By David Ross. Documentary film seems to shift between nature puffery with a rueful environmental subtext, vaguely condescending anthropological examinations of red state weirdos, and aggressive leftwing political polemics. As usual, conservatives have ceded the field without much of a fight. I am not in favor of conservatives answering leftwing polemics with rightwing polemics. I am in favor of conservatives answering clichés with non-clichés, answering tendentious narratives with non-tendentious narratives. With this mind – and with the caveat that my documentary viewing has been far from encyclopedic over the last ten years – let me offer my list of the decade’s best documentaries. Please note that ‘best’ in this case is a cinematic assessment; it has nothing to do with political point of view.

• Jazz (2000, Ken Burns).

• Mark Twain (2000, Ken Burns).

• Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002) is the surprisingly interesting story of the birth of skateboarding. You will come to view the annoying punks who nearly run you down on the sidewalk with a new respect.

• Stone Reader (2002) chronicles the search for the forgotten novelist Robert Stone.

• The Art of Piano: Great Pianists of the 20th Century (2002) is like a Pharaonic tomb in its wealth of archival footage: Horowitz upon his return to Carnegie Hall in 1965, Rubinstein in Moscow, etc.

• The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002, Robert Evans) is a lubricious exercise in autobiographical self-indulgence from film producer Robert Evans, a live wire even by Hollywood standards.

• Architectures (2003), a four-disc series, presents case studies in modern architecture, each about twenty-five minutes long. Much of the architecture is rebarbative, and the film itself may be a bit dry and technical for some tastes, but few films about art and culture are this detailed and intellectually serious.

• Deep Blue (2005) is underwater cinema at its most lush and exotic. The inevitable environmental message sneaks in at the end, but one can’t really call it gratuitous.

• Grizzly Man (2005, Werner Herzog). Nutcase lives with the bears and gets eaten… – go figure. Even so, the film provides a compelling critique of a certain kind of romantic idealization of nature, which poses dangers for us all.

• Ballets Russes (2005) is a moving history of one of the twentieth century’s great ballet companies, featuring interviews with many of the dancers who made the company legendary. The film becomes an examination of – and finally a paean to – artistic dedication of the highest order.

• Into Great Silence (2005) is at once silent, static, and epic, a grand glimpse of life in a Carthusian monastery in the mountains of France. It is one of the more difficult and beautiful films ever made, and perhaps film’s most sincere and respectful attempt to portray the life of religious devotion.

• Encounters at the End of the World (2007, Werner Herzog) brings the Werneresque hermeneutical apparatus to bear on the McMurdo research station at the South Pole, with reflections on the soullessness of technology and the fate of humanity. This sounds deep – and in fact it is deep.

• Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 (2007, Ben Niles) chronicles the construction of a Steinway grand piano, from lumber yard to Carnegie Hall. It is fascinating study of engineering expertise, but even more an homage to old-fashioned ideals of hand-craftsmanship. I plan to show it to my writing students, in the hope that its implicit ethic of perfectionism will teach them a lesson.

• Ballerina (2009, Bertrand Normand) chronicles the trials and triumphs of a gaggle of Kirov ballerinas at different phases in their careers. Among the featured dancers is Svetlana Zakharova, perhaps the greatest ballerina of her generation, and not incidentally one of the most beautiful women in the world. Here she is: ethereal in Swan Lake; sultry in La Bayadère; smoldering in Carmen.

Here’s an instructive documentary double-bill: The Kid Stays in the Picture and Derrida (about the French literary theorist and progenitor of deconstruction). Evans is charming, scabrous, lewd, and hilarious; Derrida is evasive and more spiritually sterile than imaginably possible. Sure, you’d rather have a beer with Evans, but with whom would you rather discuss Proust or Heidegger? I’m tempted to say Evans again. Derrida may be a genius in the strict sense, but he is a guarded genius. Personality, one realizes, is not incidental to genius; it may even be the essence of true genius.

If I had to give a decadal Academy Award, I would be deeply torn between Encounters at the End of the World, Note by Note, and Into Great Silence. The first is a film of intellect; the second a film of heart; the third a film of spirit. The latter must take the laurels, if only because its beauty is so unusual, its method so simple and yet so ambitious. Nearly three hours long, the film does not merely depict the lives of the monks, but attempts to induce in the viewer a sense of the monastic rhythm, the slowness and ceaselessness of the monks’ simple acts of toil and devotion. There seems to me a deep and central question in this, having nothing to do with matters of faith and observance. Breadth and depth exist always in opposition. Our culture has become a veritable cult of breadth, a crab-dance of scuttling lateral movement. The web is world-wide, but what remains world-deep?

Posted on August 31st, 2010 at 9:33am.

By David Ross. Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? (2006) is a lively little documentary about Teri Horton, a feisty, gravel-voiced grandma who embodies every red state stereotype. She purchased a large drip painting for $5 in a thrift shop in San Bernardino. Somebody naturally mentioned Jackson Pollock, of whom she had never heard, and she took it into her head that she’d purchased a lost masterpiece worth tens of millions. There ensued an epic battle as Horton pestered the skeptical and obnoxiously condescending mandarins of the art world, demanding the canonization of her painting. The whole business might have been filed under the heading “crank makes a pest of herself,” except that Horton had an ace up her sleeve: the forensic art expert Peter Paul Biro claimed to have found a fingerprint on Horton’s painting that matched a fingerprint he had lifted from Pollock’s studio. At this point the controversy becomes fascinating, as it pitches curatorial instinct against forensic evidence and raises basic questions about art authentication and even more basic questions about epistemology. The film, of course, is interested in none of this, at least not in a serious way; it unhesitatingly sides with the feisty granny against the insufferable Ivy League boors, liking the entertainment value of its own populist narrative.

