in his limbs and hands and feet, so too are Pynchon's novels marked even at the level of the chapter, the paragraph, the sentence, as the mutants that they are.

An artist's rendering of AGAINST THE DAY alongside two other novels

As readers may remember, I embarked on my ill-advised journey into the giant's mountain cave back in December, when I began reading AGAINST THE DAY.  I am sad to report that after two full months, I am only halfway through the novel(lum), and no closer to unlocking many of its mysteries. 

AGAINST THE DAY is not just a historical novel, but a novel about the past: about innocence, about boys' adventure novels, about the legacy of parents on their children.  And about time travel, let's not forget that.  We move through its pages like these ghostly visitors from a tainted, darker future, unable to quite touch the characters who -- with their blazing red hair or their uncorrupted sensual passions or their inescapable missions or their half-mystical scientific theories -- seem to fly through the world fueled only by air and wonder.

What is this book about?  Icelandic spar.  Revenge.  Two women named Estrella.  Anarchy, dynamite.  A family of magicians.  A dog who reads.  The World's Fair.  A zeppelin.  A harmonica academy.  Venice.  A vehicle that explores under sand.  Eternal youth.  Photography.  An avalanche.  A weapon based on time.

I am not going to lie to you: it is very difficult to follow the "story" of AGAINST THE DAY.  There are several threads I can think of off the top of my head: the story of the Traverse family, headed by patriarch Webb, an anarchist bomber, whose children Reef, Kit, Frank, and Lake scatter in all directions after his untimely passing; Dally Rideout, whose father Merle raises her when her mother runs off to form a new family with impresario Zombini the Mysterious; the Fraternity of the Venturesome Chums of Chance, a crack team of do-gooders who, it's strongly implied, are at least in part fictional; Lew Basnight, an amnesiac detective who uses explosives as a recreational drug and pals around with Englishmen Neville and Nigel; Yashmeen Halfcourt, a beautiful mathematician -- and on and on.  And, as I suggested before, these stories hardly break down into managable fictive units.  Characters appear in passing, then return to dominate a section or chapter; Pynchon lavishes detail on settings that, like the World's Fair, are rapidly dismantled before they can ever be fully explored.  Reading this book is an exhausting experience.

And yet.  I went away over the weekend, and on the train struggled through some fifty or so pages of this novel, only to set it aside.  I felt frustrated that I had not finished the book yet, that I wasn't even close, and that it seemed like I would need to start from the beginning as soon as I finished, if I wanted to be able to comment meaningfully on it.  I planned this blog post to be a tombstone to the reading project, an admission of defeat, a white flag raised to the forces of the forty-hour work week and the Playstation 3.  And yet.  On the train ride back, I read another novel, one I'll talk about in the next post, perhaps, a light, approachable novel about cakes and high school, and it happened to me again.  That old feeling, the same one I had after finishing GRAVITY'S RAINBOW: the feeling that next to Pynchon, nothing has substance, nothing has depth.  And it drove me back to AGAINST THE DAY. 

Because next to Pynchon, everyone looks like a midget.

I Mean It's Like I Don't Know What

Over the weekend, I saw my first Mumblecore movie: Funny Ha-Ha.  I've seen films by Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, Francois Truffaut, and other New Wave/cinema verite auteurs, but nothing I've come across in the past quite prepared me for this.  In description, the film sounds simple enough: it tells the story of a young woman named Marnie, who works as a temp (later she becomes a professor's assistant); she's attracted to one guy, makes out with another who's attached to her friend, and goes on a few dates with a third.  In the beginning, she drinks too much -- then she stops.  We learn that she wants to play chess and spend more time outside, because she makes a to-do list. 

But Funny Ha-Ha is a bizarre cinematic experience, for one primary reason: not only is this movie nearly devoid of meaningful action, it's also nearly devoid of meaningful information.  There are no telling details here.  While a film like Clockwatchers (for example) also tells the story of a lonely temp to whom nothing much happens, that picture fetishizes certain images, endowing them with power and meaning: a green plastic monkey, the clock of the title.  The office setting there, though drab and depressing, is depicted memorably, almost as a character in the film: rearranging the temps' desks becomes an act of betrayal.  With the exception of one scene where Marnie finds a packet of birth control pills in a potential boyfriend's desk, though, the characters in Funny Ha-Ha hardly interact with their settings or the objects within them.  Scenes are vaguely grounded in apartments or on the street or in other interchangable locales; the camera rarely, if ever, hones in on anything besides a person's face.  We never get a sense of the relationships between the characters, their shared history, or their individual backgrounds.  Even the actors' physicality is nonspecific, fidgety, and vague.

All of this probably sounds like criticism.  But in fact I thought Funny Ha-Ha was beautiful and fascinating and deeply, compellingly strange, and for me it raises an interesting question about storytelling.  The popular wisdom seems to be that, if the viewer/reader is confused, he will get bored and abandon whatever story he's watching or reading.  But often, when a film or book refuses to directly offer the elements of conventional narrative – character motivation, for example, or exposition – I find myself seeking those out, almost desperately, from whatever material is available.  When one character in Funny Ha-Ha suddenly and inexplicably gets married (off-screen, of course), I project onto his situation all kinds of possible explanations: maybe his new wife guilted him into it?  Maybe there was some practical reason – health insurance, a green card?  Or maybe his attraction to Marnie has frightened him?  Far from boring me, puzzling over this question draws me deeper into the film than many plausible explanations could.

Though the characters in Funny Ha-Ha are unguarded, awkward, and vulnerable, the experience of watching the film is far from intimate.  On the contrary, the viewer becomes a voyeur.  We don't know these people.  These scenes have not been prepared for us.  We rifle through them, as Marnie rifles through the materials on her would-be lover's desk, piecing together a story from whatever clues we can find.

Thought Experiment: Ghostbusters

Imagine, if you will, a world where poorly executed fake Picassos go for more money than work by the best contemporary artists, even though it's tacitly understood that they're made by unemployed grad-student painters. Imagine a world where random character actors grace the Broadway stage, but are credited in the program with names like "Scarlett Johansson" and "Claire Danes." Imagine that the lip-synching acts, a la Milli Vanilli, dominate the music scene. Imagine that all of this is an open secret, and nobody says anything, because nobody cares. If that sounds outlandish to you, then take a good look at the New York Times bestseller list any week of the year. I'm willing to bet that half the titles you find there are ghostwritten.

Ghostwriting is a parasite eating the face of American literary culture. And I'm not going to lie: I've tasted that face myself. I doubt there are too many writers in the NYC area who haven't at least contemplated the possibility on occasion. Ghostwriting is a decent way to make a few thousand dollars as a struggling novelist, and for those who excel at it (like Chronic City's Oona Laszlo), it's not a bad way to make a living. Although it's nigh well impossible to survive financially as a literary writer, I know of at least a few people who are able to keep out of poverty ghosting full-time, and I don't fault them in the slightest. Nor do I really take issue with the "Authors," the folks whose names go on the spine. Often celebrities, politicians, or major successes in other fields, they've paid their dues, and who can blame them for wanting to share their knowledge, their stories with the world? Wanting to see yourself on a library shelf isn't the worst form of hubris I can imagine.