Having watched the film and weighed its evidence, I was torn and confused. A fingerprint is a fingerprint. On the other hand, I’ve spent time among collectors, curators, and scholars, and I know that the aesthetic eye is not a myth; what seem like snap or arbitrary judgments are a matter of the brain instantly acting on tens of thousands of hours of looking and thinking and comparing. There really are experts in this sense. Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum, is an example. He appears in the film as the chief witness for the prosecution, calling Horton’s painting laughable and ridiculing Horton’s right even to hold an opinion on the matter, in what must be one of the most uninhibited displays of pomposity ever captured on film. But Hoving’s personality does not, as the film seems to insinuate, invalidate his judgment. Nobody should doubt that a director of the Met knows incalculably more than a former truck driver, and that this knowledge is substantive and meaningful.

Oja Kodar, in Orson Welles' "F for Fake."

Like Hoving, I had the sense that the painting was off. I am not an expert on Pollock, but I know what one is supposed to feel in the presence of a great painter’s work – a certain flood of beauty and meaning, a sense of intricacy too great to be immediately digested. I was feeling none of it. The painting seemed to lack drama, presence, rhythm. It occurred to me that if the painting struck my dull eye as dubious, it must be very dubious indeed. Could the painting have been authentic, but for some reason botched? Could Pollock’s seminal energies have been dammed by a migraine or a hangover or a tiff with the wife? Perhaps he knew the painting stunk and dispatched it to the dump or gave it to the milkman. This would explain why the painting is unsigned, and begins to explain how it wound up in a thrift store in San Bernardino. In sum, I didn’t know what to think.

The New Yorker has thankfully rescued me from my uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. In a superb piece of investigative reporting (see here), David Grann brought a different kind of skepticism to the controversy, assailing the fingerprint evidence and finding plenty in Biro’s past to raise the possibility that he is an outright charlatan. The article does not merely supplement the film, but supersedes it entirely. Skip the film – read the article.

Those who enjoy the whodunit aspect of art authentication should have a look at Hoving’s False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes (1997). Hoving’s brashness plays better on the page than it does on film, lending a humorous derision to his many anecdotes of stupidity, arrogance, and low cunning. The book is a very useful prophylactic; anybody who reads it will be cured of the fantasy of the lost masterpiece. You can take it for granted that the thing’s a fake.

O'Toole & Hepburn in "How to Steal a Million."

While on the subject of art authentication, let me note the documentary F for Fake (1973), Orson Welles’ last and least celebrated directorial effort, and by far the strangest and most problematic of his films.  It is a postmodern phantasmagoria on the theme of fakery, centered – precariously – on the activities of the Elmyr de Hory (see here), one of the premier art forgers of twentieth century, and his equally shady biographer Clifford Irving, author of a fraudulent autobiography of Howard Hughes (see here). Elmyr is a whirl of joie de vivre as he whips up Matisses and airs his laissez-faire philosophy (“I don’t feel bad for Modigliani – I feel good for me”), but the interesting question is why Welles felt drawn to his subject matter. Does the great director conceive the great forger as a fellow illusionist or as an object lesson in the temptation of shortcuts, partial mastery, pastiche? Or is the motive ironic – a commentary on the world’s tendency to muff the distinction between true art and fake art, with the implication that Welles himself has been the victim of this incompetence? Students of Welles will find much to consider in this barmy, brilliant experiment in documentary, as well as much to enjoy: particularly a lascivious segment that provides more than an eyeful of Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover for the last twenty-four years of his life and a woman clearly born to be a Bond girl.

Finally, let us not forget William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million (1966), starring Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn, a heist/forgery flick that has the distinction of being the least gritty crime film ever made. If any film is made of spun-sugar and Givenchy finery, this is it. It includes several charming witticisms on the subject of forgery:

Charles Bonnet: Don’t you know that in his lifetime Van Gogh only sold one painting? While I, in loving memory of his tragic genius, have already sold two.

And:

Charles Bonnet: I doubt very much if Van Gogh himself would have gone through so much trouble.
Nicole Bonnet: He didn’t have to. He was Van Gogh!

And:

Charles Bonnet: What have I done? I’ve given the world a precious opportunity of studying and viewing the Cellini Venus.
Nicole Bonnet: Which is not by Cellini!
Charles Bonnet: Ahh, labels, labels. It’s working with the Americans that’s given you this obsession with labels and brand names.

It’s interesting that all of these films and books slip into a kind of merriment. Forgery, it seems, is very close to comedy and the carnivalesque. It makes asses of those in authority, jumbles categories, upends assumptions. The forger is very much like the court jester or the Shakesperean fool, and even those like Hoving, who have millions of dollars at stake, cannot help but smile.