Yet therein lies the problem. The whole point of a ghostwritten book is its physical presence: there is the "author's" name on the cover, his photograph on the back. Though the words inside are not the author's per se, the book is his, and thus an object worth desiring. As we move into an era where the book qua physical object is increasingly separated from the content within its pages, though, I wonder what the consequences of this paradigm will be. Through ghostwritten titles, publishers have trained readers to devalue the actual formation of language into narrative, meaning, idea. The content, i.e. the writing itself, is treated as a commodity, easily farmed out to the lowest bidder; the "author" (and his "platform") is the product. But as we gain ever-greater access to these "authors" through streaming video, Twitter feeds, podcasts, and the like, what does a ghostwritten book offer that sets it apart?  Immediacy?  Even when a book is "crashed," or published in the minimum amount of time possible, it can't compete.  Greater accuracy?  Book publishers aren't exactly known for their fact-checking.  A handsome binding?  Forget it, says the Kindle. So, without the jacket design, the creamy heavyweight pages, the glossy photo inserts, what will be left of the author for publishers to sell?

This is why I consider ghostwriting a face-eater. The only way to make books relevant in an increasingly digitized world is by valuing writers not for their ability to promote and publicize their work, but for their ability to, well, write it: beautifully, intelligently, distinctively. Because books aren't made of paper and ink anymore, if they ever were -- they're made of words. Funny how easy that can be to forget.

Chronic City, pt. 3: Why So Serious?

"When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death -- how characters act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate... (I suspect one of the reasons that fantasy and science fiction appeal so much to younger readers is that, when the space and time have been altered to allow characters to travel easily anywhere throughout the continuum and thus escape physical dangers and timepiece inevitabilities, mortality is so seldom an issue.)"  -- Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner (Introduction)

Over the weekend, I was thinking a good bit about this statement, and how sneakily true I've found it to be over the last few years.  In my post on violent movies, I talked a little about what I saw as violence's power to make characters real, or more precisely, corporeal, to place the viewer in their living bodies -- to shift the focus from what happened (good or evil, right or wrong) to the necessarily more complex realm of how it happened.  But, more even than violence, I think that the role of death in a work of fiction can lend characters this reality, or conversely, rob them of it.

After I read Chronic City, I struggled to articulate what made Perkus Tooth so real to me as a character.  A larger and perhaps more interesting question, though, is why anything in the world of that novel felt as significant to me as it did.  Chronic City presents a landscape burgeoning with pop culture references, and satire, and stoner humor, and sex.  Eagles and tigers render characters homeless; an installation artist digs big holes in the ground.  And Lethem is well aware of the hilarity of all this, playing even poignant moments for laughs: for example, when Perkus's heart is breaking, he "blame[s] the nearest cultural reference he [can] find"; when he and Chase are fighting over a burger waitress, he refuses to celebrate Thanksgiving, ostensibly "out of respect to Sacheen Littlefeather."   The epic quest for the grail-like chaldron takes them to -- where else? -- ebay.  In a certain way, the book sets itself up to be dismissed (a "baked Seinfeld," as one reviewer put it). 

And yet, from the beginning, death circles this novel, just as the birds circle Insteadman's church spire, just as Janice Trumball's doomed space station orbits the earth.  When Chase first meets Perkus, he observes, "With Tooth's turtle's posture and the utter slackness of his being... I could have taken him for elderly... [but] he was in his early forties, barely older than me.  I'd mistaken him for old because I'd taken him for important."  Perkus's fragility, and his failure, are the open secret of this novel, the first and truest fact of him.  And though his quests and his brilliance and the bizarre accumulated complexity of his life and relationships for a time overshadow this in the reader's mind, it's his vulnerability that subconsciously sticks.

The same is true for the other characters.  At the funeral where Oona and Chase initially pursue their love affair, Chase describes "the shameful survivor's lust I've known to sometimes wash over me at funerals, the giddy, guilty apprehension of one's own continuing lucky freedom to feast and fuck and defecate, to waste hours flipping cable channels watching fragments of movies or half solving crossword puzzles then tossing them aside, to do pretty well anything but sit and honor the memory of another whose lucky freedom had run out."  When he and Oona flee the funeral together, they are fleeing death.  Yet the two of them are no less mortal than Perkus or, for that matter, the now-deceased Junrow.  When they visit the Urban Fjord, a child asks Chase if he's the same boy from the sitcom reruns; "You look old," he says, to which Chase replies, "I am old."  And Oona?  "Her frame wasn't strong enough to carry around a coat heavy enough to warm her."  Neither of them are indestructible.

Throughout the novel, the characters seek to halt the inexorable forward motion of time through language, argument, art.  Oona keeps Janice Trumball alive through the letters she ghostwrites; Biller removes the fact of Brando's death from the star's Wikipedia page; Insteadman's younger, immortal self is preserved on VHS as if under glass.  And marijuana, their substance of choice, is known for its strangely slowing effect on one's perception of time.  This is not your teenage brother's stoner novel.  Only in forgetting the past, however temporarily, can these characters ignore the looming fact of a future where they'll have vanished into complete insignificance.

As Heidegger says, death is the essential fact of one's existence; though someone might sacrifice himself for my survival, no one can die my death for me.  That death is my own.  On further reflection, I think it is Perkus's death, more than anything else, that provides the center, the grounding, to his vast and complicated character, just as the presence of death does the same for the larger world of this novel.  In his descriptions of Perkus, narrator Insteadman creates, at moments, an illusion of the infinite: "[Perkus's] mind's landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads," he notes upon their first meeting.  Yet what ultimately defines Perkus, renders him tragic, is his finitude.  Perkus never knows romantic love; he is a pawn in the conspiracies of others; his body is falling apart; and even his verbosity, his intelligence, once met its limit: "It's like when I tried to write a book, Chase.  Practically every day I had to remind myself what it was even about, why I'd even started it!" he confesses in their final conversation.  Insteadman wants us to mistake Perkus for important, for larger than life, just as he did; he wants to immortalize Perkus.  But it's Perkus's unimportance that brings him to life -- and makes his death heartbreaking.

I'm not interested in quibbling over genre terms.  Some people have described Chronic City as science-fiction.  It's also fucking hilarious.  But, when I return to the Pynchon quote, I can't help but think of it first and foremost as "serious fiction."

Yes, We Have No Bananafish

I can still remember sitting in the study hall at my oppressive Catholic high school, dressed unbecomingly in a regulation red polo shirt, matching red knee socks, and a stiff blue flame- (and boy-) retardant skirt, reading my copy of the Catcher in the Rye.  On flickering TV screens in the corners of the room, Channel One, an advertisement-laden infotainment program, blared Mountain Dew commercials at top volume; a few rows ahead, some kids whispered and played poker across a desk.  No one spoke to me, and with good reason: I was hideous, with hair like a clown wig, a face like a pizza, and a smile like a jack-o-lantern's since, by some fluke of biology, I had never developed two of my adult teeth -- two teeth that, even more unluckily, should have been positioned in the front of my mouth.  Most hours of the day, I was miserable.  I hated the hypocrites who forced us to watch television at school but gave us too much work to watch it at home, the asshole chemistry teacher who told struggling students they'd wind up flipping burgers, the classmates who, when given five minutes of free time before the end of the school day, literally talked around me, leaning over my desk to joke as though it were an unoccupied credenza.  Yet, in that moment, I was happy.  I didn't have many friends, but one of them, I knew, was Holden Caulfield.

Yes, like many literary young people, I loved Salinger's work as a teenager: The Catcher in the Rye, of course, but also Franny & Zooey (my favorite at the time), Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction.  I was so obsessed that, early in college, I spent far too much money on two volumes of his uncollected short stories, which I promptly devoured; certain of those ("The Long Debut of Lois Taggett," "The Inverted Forest") top even his more widely published work, in my estimation.

The point of this post isn't to dig into the nitty gritty of Salinger's work, as I've tried to do, however ineptly, with the other reviews and commentary I've put up on here before.  Maybe I'll do that eventually, but this time, I'd like to say something less analytical.  Something more like: thanks.  Thanks for making me feel less like shit, JD Salinger -- for making me feel like there was a place in the world for someone like me.

I'll add just one quick aside.  Some critics consider The Catcher in the Rye the first young adult novel. This idea riled me as a teenager: just because the protagonist was my age, did that make his concerns any less profound, the scope of the novel any less ambitious or philosophical? I'd still disagree with anyone who considers Catcher "simply" or "merely" for adolescents, who's willing to dismiss it because of its subject, but now I do see why the reading of it as YA makes sense. Unlike, say, Edwin Mullhouse, which sees childhood fundamentally as metaphor (for creativity, for passion, for adult life), Catcher provides the reader no such distance. Throughout his work, Salinger is obsessed with children and teens, their wisdom and the immediacy of their perspective. The respect with which he treats his narrator, not despite his age but because of it, is apparent from the first page (it's equally true of the other young people, especially Franny, elsewhere in his fiction).  And in that sense, he is writing for young people, not just about them.

Or, I suppose I should say, he did write for them, until today.  Rest in peace, Jerome David Salinger.  You beautiful, beautiful man.

America's Next Top Novelist

I like this painting.

I like White Castle hamburgers.  I like Cinnabons.  I like the TV show Carnivale.  I like the chocolate waterfall in the Bellagio hotel.  I like toy dogs wearing clothes.  I like the rinky-dink kiddy rides at Disneyland, and unlike David Foster Wallace, I actually had a great time at the Illinois State Fair.  I only recently kicked my Mountain Dew addiction, and that's because I moved on to Red Bull.  I've seen Mars Attacks half a dozen times, and you know how I feel about the Kids in the Hall.  I'm going to be frank: I love William Shatner.  It's not an easy thing to admit, but there it is.

Oh the humiliation.

Now don't get me wrong.  With the possible exception of the Kids in the Hall (whom I'm going to discuss again in the near future), I don't regard any of the above as considered opinions.  In fact, if someone argued with me about, say, White Castle hamburgers, I would have to concede every point: yes, they are nutrition-less.  Yes, they are made from horse meat and fingertips.  Yes, their restaurants resemble public bathrooms, with more french fries on the floor.  Yes, I will take a Crave Case, please.

When I started this blog, one of the things I promised to talk about was the fallibility of taste, my own included.  I appreciate it when people say that they don't believe there's such a thing as a guilty pleasure; in theory, I agree that I shouldn't be ashamed of anything that brings me joy.  But those folks clearly do not have the same relationship that I do with objets d'art from Urban Outfitters, or even the worst episodes of Fraggle Rock.

I own this lamp.

I recently re-read Susan Sontag's essay on camp, a classic piece of analysis and beautifully written besides.  However, as much as I'd like to excuse all my bad taste as a "way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon," it's more complicated than that.  Although my feelings on say, Santa vs. the Devil easily fit this bill, there are, to my chagrin, a whole slew of inferior artistic products that have moved me, unironically, in one way or another, and it would take a lot of thought for me to properly explain why.  To pick a random example: in the mediocre 2007 indie flick Year of the Dog, Molly Shannon's beloved pooch dies in the first fifteen minutes; to show the character's grief, the filmmaker treats us to a montage of images of the now dearly departed being cute and generically doggish.  Reader, I wept.  And not just a little bit, either.  Oh no, I was sobbing uncontrollably.  In the theater.  At a Molly Shannon movie I didn't even like.  To paraphrase the Pixies, where was my mind?

In the aforementioned essay, Sontag writes, "Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve... Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas." 

I emphatically disagree with Sontag's statement that morality is merely a kind of taste, and I think her claim that intelligence is also simply a "taste in ideas" is absurd, possibly even facetiously intended.  But I am intrigued by what she's suggesting here about the arts.  She goes on to say that, far from being ineffable, as is commonly supposed, taste has a logic all its own -- "the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste" -- which can, in fact, be articulated, commented-upon, explored.

In popular culture, it seems to me that there are two basic schools of thought on criticism of the arts (especially books and movies).  There's the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down school, which holds that criticism is a kind of product recommendation, an all-or-nothing or graded scale of merit.  For them, the fundamental question is, "Is it worth the money?"  Thumbers evaluate pieces of art alongside one another, often in direct comparison, regardless of differing aesthetics; to them, prizes, awards, rankings make sense as a way of navigating any landscape of creative endeavor.  This is the school of thought behind "Top 100" lists of books and movies, the "Must See" inserts amid Time Out New York's event listings, and even behind a television show like Top Chef, where cooks from widely different traditions and with vastly different aesthetics are pitted against each other with the assumption that someone will emerge from the contest as the "Winner," the "Best," and will then be rewarded financially for his efforts.  (I'd imagine this also applies to American Idol, though I've only ever seen this show once, in a bar with the sound on mute while waiting for a drag show to start.)  And this way of thinking spills out beyond the realm of professional critics: I find it telling that Amazon.com has user reviews in the same format for both books and vacuum cleaners.

Then there's the even lazier school of thought, which holds that "whatever floats your boat -- it's all just subjective."  This is the school of thought replicated through the cruel brainwash machinations of the worst suburban book clubs, where novels are valued for how much their readers can "identify" with the characters.  This makes artistic opinions personal to such a point that they can only be discussed in terms of autobiography.  If you dislike a film that someone else loves, then why try to argue with him?  You can't change who he is.  And similarly, if a book doesn't "work for" a certain reader, well, what can you do?

On the surface, these schools of thought appear to be opposed: the Thumbers see the quality of a work as an objective property to be measured, while the Boat-floaters regard it as entirely subjective, truly in the eye of the beholder.  But both of these schools of thought are, I think, deeply rooted in the capitalist system, because both see the piece of art as a product.  In both schemes, the audience's taste is immutable -- a market to be tapped.  The only difference is that according to the Boat-floaters, saying a film that's grossed a billion dollars is still a failure is absurd (it "worked for" so many!), whereas the Thumbers see success in one particular market (among "sophisticated," meaning educated, savvy viewers/readers like themselves) as more inherently valuable than success in others.  Yet, like the book club frau who requires her novels to feature victimized women springing back from adversity, this "sophisticated" market still has "standards," pre-existing expectations that must be met: generally, in the narrative arts, a "good story" with "developed" characters and "serious" themes, something that's "challenging" without being "offensive," "complex" without being "confusing."