Posted on August 17th, 2010 at 10:36am.

Jeff Koons' "Girl with Dolphin and Monkey," at The Whitney Museum.

By David Ross. The more I am immersed in the study of art, the more I am appalled by what now passes as art … viscerally, even angrily appalled … and amazed that our culture – the culture of Palladio, Vermeer, what have you – sold its birthright for a mess of pottage that was not even tolerably good pottage. I recall an instructive day of cultural tourism in New York. My wife and I spent the morning at the Whitney, where we joined a sparse gaggle of pierced and alienated art-student types. We could not help noticing the mood of sour dutifulness that seemed to prevail. Nobody was enjoying and nobody was there to enjoy; the purpose was to symbolize one’s commitment to the modern, and to demonstrate one’s figurative manning of the barricades in the war against the bourgeois. After a while, I said to my wife, “Let’s get the hell out of this morgue.” We tried a palette cleanser of French pastry at Payard (see our wedding cake here), but the rancid taste was still in our mouths, and we felt the need for the stronger mouthwash of the Met. We wound up looking at Georgian furniture. Amid the gracefully tapering forms and magnificent burnishes, the public mood was all delight. Vacationing soccer moms stood before an impossibly lovely escritoire or settee and exclaimed, “How pretty! Kids, look at this one! Ooh, wow!”

From Marcus Harvey's "White Riot."

The problem, just to be clear, is not modern art, but art that has abandoned the refinement of the hand and eye that marks the aesthetic. The problem is art’s increasing identification with aims that are not aesthetic at all, but political, sociological, commercial, sensational, and self-promotional, with impulses that are subversive but not beautiful in their subversion (as say Baudelaire and Toulouse-Lautrec were beautiful in their subversion). Turner has much in common with moderns like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko; he has nothing in common with a postmodern like Damien Hirst.

I constantly search for a definitive diagnosis of what’s gone wrong. Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) is lucid and amusing, but even better, because more pissed off, is Theodore Dalrymple’s essay “Trash, Violence, and Versace: But is it Art?” (see here), a review of a 1998 exhibition called “Sensation.”  The Royal Academy of Art, historically a bastion of the staid, was the offender in this case, which suggests how strangely and thoroughly the cultural life of the West has been perverted. Dalrymple is particularly roused by the vapid amorality of Marcus Harvey’s portrait of the mass-child-murderer Myra Hindley. The portrait is rendered in children’s handprints, and the parents of the murdered children naturally protested (not that anyone cared). Dalrymple comments: Continue reading »

By David Ross. My wife and I rewatched Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954) with our five-year-old daughter. I must be growing old and stodgy, because Audrey Hepburn’s pixie beauty excited me less than the film’s burble of conservative – or at least capitalist – sentiment.

Humphrey Bogart plays Linus Larrabee, an industrialist whose various empire-building activities the film seems more or less to endorse. His latest brainchild is an indestructible sugar-based plastic. In the interest of vertical integration, he’s arranged for his playboy brother David (William Holden) to marry a sugar heiress, setting the stage for the following exchange:

David: You’ve got all the money in the world.

Linus: What’s money got to do with it? If money were all there was to it, it’d hardly be worthwhile going to the office. Money is a by-product.

David: What’s the main objective, power?

Linus: Ah, that’s become a dirty word.

David: Well, then, what’s the urge? You’re going into plastics now. What will that prove?

Linus: Prove? Nothing much. A new product has been found, something of use to the world, and so a new industry moves into an undeveloped area. Factories go up, machines are brought in, a harbor is dug, and you’re in business. It’s purely coincidental of course that people who never saw a dime before suddenly have a dollar and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their teeth fixed and their faces washed. What’s wrong with a kind of an urge that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds, and movies on a Saturday night?

Throwback.

It’s true enough that Linus bolts from the boardroom to catch the steamer that’s conveying Sabrina (i.e. Audrey) to Paris, but there’s no suggestion that he repudiates his former life. He loves Sabrina; Paris is incidental. He will presumably return and resume his role as an Atlas – or at least chess master – of industrialism, without apologies.

The great figure of the film, however, is Linus’ father Oliver Larrabee (Walter Hampden). He’s a reactionary of the nineteenth century, an unrepentant, cigar-sneaking, Martini-swilling robber baron, in comparison to whom the sniveling, canoodling modern (David) and the Ivy League bean-counter (Linus) are wan indeed; in the end, the film’s particular affection is for the salty throwback.

When David announces that he’s in love with Sabrina, the chauffeur’s daughter, Linus temporizes, “This is the 20th century.” Mr. Larrabee responds with one of the great reactionary bons mots:

“The 20th century? Why, I could pick a century out of hat blindfolded and come up with a better one.”

Who knows whether this line conveys genuine ire, or whether it’s meant merely in fun. What impresses me is its mere awareness that history is a dodgy business, with the implication that those who believe ‘we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for’ must at least argue their point.

Posted on August 6th, 2010 at 7:23am.

Irving Kristol in 1976.

By David Ross. The word “neo-conservatism” suffered a wild and unfortunate distortion during the last nine years, coming to mean something like “the neo-fascist philosophy of George W. Bush and his Satanic cohort,” or even more simply, “the wicked tendency to invade other countries.”