I'm using the scare quotes here because I think these terms represent critical assumptions that are so common they've become nearly invisible to us.  We anticipate that any new book or movie will be evaluated along these lines, as if each reviewer is issued a rubric to score the work in each category.  These tacitly agreed-upon terms make it easier to shrink reviews to a paragraph, or even a pithy sentence or two: convenient, considering the decreasing availability of review space in popular magazines and newspapers.  Strictly descriptive terms acquire positive or negative connotations: "dense" is worse than "lean" but better than "bloated," "shocking" is better than "disgusting," but has nothin' on "haunting."

I'm not faulting reviewers; for the most part, and with the exception of the truly insensate, they're doing the best with the space they have.  But I wonder what would happen if those same critics turned their analytical gaze not on a new work, but on the critical assumptions themselves, attempting, as Sontag does, "to snare a sensibility in words." 

One effect would be that readers would be empowered to correct for the taste of their reviewers.  For example, I only occasionally agree with Roger Ebert.  But since I've been reading him since childhood, I am now able to gauge, with a high degree of accuracy, what I'll think of a film based on the way he describes it.  I don't mean that I only read his reviews for what they reveal about a film's content; his evaluative statements also contain valuable information about what the movie is like.  But now, when he says a film is "deplorable" or "inexplicably riveting," I know what he's getting at, what it means when he makes that statement.  I can see through it.

The second, and perhaps even more important, effect of reviewers laying bare their critical assumptions would be the reviewers beginning to correct for these assumptions themselves.  But, you might argue, if reviewer corrects for her taste, what will be left?  "Objective" standards?  Whose are those, and why shouldn't they be corrected for too?  For the sake of argument, let's agree that Sontag is right and that, in the arts, there is no higher authority than taste.  Even so, the "tentative, nimble" work of explicating one's sensibility would force a reviewer to think harder about the standards she's using, and at least try to apply them more consistently.  Working out a theory in writing has a funny way of opening one's mind, too.  It can start a dialogue, with others or even within oneself.  Far from setting a reviewer's sensibility in stone, I think that more often than not, it would lead to her questioning -- and perhaps ultimately rejecting -- the most knee-jerk of her received ideas.

This is what I'm working on, anyway.  And the more honest I am with myself -- and you, dear reader -- about my weird proclivities and turn-offs, the more meaningful any criticism I offer will be.  At least I hope so.

Watching the Watchmen, pt. 3

This movie has a bit of Barthelme in it.  Throughout Watchmen, Snyder directly appropriates sound and images from popular memory: the moon landing, the Zapruder film, Dr. Strangelove's war room, Ridley Scott's perfume commercial, Apocalypse Now's potent mixture of Wagner and Vietnam.  Even the scenes that are not in direct homage to earlier sources are made to look like found objects: we see police footage of Rorschach; Adrian Veidt poses for photographs with Annie Leibovitz; Nixon speechifies, live, before the post-apocalypse damage is even tallied.  And when characters break, that happens iconically, publicly, too: Moth Man's institutionalization, replete with flashbulbs; Dr. Manhattan's prime-time freakout.  Televisions are everywhere in this movie, just as print matter (books, newspapers, comics) turned up page and page again in the graphic novel.  The Comedian, minutes from death, flips channels, adjusts the volume; protesters throw explosives through the window of an electronics store glowing with illuminated screens; we hear about Rorschach's arrest and Mason's death from the nightly news; at the film's close, Veidt brandishes "another ultimate weapon": his remote control.  Snyder has adopted the book's technique of collage, but tailored his allusions to work in moving pictures rather than static ones.  The result isn't just that, as he modestly and somewhat repetitiously states on the director commentary, "it looks cool," but that, like the graphic novel, the world of Watchmen the film is an explicitly postmodern world, inhabited by postmodern characters who are aware of their actions not just qua action but as public symbol, metaphor, myth.

The most postmodern stroke of all in the film's ultimate cut, though, is the one that does directly reference comic books: the Black Freighter subplot.  Even after seeing the theatrical cut of the film and reading the graphic novel, I had doubts about the possibility of integrating this story into the film -- though I saw the thematic connections, I wasn't sure what it would really add.  The ultimate cut proved me definitively wrong.  The Black Freighter sequences, executed in vivid (and often disgusting) 2-D animation, aren't just a visual triumph.  If in the book this captain's sordid tale ran parallel to the main story, serving to provide mainly a meta-textual commentary on the nature of comic books themselves, in the movie it becomes something less cerebral: a kind of David Lynchian opening into of the city's troubled mind.  In one scene, the camera zooms on a single panel of the comic -- slowly the waves begin to lap, and we are transported.  Yet the animation, bracketed by a primarily live action film, serves as a constant reminder that the story we're viewing is the creation of someone, that it's the product of a particular psychology and perspective.  And while the graphic novel told us who drew Black Freighter and why, creating a larger context in which the comic functioned as society's mirror, the movie allows us to access the comic's grisly seascape only through the more junior of the two Bernards, whose response to it is nuanced, perplexed, and largely internal.  If Veidt's creation -- a united world -- is meant to be that public and impersonal thing, the greatest good for the greatest number, the Black Freighter is the perfect counterpoint: private, handmade, self-contained, the product of neurosis and obsession, and without a materially positive effect on anyone, yet somehow viscerally true.  It's apt that we see the obliteration of this comic, and this reader, in Veidt's nuclear blast: in destroying the city, he hasn't just wrecked one real world, but the millions of tiny imagined ones carried around in people's heads.

I could spend some time pointing out what's wrong with this film -- the unintentionally hilarious sex scene, Malin Akerman's wobbly performance (she sure is cute though), the dialogue's sometimes clunky exposition.  But none of that interests me nearly as much as the picture's sweeping ambition, and its great success on the whole in realizing it.  The Village Voice once famously said reviewing Mason & Dixon was like "reviewing the Atlantic Ocean"; I'd have to say the same thing about Watchmen.  It's dark, and deep, and sometimes very cold, but it merits a lot of exploring.

Watching the Watchmen, pt. 2

I have never liked superhero movies.  I didn't care for Spiderman, Iron Man, X-Men, Superman, or Transformers.  Mystery Men was sporadically funny but mostly stupid.  The Incredibles was cute but silly.  Unbreakable was okay.  Hellboy was dazzlingly bad.  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was muddy and incomprehensible.  Except for the brief appearance of an adorable vampire Pomeranian, Blade was interminable.  And though I saw merit in both the Nolan and Burton visions of Batman, especially in their iconic villains, their films as films left me strangely cold.

My favorite supervillain, until recently

I did not particularly want to see Watchmen.  I anticipated two plus hours of latex and explosions, and I'd heard rumors about a giant naked blue guy (a theme that, unbeknownst to the moviegoing public, would be revisited by Avatar later in the year).  I figured it would be crowded, with long lines at the concession stands and teenagers kicking the back of my seat, and that if the comic book's dark ending had been changed, as I'd heard – I hadn't yet read it at the time – the film no doubt would close on a montage of sequel-mongering and sexual consummation.  It sounded like the kind of movie they'd play on flat screen TVs in Circuit City to demonstrate the picture quality.  

All of this changed for me nearly the instant the film began.  A lot of reviewers have commented on the title sequence, in which the lives and, often, deaths of the Minutemen (the original superhero organization in the film) and then the Watchmen are related in brief to the tune of Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin."  Obviously, this sequence sets up the tone of nostalgia; by inserting these characters into iconic national moments – VE Day, the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination – the film grounds them historically, in a context already rife with associations, and thus renders them "unforgettable" for viewers. 

But for me, this sequence did something else too.  The film opens with a scene of the aging Comedian thrown to his death by an unknown assailant; if that was followed immediately by Rorschach's ruminations on a possible Mask Killer, the story would have begun on the trajectory of a classic murder mystery.  But by jarring us from that thread right away with a sequence that reveals the forward movement of time to be the world's only indestructible power, the movie forces us to step back, to remove ourselves from the immediate suspense of the situation (The Comedian is dead!  Who killed him?) and read it metaphorically instead. (The Comedian is dead, sure – and so are Silhouette, Dollar Bill and JFK.  So what?  Even the larger-than-life aren't larger than death.)  Structurally, we fall into a Dr. Manhattan-like intellectual remove, reading this story on two levels, the specific and the abstract, almost before it even starts.

The conflict between these two points of view, and the moral consequences of each, is the conflict at the heart of Watchmen.  At the abstract end of the spectrum – get ready for some serious spoilers, folks – is Adrian Veidt, supposedly the smartest man in the world, who literally destroys that world in order to save it:  in a utilitarian calculation that would make Peter Singer blush, he wipes out dozens of major cities in order to bring what he believes will be humanity's only lasting peace.  He is the only main character whose dreams and memories we never access* in the film, and it's an appropriate omission:  to him, the subjective experience of a single life is without intrinsic value.  The only thing that matters is the big picture, the Alexandrian "vision of a united world." 

At the other end of the spectrum is Rorschach, a man whose very name evokes the irreducible complexity of a specific human mind.  Nursing grudges (his enemies list would, heh heh, dwarf Nixon's) and neuroses (his attitudes about sex and hygiene make Ignatius Reilly look datable by comparison) yet unflinchingly loyal to his band of "masks," Rorschach does not believe the ends justify the means.  "Why does one death matter against so many?" he asks rhetorically. "Because there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise in this." Like a deranged Kantian, he lives by unshakable moral principles of his own making, hard-won after a lifetime lived in "gutters... full of blood": tell the truth, stick close to your friends, and never compromise.  Though his voiceovers may sound jaded, he's the film's one true idealist, the only one heartbroken by deaths that do not affect him directly.  As he mournfully observes, "A Comedian died last night, and nobody cares. Nobody cares but me."

Suspended between these two polar opposites, of course, is Dr. Manhattan, the one person (notice I don't say human) who might have the power to tilt the balance.  Though paranormally equipped in his perception of reality and time, he can't help but suffer human emotions as well:  loneliness, jealousy, tenderness, guilt.  The internal conflict of these two contrary perspectives comes to a head during his time on Mars, when he tries to eschew his humanity entirely by seeing reality only through the abstract.  He tells Laurie there is no point in saving life on earth from nuclear holocaust – "The universe will not even notice" – but then promptly changes his mind when presented with the unduplicatable fact of another human being: her.  Observing the bizarre circumstances of her birth, he says, "It's you – only you – that emerged. To distill so specific a form, from all that chaos. It's like turning air into gold. A miracle."

The joke here, of course, is that Laurie isn't a miracle, any more than the boy reading comic books next to the newsstand, or Rorschach's shrink, or the Comedian himself.  She doesn't even have superpowers (unless you count her uncannily gorgeous hair).  She's just a human being, and abstractly, objectively, as Manhattan earlier observes, a live one and a dead one have the same number of particles.  What he realizes in that scene really has nothing to do with genetics or probability: it's the intrinsic value of her personhood, something that has no structural properties at all, something that, outside of the law of human morality, doesn't empirically exist.  Manhattan's realization is not an arrival at superhuman knowledge; it's a temporary regaining of human perspective, which he of course quickly casts off again in later scenes.

A superhero movie confronting ethical conundrums is nothing new.  But what surprised me the first time about Watchmen, and surprises me even more in the extended version, is the film's true refusal to take sides.  Although Rorschach dies a hero's death (hey, I warned you about spoilers) the movie's cliffhanger ending indicates that his personal idealism may posthumously fuck things up just as much as Veidt's cold utilitarianism.  And we're given no reason to believe that Adrian "I'm not a comic book villain" Veidt is motivated by anything more selfish than the reasons he supplies.  There's no twist ending where he becomes president (though Ronald Reagan may), or benefits directly from what he's done.  Instead, the movie leaves us responsible for drawing our own conclusions, ones that may make us realize things about ourselves we'd rather not know. 

In reading over this post, I realize that much of what I've said about the film, with the exception of my discussion of the opening sequence, could also apply to the graphic novel.  Let me say a word or two about that, since it was such a source of controversy at the time of the film's release.  Although the movie certainly cuts rich and meaningful elements of the graphic novel (Dreiberg and Mason are significantly more developed characters in the book, for example), I think the only major regrettable omission in the theatrical version of the film was the Black Freighter story, which is masterfully included in the ultimate cut version.  In my next post, I'm going to talk a little about the movie's use of collage, and why I think it was fundamentally faithful not only to the book's plot and "look," but also to its genre-shattering postmodernism. 

And maybe then I'll get back to complaining about shit I hate.

*OK, I have to offer a caveat: we do see his memories of the Comedian during the funeral sequence.  But even here I would argue that we never have access to the personal significance of his memories in the way we do with, say, Laurie Jupiter's.  Nor do we see how past events transformed Veidt in the way that we do with Rorschach, Manhattan, etc., because to Veidt, biography is not a reason for action – only logic is.

Watching the Watchmen, pt. 1

Negative reviews -- of both books and movies -- tend to be more popular with readers than positive ones do.  In my opinion, this is true for a number of reasons.  First, negative reviews tend to be funny, or at least have more potential for humor.  By casting a serious attempt at artistic craft in a light that renders it absurd, the reviewer has ample opportunity to display his own wit, skill with language, and imagination.  In some of the most hilarious negative reviews, the author, like a good prosecuting attorney, is able to simply step aside and let the work damn itself.  Second, negative reviews allow the critic to insert himself as a character in a way that positive reviews often do not.  Held at a remove from the work, the critic is witness, narrator, and, at times, even protagonist.  In Roger Ebert's classic review of Caligula, he appears as a solitary and powerless figure -- a lone sane nobody, unable to redirect the stampede of movie-goers as they plunge endlessly into the abyss ("Surely they know there are other movies in town that are infinitely better," he writes.  "It is very sad.") .  But third, and I think, most importantly, the arguments made in negative reviews at least present a veneer of objectivity: the reviewer has "standards," these "standards" have not been met, and thus, the work is flawed.  Why oh why, the negative review asks, didn't the author approach his work some other way -- in the first person, in the third person, in a plainer style, at a faster pace?  What's with this structure, why didn't the writer stick to a tried-and-true arc -- or if he did, why didn't he reach for something fresher, more innovative, surprising?

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that negative reviews can't be accurate, or even enlightening; defining one's own aesthetic against something one considers "sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash," to use Ebert's phrase, or even just deeply flawed, can bring one's opinions into sharp relief.  And, unlike some folks, I would not argue that "critics with staying power never employ snarkiness"; to the contrary, a well-crafted zinger -- even an empty one -- can linger in the reader's memory far longer than its intended target. 