Given this slippage of meaning, I cannot recommend highly enough Joseph Dorman’s documentary Arguing the World (1998), which provides a thoughtful and accurate account of neo-conservatism as it traces the careers of literary critic Irving Howe, political thinker Irving Kristol (father of Bill), Columbia/Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, and Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer. The story will be familiar to conservatives who know their own lineage: bookish, Jewish New Yorkers arrive at City College; fall under the spell of Trotsky; revolt against the murderous tyranny of Stalin; begin to qualify their leftism; cast their lot with the high modernism of Partisan Review; found Commentary; begin to take seriously the Soviet threat; increasingly recognize the perverse incentives and disincentives created by LBJ’s Great Society; recoil from the brainless nonsense of the counter-culture; begin creating the intellectual foundations of modern conservatism in a series of groundbreaking books and articles; preside over conservatism’s return to power on the back of their own ideas.

While remaining strictly neutral and objective, Arguing the World explains these weighty developments in American political and intellectual history and rescues an important tradition from cartoonish caricature.

Posted on July 27th, 2010 at 10:11am.

From the 1995 BBC version of "Pride and Prejudice."

By David Ross. I have previously commented on film’s mismanagement of the lives of authors (see here). Film does somewhat better with the works of authors, and indeed regularly eclipses its source texts. Who recalls that The African Queen was a 1935 novel by C.S. Forrester? Or that Rear Window began as a 1942 short story by one Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), a second-tier crime novelist in the Hammett/Chandler mode? Or that Vertigo was a 1954 novel by Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud, writing under the pen name “Boileau-Narcejac”? Or that Psycho was a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch?

Jennifer Ehle as the perfect Elizabeth Bennett.

Upstart movies supplant even relatively good novels. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 come to mind. Between them, James Ivory and David Lean gave E.M. Forster a run for his money no less than four times. Poor James M. Cain, a gritty crime novelist of no mean talent, gave film a bountiful gift of storylines and wound up rendering his own works nearly irrelevant. Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) were all adaptations of his largely forgotten novels. Even Ernest Hemingway has been outdone. Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944) – the first film to pair Bogart and Bacall – turned Hemingway’s mediocre novel of 1937 into a kind of Caribbean Casablanca. As far as I know, nobody has read Hemingway’s novel since. Hemingway himself hated the novel, so we can hardly blame ourselves for ignoring it.

Truly great literature is typically too dense, intricate, linguistic, and interior to be anything but a celluloid fiasco. Melville, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce – they’ve all been made ridiculous by directors who believed they were up to the challenge of world-historical storytelling. Orson Welles tried to match wits with Kafka’s Trial (1962), but even he should have known better. Martin Scorsese brought the eye of a Dutch master to the period detail of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1993), but in the end his film is undone per Hollywood formula: too much eye candy (Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder), not enough theatrical competence. John Woo, best known for realizing that tough guys look twice as cool with a gun in each hand, recently tried to bring the greatest of all Chinese novels, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, to the big screen. The resulting epic, Red Cliff, crams several thousand pages into three hours of film, a good two hours of which are devoted to shots of arrows whizzing in thick bunches. Those training to be Olympic archers will love it; students of Chinese literature not so much.

Lyme Park, Cheshire.

The only major author to emerge smelling something like roses is Jane Austen. While no film is likely to rival her novels, which may be the greatest – and are certainly the most charming – ever written, the BBC’s 1995 miniseries is a marvelous effort, perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a canonical literary work in the history of film. Jennifer Ehle (a North Carolinian no less) is the perfect Elizabeth Bennett. She shifts with liquid ease between sense and sensibility without upsetting the comfortable equilibrium of Elizabeth’s personality. This is indeed the trick: Elizabeth must be dual without being divided; her different sides must be integrated and seamless; she must be both things at once. In terms of craft, Ehle, who was then twenty-six, throws looks like some character actress of the 1930s cannily drawing on the stage experience of six decades. Her every shift of expression has logic and purpose; this is not method acting, but something like sculptural creation, each gesture like the tap of the chisel. It’s a testament to Ehle’s performance that her looks grow upon us just as they are supposed to grow upon Mr. Darcy. We begin by overlooking her unassuming loveliness; by the end, her dark ringlets and mischievous smile have thoroughly captured our attention. If there is a quibble to be made, it’s only that Ehle is likely to invade our mind’s eye next time we read Pride and Prejudice. Continue reading »

By David Ross. Pixar vs. Faux-Pixar is the duel at the local megaplex this summer, as Universal Studio’s Despicable Me and Dreamworks’ Megamind square off against Pixar’s Toy Story 3. In the end, there can be no real contest. Pixar is a genuine American classic, a creative serendipity feeding as directly and undeniably into the permanent culture as the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. Pixar’s few corporate peers are Levi’s, Winchester, Harley-Davidson, Topps, Fender – companies that have found forms somehow expressive of the national spirit. Pixar stands athwart the cynical, noisy, sexualized nonsense of the mall culture, and says, effectively, “None of this is necessary.”

Toy Story 3 is steeped in heart and soul and memory, with time itself – as in all the greatest works – somehow the nemesis. It arguably tops the previousToy Story installments and The Incredibles - masterpieces in their own right – and exemplifies as well as anything what American companies are capable of creating when they heed their better angels.

Cowboy and spaceman: American icons.

The story is simple enough. Andy is leaving for college. He’s decided to take Woody with him (a detail full of wonderful sentimental implication), while the rest of the gang are grumblingly headed to the attic in a garbage bag. A mix-up lands the bag at the curb with the rest of the trash. Led by Buzz Lightyear, the toys escape their polyethylene tomb, scamper into the family car, and climb into a box destined for the Sunnyside Daycare Center. This turns out to be a militarized police state run by an emotionally warped teddy bear named Lotso and his henchman (“Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force!” declares Barbie, echoing Thomas Jefferson). Woody must, of course, save his friends and find his way home in time to depart with Andy. There ensues the mother of all prison-break sequences, a careening, antic homage to The Grand Illusion, Stalag 17, and Bresson’s A Man Escaped. It is certainly the first scene of its type to pivot on the availability of a tortilla, or to require the Scotch-taping of a cymbal-playing monkey. In the end, suffice it to say, the film affirms the values of friendship and loyalty; gracefully negotiates Andy’s passage to adulthood; and looks kindly on the cycling of the generations – the essence of cultural health – as Andy’s toys pass lovingly into younger hands.

Pixar never engages in the crass partisan whining of a film like Avatar (“shock and awe,” etc.), but each of Pixar’s films contains the gentlest and least intrusive suggestion of a guiding conservatism, it seems to me. The governing ideas are something like: 1) What was good then, is good now; 2) Each of us has duties that we must determine and fulfill; 3) Memory is the essence of our humanity; 4) Capitalism does not destroy, but creates culture – not necessarily a high culture, but a culture worth loving; 5) There are leaders and followers – natural, organic, unenforced hierarchies – and we must each assess and accept our place, 6) In time of trouble, the cowboy and spaceman – embodiments of the heroic aspiration I discussed here – will see us through. Toy Story 3 is, to my mind, precisely what a conservative film should be: a demonstration of certain virtues and laws of nature, which the wise can interpret and apply as they see fit.

The film has plenty of fun with the metrosexuality of Ken (doesn’t Mattel have lawyers?), but its more meaningful dig at the Blue State geist involves Lotso. Once a little girl’s beloved companion, he was accidentally left behind at a picnic in the countryside; he valiantly journeyed back to his house only to find that he had been replaced by another bear exactly like himself. In his heartbreak, he became bitter, cynical, alienated … …as George W. Bush would say, evil.

Barbie and Ken make an appearance.

Your typical Hollywood simpletons would proceed as programmed to a trite conversion scene, on the assumption that all humans are essentially good and can be reclaimed with a hug. Pixar has no patience with touchy-feely delusions about human nature. The climax of the film finds the whole gang on a conveyor belt headed toward a pair of whirling metal teeth (the scene reverses the usual environmentalist fanfare of rainbows and dancing flowers; recycling has never been conceived so menacingly). Woody risks his life to free the trapped Lotso, and they narrowly avoid death by mastication. With the gang now headed toward a demonic abyss of fire, Woody points Lot-so toward a big red stop button. Woody assumes, just as we assume, that Lotso, having been touched by the magic wand of love, is now a good guy. But no! Without the least hesitation, Lotso sends the whole gang into the fiery maw of hell (rescue arrives from other quarters). The point seems to be that some people really are evil and we had best take their evil seriously. If only the proponents of the “Overseas Contingency Operation” and “Man-Caused Disasters” had the wisdom of Pixar!

As in all the Toy Story films, the periphery is rife with humor and delight. Notice a cameo appearance by Miyazaki’s Totoro in Bonnie’s bedroom. Thus one master celebrates another. I noticed too – and had to applaud – Bonnie’s outfit: plastic bead necklace, purple tutu, rain boots. My five-year-old daughter laughed; she understood well enough that these smart fellows had fixed her in their mirror.

Posted on July 16th, 2010 at 9:41am.

By David Ross. Who is the mad genius who so thoroughly inhabits the mind (and accent) of Werner Herzog and brings us these marvelous children’s stories, told for the first time with proper attention to their horrifying subtexts — their terrible occlusions?

• Werner Herzog reads Madeline.
• Werner Herzog reads Curious George.
• Werner Herzog reads Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.
• Werner Herzog reads Where’s Waldo.

On a more serious but related note, let me recommend the informative documentary Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place (2008), which tells the story of the author and illustrator of Mike Mulligan and several other classics of children’s literature. Burton was the most inventive artist ever to devote herself exclusively to children’s literature. Her every page is a little cosmos of detail; detail coalesces into pattern; pattern comes alive as rhythm. Among modern American illustrators and cartoonists, only Saul Steinberg more completely transcended his job description and ascended into the sphere of high art (New Yorker subscribers should have a look at Adam Gopnik’s brilliant essay on Steinberg; Updike was another ardent, life-long admirer).

[Editor's Note: on a related note, LFM Editor Apuzzo recommends Klaus Kinski reading "The Selfish Giant" by Oscar Wilde (auf deutsch) from the 1962 film Der Rote Rausch.]

Posted on July 15th, 2010 at 10:35am.

From 1950's "Destination Moon."