But I do find that writing negative reviews, especially the ones that have me snickering as I type, can leave me at something of a loss when I approach material I really love.  If the negative review asks, "Why this way and not some other?" then the positive review must speak to the necessity of the choices made by the work's creator; otherwise by comparison, it reads like hollow praise.  Especially for works that are sprawling, ambitious, and complex, it can be easier to speak in enthusiastic generalities.

This is all a long way of leading into my subject: the 215-minute monster that is the "ultimate cut" of Zach Snyder's film Watchmen.  This movie, uneven, bizarre, pulpy, and mammoth, discredited by comic book purists and scoffed at by the easily confused, blew me away in the theater, but this longer cut was a revelation.  My next post may not have the entertainment value of a pithy dismissal, but I will try my best to dig into at least one or two aspects of a work that kept me transfixed for three and a half hours, and still left me wanting more.

Joining the Blue Man Group: James Cameron's Avatar

Certain qualities -- stunning special effects, explosions, a fast-paced story, stars -- may guarantee a strong opening weekend for a movie.  But it takes something extra to propel a film to true market domination, to the level of an "event."  It requires an ability on the part of the filmmaker to tap into the subconscious of the moviegoing public, to understand the paradigms that underlie the way they see the world and somehow render those paradigms onscreen.  A film that succeeds in this way does not necessarily succeed artistically; it doesn't necessarily fail either.  That sort of accomplishment is beside the point.  The point is simply to create something both so spectacular and yet so recognizable that audiences inhabit it as easily as their own dreams.

If America dreams, it dreams James Cameron movies.  And though Avatar may at times seem like the result of too much bad pizza right before bed, it nevertheless speaks to our national preoccupations and desires far more directly than I suspect even its fans would like to admit.  A lot's been written already about the hilariously bad dialogue ("Come to Papa," "let's dance"), the creepy love story ("local tail" has never been used so literally), and the blundering obvious-ness of the characterizations.  For anyone who's seen Titanic, none of this will come as a surprise.  But the thing that's weirdest about Avatar, and in a way, most interesting about it, is what it has to say about nature and technology, and the surprising way those two intersect.

In the film, our protagonist, Jake Sully, is a paraplegic, a Marine injured in combat who's now given a second chance at life when he's called on a mission to the planet Pandora.  Once there, he is to remotely operate an avatar grown from a mixture of extraterrestrial and human DNA that resembles a member of the local alien race of blue humanoids, and thus insinuate himself into their community.  In short order, he experiences the wonders of the forest, becomes enamored with alien culture, and goes through the "fun part" of his tribal initiation to manhood with a local hottie under the glowing tentacles of a ghost tree.  I won't go any deeper into the plot: it's unnecessary, and based on ticket sales you've probably seen it already.

What I will point out is the rather obvious fact that, inherently and from the beginning, Sully's attraction to the new world bears no resemblance to our traditional ideas about a love for nature.  What he is attracted to is, bizarrely, provocatively, unnatural: the opportunity to trade his broken body in for a new one.  By creating a character -- a young disabled veteran -- who indisputably deserves a second chance at fitness and finds it in a body not his own, I'd offer that Cameron is slyly sneaking in an idea, increasingly prevalent in our culture, that flawed bodies (overweight, aging, scarred) do not "represent who we are" -- that, in some way, physical imperfection, not the correcting of it, surgical or otherwise, is what's unnatural.  Part of the fantasy here is not just that Jake Sully gets his legs back; it's that any of us can imagine plopping into a blue body that's like our own, only with longer legs, firmer abs, golden eyes, and arms that swing gracefully from tree to tree.  This is reinforced by the appearance of the two other characters who also go avatar: Sigourney Weaver's character, a tightly wound, middle-aged chain-smoker, seems effortlessly athletic and relaxed in alien form, and Joel Moore as Norm Spellman, her gangly, nerdy sidekick, turns valiant hero when he switches bodies.

I mentioned plastic surgery already.  But there's something else this resembles even more clearly.  When Sully sees his alien for the first time, suspended in an aquarium of what I assume is Blue Dude Amniotic Fluid, and later, when he first entombs himself in a gel-packed pod filled with nerve-grabbing hookups and wires, I found myself thinking of another zeitgeist-courting film of yore: The Matrix.  Released ten years ago, when our dependence on computers was still incomplete, that picture hinged on Keanu's decision to choose the red pill, rejecting a comforting simulacrum for a grittier, grayer-toned reality.  That film was characterized by a deep unease with our still-nascent desire to leave our bodies behind.  Now, in the era of Second Life, Facebook, the iPhone, the Wii, the PS3, and such, where folks -- like me and most everyone else -- spend half their lives in front of a flickering screen, we've become more comfortable with our avatars.  In fact, they're starting to look more like us than our real reflections do.

And the plugged-in quality of Avatar's world goes deeper than just Jake's point of access.  Cameron (and many viewers) may think he's evoking the web of life, but Pandora is closer to another web: the World Wide one.  We're told that the planet's tree roots form a network with more connections than the human brain; data, including sound, is stored in phosphorescent vines.  And the local people walk around with connectors in their ponytails that recall nothing so clearly as USB ports.  They can hook into anything -- horses, dragons, plant life, you name it -- and immediately download and transmit information.  In one of the film's weirdest lines, Sigourney Weaver says that the aliens' attachment to the ghost trees is not "just some pagan ritual"; the trees, she explains, contain actual, scientifically measurable data.  Has America arrived at its atheist moment?  (If so, go team.)  Because this is tantamount to saying that knocking out Google's servers isn't like trashing the Vatican -- it's much much worse.

Part of the reason that, historically, nature has been both appreciated and systematically destroyed is because large parts of it are not immediately useful to us.  Here on Earth, we cannot charge up our cell phones by touching a toadstool or discover our grandma's favorite cookie recipe by licking a tree.  What we can do is look upon nature in wonder, as something outside of ourselves and our direct control (a feeling that can inspire a sublime religious or spiritual perspective), or we can look upon nature practically, as a collection of raw materials to be shaped.  Neither perspective is plausible for the characters who inhabit Avatar.  Pandora is a video game world.  Everything there is already a tool, a toy, a challenge, a sex object, an entertainment system.  To plug in, all you have to do is pick out a skin -- preferably a more attractive version of yourself, and definitely blue.

After watching the movie, I walked out of the theater declaiming on it at some length. 

"I kept thinking one of them was going to get his ponytail cut off," I said.  "Shouldn't they have explored that?  What would happen then?"

"He'd probably just have wandered around forever, looking for a wireless signal," said one of my friends, turning his phone back on.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, pt. 1

In my opinion, Terry Gilliam has made five perfect films: Tideland, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, and Brazil.  In each of these, he marries his rococo visual style with an omnipresent -- in fact, at times overwhelming -- emotional immediacy.  His characters, grotesque as they can sometimes be, are entirely transparent to us in these pictures: Fear and Loathing manages to paint an incredibly complex portrait of two men, despite the fact that they are never for a moment sober, and by yanking us painfully out of their protagonists' imaginary worlds, the endings of Tideland and Brazil reveal how close we've been to these characters all along.  Gilliam can take me from weeping to laughing faster than any other filmmaker (the moment in Fear and Loathing when Hunter awakes from his early 60's reverie to find a Z on his forehead and a gun in his hand springs to mind); he sees the complexity in even minor players (like Fisher King's unforgettably tragic gay hobo, or the veteran in that movie played by Tom Waits), and he knows how to get insanely good work from actors: tiny child Jodelle Ferland detonates in every scene of Tideland, 12 Monkeys boasts brilliant performances from Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, both generally reliable but unextraordinary, and the flicker of mania, desire, and pain across Robin Williams's face in Fisher King make it, for me, his only truly accessible film performance.  I may come to Terry Gilliam for the scenery, but I stay for the people chewing it. 