By David Ross. President Obama’s hostility to NASA has now become a subject of wide comment, and for good reason. It reveals, perhaps more than anything else, his resentment of everything that implies heroic possibility (the military, capitalism, Israel, etc.). The heroic quest to expand knowledge – to enrich consciousness – has nothing to do with his mindset or task, which remains that of the leftwing community organizer. Harold Bloom uses the phrase ’school of resentment’ to describe the academic enemies of Shakespeare. In my opinion, the same psychopathology explains the enemies of NASA. This ‘resentment’ is directed against anything that suggests human beings transcend their social, economic, and biological context, and that they are irreducible to a formula of animal needs. Robert Zubrin, who has for decades lobbied for a mission to Mars as head of the Mars Society, makes precisely my own point in the June issue of Commentary (subscriber only):

The values championed by the Obama administration are comfort, security, protection, and dependence. But the frontier sings to our souls with different ideals, telling stirring tales of courage, risk, initiative, inventiveness, independence, and self-reliance. Considered as a make-work bureaucracy, NASA may be perfectly acceptable to those currently in power. But for mentalities that would criminalize the failure to buy health insurance, the notion of a government agency that celebrates the pioneer ethos by risking its crews on daring voyages of exploration across vast distances to terra incognita can only be repellent.

In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, NASA administrator Charles Bolden illustrates the extent of the Obama administration’s departure from the “right stuff.” Bolden told Al Jazeera: Continue reading »

The Italians in their moment of triumph, 2006.

By David Ross. Every four years conservatives go into nativist-moron mode. I’m not speaking of presidential politics but of World Cup politics, and of the favorite conservative meme that soccer is a subversive plot to deprive us of our precious bodily fluids (see here and here and here). Libertas, for one, loves soccer. Like a Max Ophuls tracking shot, it has a beautiful, hypnotic fluidity, in comparison to which American football is like a bumper-to-bumper mess on a Southern California freeway. Among conservative organs, only Powerline has blown the vuvuzela on behalf of soccer. Relatively bright bulbs, those Dartmouth-educated lawyers.

The present World Cup has been high entertainment due to the creeping parity in the world game and the amusing fallen souffle of the French team, though the tournament has not been long on individual genius. Argentina’s Lionel Messi, clearly the best player in the world, could not figure out how to integrate his talents, while the other big guns were probably a bit overrated to begin with. Argentine coach and former world superstar Diego Maradona offers a surprisingly subtle theory in explanation of the general fizzle. Breaking with p.c. cliché, he suggests that today’s stars are not too selfish, but not selfish enough. They have absorbed too much of the wussy zeitgeist, as it were, and lack the bravado and ego of the matador. Continue reading »

David Mamet.

By David Ross. David Mamet is our leading playwright as well as an incisive, cerebral film director. He made a splashy conversion to conservatism in 2008, publishing a hoot of an essay called “Why I am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal” in The Village Voice.

I was pleased but not surprised.  All artists of real aspiration must eventually come to terms with conservatism, great art being rooted in the same values and perspectives that conservatism is rooted in – rooted in the assumption, for example, that human beings are more than automata of history, accidents of chemistry, points on a graph, sheep in need of a governmental shepherd.

In the latest issue of Commentary, Terry Teachout, the dean of conservative cultural critics, ponders the impetus and meaning of Mamet’s conversion (for subscribers only, unfortunately).

He traces the crux of the matter to a passage in “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal”:

I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

Teachout comments: Continue reading »

From Disney's "The Princess and the Frog."

By David Ross. The Pixar-Disney partnership, about which I was initially skeptical, now seems all to the good. Pixar remains exuberantly creative, while Disney has absorbed some of the lessons of Pixar, the most basic of which is that kids have better instincts as well as worse instincts, and that there is plenty of money to be made by appealing to the former. My recent discussion of kids movies made no mention of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (2009) because I had not yet seen it, but my little family had a rollicking time with it last night. I would call it Disney’s best film since The Fox and the Hound (1981), the last film to exhibit something, if only a shadow, of the old charm and simplicity. Coming on the heels of Bolt (2008) – Disney’s most successful Pixar rip-off attempt – The Princess and the Frog seems to signal that Disney has finally found the light at the end of its long tunnel of malaise, incompetence, condescension, and small-mindedness, otherwise known as the Eisner era.

The Princess and the Frog offers plenty to like. Instead of rounding up celebs to phone in the usual tired voice work (v. Mel Gibson in Pocahontas and Demi Moore in The Hunchback), Disney put together a low-profile but vibrant cast led by Anika Noni Rose as Tiana and Jenifer Lewis as Mama Odie. The acting is focused and energetic throughout, giving the entire film an air of personality and emotional engagement that recalls the films of Disney’s golden age (Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter, etc.). Meanwhile, Randy Newman’s soundtrack, a pastiche of New Orleans jazz and zydeco, lends the film what all recent Disney films have lacked: bounce. While it is not going to convince anyone to throw away their old Clifton Chenier records, the soundtrack is a lark, and a welcome reprieve from the pop-Broadway syrup that dominated Disney’s dark age. Continue reading »

Anne Briggs.

[Editor's Note: On the occasion of the 2010 Glastonbury Festival being held in the UK this weekend - the largest music festival in the world, with an estimated 170,000 attendees and 500 music acts - LFM contributor David Ross looks back at the Anglo-Celtic folk revival.]