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus isn't like these movies.  It didn't do a Mexican hat dance on my heart or leave me wanting to adopt a junkie's child.  Though the performances were strong -- particularly by Christopher Plummer and luminous newcomer Lily Cole -- I didn't feel I was inside these characters, despite the fact that I spent a decent amount of time literally inside their imaginations.  For the most part, they're depicted as fairy-tale types: the Devil, the child-bride, the trickster, the oldest man in the world.  We hold them at a distance, and their actions often read as pieces of a half-remembered story, performed for our pleasure, rather than human choices enacted in the moment.  But, unlike Gilliam's lesser-but-fun Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, I didn't feel that this distance came from a desire to keep the material light and storybookish, the action quick and springy.  This is a dark, ambitious, panoramic film, sprawling and loose-ended, a collage of landscapes and narratives and layered symbols.  As a character in the film advises us, "Don’t worry if you don’t understand it all immediately."  And don't worry: you won't.

For that reason, I'm not going to write a real review of Imaginarium until I've seen it at least one more time.  But I would advise you to get out to it as fast as you can, because I have a feeling it won't be in theaters for too long.

Happy Holidays from a Dying Industry

The American publishing industry is a decadent empire, teetering on the brink of self-destruction, and in its cluelessness the above advertisement is a rough equivalent to Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake."  I've watched the above clip some three or four times now, and each viewing has left me in a state of slack-jawed amazement.  What is going on here?  Over the course of two and half minutes, some two dozen "authors" -- mostly dimwitted celebrities whose ghostwritten bestsellers have already vanished into the gulping swamp of our collective national amnesia -- offer bizarre non sequiturs on the value of the book as consumer product.  The handful of literary writers who put in appearances (Lethem, McCourt, even Angelou) appear to find the whole project very amusing; the others, some of whom may not yet have cracked the spines of their own published works, range from shamelessly self-promoting to dead earnest.  (OK, except for Jon Stewart, but has he ever said anything that didn't sound sarcastic?)  Although Judy Blume has written some charming kids' titles, her quip -- "You can never have too many" -- takes the cake for idiocy here, especially in light of the other authors sharing her screen time.  I hate to tell you, Ms. Blume, but for my household, one Bill O'Reilly screed is one too many.

I find the ad so fascinating, I guess, because it speaks to what I see as a profound misunderstanding on the part of the publishing industry about what books are.  Here's a hint: they are not neckties.  The reason that books are difficult to sell is not because people don't realize that they make "great gifts"; it's because buying a book for someone requires that the giver have some familiarity with -- and interest in -- said book's content.  Yet, with print review space ever dwindling (bye bye Kirkus) the publishing industry appears to have given this up for a lost cause and has chosen to focus its energies instead on producing content that is more or less reducible to an author photo and jacket copy.  People don't have time to read, the logic goes, so we'll give them books that they barely have to skim.  Such books "make great gifts," of course, because you can purchase it with the same confidence as when you buy a one-size-fits-all Snuggie.  There are no surprises lurking inside.  If Grandpappy liked Cesar Milan's last book, he'll like the new one too.  The old dog will not be learning any new tricks, however.

A lot has been said about the "fragmentation of our cultural attention" in the age of the internet, but I would actually argue that the opposite is true.  With Wikipedia, YouTube, and yes, the blogosphere at everybody's fingertips, people are digging more and more deeply into the subjects that fascinate them, without the moderating force of a teeny local library or a shitty mall bookstore holding them back.  The reason books are losing out against new technology is not because, as the self-pitying publishing conglomerates would have it, readers are getting distracted more easily and simply consume whatever's in front of them at the moment.  As technology allows us to increasingly customize our own consumption of information and entertainment, people are actually, I believe, getting pickier and more active about what they choose.  We don't watch "whatever's on" anymore; we go to Hulu or Netflix streaming or watch the shows we've saved on TiVo.  We don't get all our news from the New York Times anymore; instead, we read articles from a variety of papers, magazines, and online news hubs, eclectically chosen.  So why do publishers concentrate their money, marketing dollars, and editorial focus on a tiny number of titles meant to appeal to "everyone"?

Not surprisingly, Lethem puts it best: books are a blessed escape from life's realities, even the realities of the very industry that produces them.  I suppose this ad did work on me, if only in the sense that it made me long for a fictional alternative to our weirder-than-plausible world. 

Happy holidays, everyone, and here's hoping for a less desperate 2010.

Me and Mr. Pynchon

In life, I've found, we have two kinds of friends.  First, we have the friends we admire.  These are the friends who send us Christmas cards with pictures of their pets and children, the friends who throw dinner parties and attempt dishes out of cookbooks illustrated with photographs of the food.  These friends own appliances, knit, and regularly wash their hair.  These are the friends whose sheer competence dazzles us, gives us hope, that we too will one day have some similar measure of control over our own lives.

Then there are the other friends.  These are the friends we can't take anywhere.  These are the friends who barrel through life, leaving a scattered trail of McDonald's wrappers and parking tickets in their wake.  These friends alternate between stunning us with their intellectual brilliance and describing their gynecological problems in graphic detail.  These friends trash our apartments, drink our booze, crash our computers, and scare our dogs.  These friends give us presents they found in the garbage, and those presents are lovelier than anything else we own.

Of course, this is a vast oversimplification: in life, our friends are generally some amalgamation of these two categories -- they wouldn't be bearable otherwise.  But for the sake of argument, let me offer that we generally love and admire others because they either maintain a degree of control that we cannot, or because they allow an amount of chaos that both frightens and excites us.  For me, writers are the same way.  Steven Millhauser, Charles Baxter, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver are, for me, all examples of the first category: though their work is at times really freakin weird, there's a sanity, a logic, to the way that images and characters are conveyed.  When reading, say, The Feast of Love -- an intensely ambitious, formally experimental novel, mind you, and one of my all-time faves -- I still had the sense that Baxter inhabited the same world that I did: his mall coffeeshop, his Humane Society, his football stadium were all instantly recognizable to me, and within them, he was articulating thoughts that I might have had myself, if only I'd thunk a little harder.

Thomas Pynchon, on the other hand, has always been, for me, squarely in the second category.  Though I believe that a sort of skewed logic usually -- probably? -- underlies the choices he makes in his work, I am not going to sit here and pretend that I know who or what the Kenosha Kid is supposed to be (I never did).  Pynchon's work has left me laughing, annoyed, stupefied, wowed, puzzled, turned on, grossed out, and bored, and in many ways, it would be easy for me to dismiss it now.  When I first read the guy, I was in college, still infatuated with the Beats, and wild for anything -- intellectual or otherwise -- that would blow the conservative Midwestern sensibilities of my childhood to smithereens.  Pynchon, with his pornographic imagination (I adored his original title for Gravity's Rainbow: Mindless Pleasures), his panicked, drugged-out antiheros, his steamroller intellect, and his compulsive distrust of authorities and systems, even the mail, for Chrissake, became my patron saint. 