By David Ross. From Lady Gregory to Lady Gaga … it’s been a depressing hundred years. Let us turn, for momentary solace, to the folk chanteuses of the British Isles, keepers of a tradition “as cold and passionate as the dawn” (Yeats, “The Fisherman”).

Sandy Denny (of Fairport Convention), “Reynardine” and “Tam Lin”: see here and here.

Lyrics to Tam Lin: see here.

Live footage of Sandy Denny performing a spare, autumnal suite from her first solo album The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971). Savor this footage, because there is not much extant footage of Denny performing live; cameras by no means followed her every move. (Compare Warren Beatty’s comment on Madonna in Truth or Dare: “She doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there in existing?”)

Tríona Ní Dhomhnail (of Skara Brae and the Bothy Band), “The Maid of Coolmore”: see here.

Jacqui McShee (of Pentangle), “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”: see here.

Anne Briggs, “She Moved Through the Fair”: see here.

Anne Briggs was the first. A protégé of Bert Jansch during the early sixties, she went from pub to pub playing music that looked back to Queen Elizabeth far more than it looked forward to Sgt. Pepper’s. The old men in tweed drinking their bitter must have been pleasantly surprised. For whatever reason, she did not pursue a recording career in earnest and retired early in life to become a market gardener – which activity, I understand, she pursues to this day. She released three albums, all of which have a stark beauty. She plays an odd syncopated guitar, which at moments heralds Nick Drake. I have no doubt that he listened to her carefully. Continue reading »

From Jane Campion's "Bright Star."

By David Ross. Has there ever been a good film about a writer?  Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) was respectable enough, as I remember it, but generally film has no idea how to approach lives that are largely interior, with driving purposes that are inconveniently invisible and inscrutable.  In consequence, film tends to emphasize the gossipy and scandalous, dwelling on the externals of sexual deviancy, alcoholism, and nervous breakdown.

Film has been particularly clumsy in its attempts to deal with the romantics, in whose case the temptation to sensationalize is enormous.  Percy and Mary Shelley receive the star treatment in Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), while Wordsworth and Coleridge feature in Julien Temple’s Pandaemonium (2000), the latter starring the diminutive Scotsman John Hannah, last seen being chased by mummies, as Wordsworth.  Both films are creative disasters and intellectual insults even by the debased standards of Hollywood.  Pandaemonium is to literary biopic what Plan 9 from Outer Space is to science fiction: a film so unbelievably stupid that it becomes incredible in its own way. The less said about these films the better. The BBC production Byron (2003) is far more respectable, but suffers the reverse problem: its fidelity to historical and period detail is almost pedantic, and it maintains a studious emotional distance from its subject. It is a live-action encyclopedia entry, the only mildly boring film ever made on the themes of omnivorous sexuality and incest.

Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), which tells the story of Keats’ doomed romance with Fanny Brawne, is surer of itself and sounder in its approach. Where Russell and Temple indulge in shuddering ejaculations of mayhem and mania, Campion recognizes that the challenge is to contain and compress the intrinsic melodrama of her story. She smartly attempts this work by shading her film in muted browns and grays (the true colors of England by the way); by utilizing all manner of strategic occlusion and interruption; and by interjecting into nearly every scene the acidic and not entirely endearing personality of Charles Brown, Keats’ friend and companion. When the syrup begins to bubble over, Campion knows exactly how and when to turn down the heat.

Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw in "Bright Star."

Even more importantly, the film feels psychologically and emotionally consistent with the poems. Campion’s Keats inevitably becomes a favorite playmate of the younger Brawne children – and he does perform an annoying Scottish jig at Christmas dinner – but he is neither the ethereal and evanescent sprite (the Keats of Shelley’s “Adonais”), nor the paragon of innocence and good cheer (the Keats of Yeats’ “Ego Dominus Tuus”). Played admirably by Ben Whishaw, this Keats is tough in his way, self-controlled, decent, decorous, and private. Where Russell and Temple insist on the correlation between insanity and genius, Campion underscores Keats’ self-awareness and his understated but powerful and consistent intelligence: in short, his fundamental sanity. I consider this a convincing thesis about the kind of personality that produced the poems.

Campion’s Fanny Brawne, meanwhile, seems the kind of woman who might have appealed to the man who wrote the poems. She is a woman not of passion, but of passionate character: character qualifies and directs passion, making her far more interesting and believably Georgian than the stereotypical melting or bursting damosel of romantic cliché. Abbie Cornish plays the part superbly and instantly establishes herself as an actress who can project a degree of intelligence and literacy in the tradition of Helena Bonham Carter and Keira Knightley.