In his New Yorker essay "Mr. Difficult," about his complicated relationship with the work of William Gaddis, Jonathan Franzen describes his experience reading The Recognitions for the first time: "I sat and read the next seven hundred pages in something like a fugue state, as if planting my feet on a steep slope, climbing. I was reluctant to leave my ultrasuede perch for any reason... I was alone and unprepared on a steep-sided, frigid, airless, poorly mapped mountain. Did I already mention that The Recognitions has nine hundred and fifty-six pages?  But I loved it."  I read Gravity's Rainbow -- after two other "long books," A Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina -- during an internship at a library in my hometown the winter I was nineteen.  Alone in a cubicle with not nearly enough to do (and a roll of toilet paper for my consistently runny nose), I wandered beneath those endless arches of sex and death, a sleepwalker in Pynchon's dream.  When I'd finally finished the novel, I decided to go for something lighter -- only a week or so remained before I returned to school -- and picked up a copy of The Whore's Child, a short story collection by Richard Russo, whose Empire Falls I'd read for a class and liked okay.  It was a mistake.  I couldn't even get through the first story.

"I feel like I have the bends," I told a friend.  "Compared to Pynchon, everything's shit."

Now, though, many years and an MFA later, Pynchon no longer towers over my intellectual landscape, laughing maniacally and killing everything else in sight with a rocket launcher.  I don't write like Pynchon -- other authors, mostly the sane ones, have influenced me more -- and though I've reread Slow Learner, The Crying of Lot 49, and large chunks of V. over the years, I haven't gone back to Gravity's Rainbow in a serious way since that enchanted winter.  Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Inherent Vice, and -- until recently, of course -- Against the Day have had to wait their turn behind, among many others, Murakami, Link, Auster, Christopher, Nabokov, Ishiguro, Chabon, Calvino, McCarthy, and both Shelley and Shirley Jackson.

Yet, returning to Pynchon now, after all this time, I find, almost to my disappointment, that he's still got the old magic in spades (and this time, with more anarchists).  Against the Day is, if anything, more beautiful, heartbreaking, panoramic, and simply weird than the other three novels of his that I've read, and I'm only 119 pages in.  Watch for more updates as this old buddy continues to make a mess of my (intellectual) life... and for God's sake, if he wants to crash on your couch, let him in.  It's worth the chaos.  Take it from one who knows.

The Funny Bones

In an interview, the filmmaker Errol Morris once said, “I don’t believe in that distinction between laughing at and laughing with. There’s just laughing at. Let’s get real here. And I suppose my final answer is, ‘So what!’…The important thing is to create complexity and to try to capture the complexity of your characters.” I’m inclined to agree. Humor need not blind us to the humanity of its subjects; in fact, it can help to point out their frailties, their excesses, their self-delusions, with an accuracy that is at times as painful as it is hilarious. Sometimes, as in Chronic City or James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times, the humor complicates a tone of tenderness and nostalgia, giving the book a self-awareness it wouldn’t have otherwise; at other times, in a piece like David Sedaris’s “Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!” the humor makes a black-as-coal vision of human nature palatable. Though not every story needs to be funny – and certainly not funny all the time – humor is one of the most efficient ways of cutting through the comforting bullshit, of getting to the heart of things. For this reason, humor and horror exist along the same continuum: at their best, both reveal more than we “can take” – they make us cringe, make us shriek, make us cover our eyes. The question is simply one of degree.

To backtrack: I have decided that the next book I read will be Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, about which I will undoubtedly have much to say in the coming posts. But, like a selfish fiancé at a bachelor party full of strippers, I decided that I deserved one last fling before making such a major commitment, and I woke up in bed with The Lovely Bones.

I expected this book to be commercial schlock, and I won't mince words: it is. This is a novel where a grieving mother orders toast in a diner and “butter[s] it with tears.” It is a novel where a dead girl dances in heaven with her grandpa: “I found myself small again, age six…Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet.” It is a novel where a creepy single guy who builds dollhouses turns out to be – gasp! – a serial killer. It is a novel where newly engaged lovers run joyfully, nearly naked, through the rain. It is a novel where no one checks the friendly neighborhood sinkhole for a missing body. It is cheesy as a Lifetime movie starring that chick from “Touched by an Angel.” But although I could make a laundry list of the things I disliked about the novel, the one thing that stands out as an underlying factor in all of them is the book’s humorlessness – not seriousness, but humorlessness – about its plot, its characters, and its central conceit.

In an early scene, when the limb of the narrating dead girl is found, her sister reacts to the news thus:

“ ‘Dad, I want you to tell me what it was. Which body part, and then I’m going to need to throw up.’

My father got down a large metal mixing bowl. He brought it to the table and placed it near Lindsay before sitting down.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’
‘It was an elbow. The Gilberts’ dog found it.’

He held her hand and then she threw up, as she had promised, into the shiny silver bowl.”

In addition to the fact this on-cue vomiting recalls for me, quite unintentionally, I’m sure, the famous restaurant scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (“Better get a bucket”), it is a perfect case-in-point of the characters’ surreally appropriate responses, throughout the novel, to every goddamn thing that happens. These characters rage, cry, suspect, fall in love, get aroused, withdraw, open up, celebrate, and yes, puke, with all the unpredictability of clockwork automatons. No one ever says something bizarre, out of left field; no one ever has their priorities all out of order; no one is ever disappointed when their dream comes true, or relieved when their worst fears are confirmed. No one ever screws up bigtime. If a character thinks something weird or crazy, like that the neighbor killed his daughter or that her ghost is in the room, it’s not because he’s cracking under the stress – it’s because, actually, he’s right. That lonely artist girl isn’t being pretentious when she thinks she has a special tie with a dead classmate she hardly ever talked to: fo’ shizz, the two of them have a psychic connection. And God forbid the dead girl’s high school crush get over his feelings for her and move on with his life, even, cruelly, forget about her for months at a time: no, that one kiss they shared means as much to him down on earth as it does to her up in heaven, and when they reunite years later, he isn’t freaked out (or turned off) at all.

Sebold doesn’t have the guts to subject her fantastical conceit to the test of humor, which leaves me as a reader duty-bound to do that myself. And there’s plenty to laugh at here if, like me, you’re the kind of person who spent the ‘90s cackling over promos for “Mother May I Sleep With Danger.” But I can’t help imagining how much better the book would be if she’d gone to the trouble herself. Picture a scene, a la Melanie from Kids in the Hall, where Susie, still acting like a lovesick fourteen-year-old, returns from beyond the grave to rekindle her love with a boorish ninth-grade flame who’s nearly forgotten her. Or picture her father suspecting the wrong neighbor of her bloody demise, while helping her real killer trim his hedges. And what if her sister was, like Dawn from the film Welcome to the Dollhouse, both intensely miserable and inappropriately happy about her beautiful sister’s disappearance? Developments like these wouldn’t undermine the novel’s conceit; they’d bolster it, by showing that even in a world with heaven people are still, well, fucked-up. Even one or two touches along these lines would breathe life into a novel that feels dutiful and wooden in its depiction of a family’s grief. As it is, I don’t begrudge Sebold her success – but don’t look for this book on any shelf in my heaven.