I’m not enough of a Keats scholar to say whether the film is minutely correct in all its details, but the advisory help of Keats’ biographer Andrew Motion suggests that it is at least roughly correct. The film tends to downplay the alleged flirtatiousness and dress obsession that made Fanny unpopular among Keats’ friends, but this is within the bounds of reasonable interpretation, it seems to me. The film does engage in at least one petty deception. The closing credits inform us that Fanny “kept Keats forever in her heart” (or something to this effect) and that she never removed her engagement ring, implying that she spent the rest of her life faithfully mourning her lost love. In fact, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes:

After Keats’s death, Fanny remained in Hampstead and mourned him through the 1820s, befriending his sister as she had promised him she would. After her mother’s death in 1829 Fanny became financially independent and, on a visit to France in 1833, in Boulogne met Louis Lindo (later Lindon; 1812-1872), whom she married on 15 June 1833. Of Spanish or Portuguese extraction and from a wealthy Jewish merchant and banking family, Louis Lindon seems to have held a number of positions, including working as an officer for the British Legion in Spain and as a wine merchant in London later in life. Until the 1850s, when they settled in London, the Lindons lived on the continent, especially in Germany, where Fanny gave birth to two sons and a daughter. Fanny died at 34 Coleshill Street, Pimlico, London, on 4 December 1865.

Posted on June 19th, 2010 at 11:18pm.

By Jason Apuzzo. It took 53 years and Obama to get Atlas Shrugged into production.

That’s at least my impression of today’s news from Variety that the long-gestating adaptation of Ayn Rand’s landmark novel Atlas Shrugged (published in 1957) has finally gone into production as a $5 million indie feature, produced by John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow.

Variety reports: “Cameras began rolling over the weekend on a five-week shoot for Atlas Shrugged Part One with Paul Johansson directing from Brian Patrick O’Toole’s script. Aglialoro would have lost the feature rights if the film wasn’t in production by Saturday.”

There will apparently also be at least one more ‘installment’ of Atlas Shrugged filmed, as the producers have expressed the desire to break-up Rand’s massive novel into several parts.

Director Paul Johansson (“One Tree Hill”) will also be portraying lead character John Galt, while the plum role of Dagny Taggart will be going to TV’s Taylor Schilling (“Mercy”).  Check out the Variety article for more details – among which are the casting of Michael Lerner and director Nick Cassavetes.

The last time I wrote about this story was on the old version of Libertas back in 2007, when the project had Angelina Jolie attached as Dagny Taggart, in what was supposed to be a Lionsgate production produced by Howard & Karen Baldwin and Geyer Kosinski, featuring a Randall Wallace script.  All of that’s gone now, and the new project is apparently being funded by John Aglialoro, who is the CEO of Cybex – the producer of exercise equipment.  I’m thinking everyone in the cast will be in good shape.

Actor/Director Paul Johansson.

I’m sure that everyone involved in the project would call it a coincidence, but it’s fascinating to me that this project – which has been developed in fits and starts at least since the 1970’s – would finally come to life in an era when … America’s most productive citizens are feeling the squeeze of government taxation and regulation more than ever, and more industries are being nationalized.  Because that’s essentially what Atlas Shrugged is about: how America’s most productive citizens essentially decide to ‘drop out’ of productive life, after feeling the bite of excessive exploitation by the government.

What also fascinates me is that the project is not coming to life as some studio-backed, behemoth production starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz (ahem).  It’s being made essentially as a scrappy indie production by people who are obviously passionate about the film’s message.  [I know some of you are saying: a $5 million budget is 'scrappy'?  It certainly is if you're trying to shoot Atlas Shrugged!] Isn’t this perfectly reflective of the current Tea Party phenomenon?  A phenomenon whereby regular citizens working outside the usual channels harness their passion to hit the streets and make things happen.

I want to wish the makers of Atlas Shrugged the best in their production.  My sense is that they’ve got a challenging road ahead, due to the complexity of their project.  But I’m glad producers John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow decided not to ‘drop out’ themselves, but to instead pull together what resources they have and bring this extraordinary novel to life.

ADDITIONAL ASIDE: LFM Contributor David Ross adds: “Resurgent collectivism has made Ayn Rand more relevant than ever. According to the Ayn Rand Institute , Atlas Shrugged is selling as never before, with some 500,000 copies flying off the shelves in 2009, and annual sales of Rand’s four novels topping one million for the first time ever.

“Here’s Rand, in all her rebarbative glory, toying with the slickly shallow Mike Wallace: Rand-Wallace YouTube interview Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.”

Posted on June 14th, 2010 at 10:50am.

By David Ross. The sight of pelicans trudging through the black crud of the gulf may particularly resonate with parents. This is rather what it’s like to raise a kid these days. You try to fly above the mess, but you wind up covered in muck and drowning in sludge. The difference, of course, is that BP’s gulf catastrophe was accidental, while the engineers of the kiddy culture execute a conscious and cynical plan. With all of this in mind, let me – vigilant father of a four year old – share a few of our happier experiments in what my daughter calls “watching.”

The live-action children’s films and TV of the last thirty years are largely moronic and corrosive. They militate against the values and mores of the adult world (discipline, delayed gratification, respect for legitimate authority, etc.), and acclimate kids to a norm of cliché. I wonder how many of the missing kids on the back of milk cartons we can attribute to the cliché of would-be adventurers sneaking out the window and climbing down the vine trellis? The best bet is simply to write off this swathe of cinematic history, the manipulative cultural politics of E.T. and Sesame Street included (see Kay Hymowitz’s classic essay in City Journal.)

My chief counter-recommendations are Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944), both starring Elizabeth Taylor and a roster of outstanding British character actors. I’m tempted to call these the best live-action children’s movies ever made. Both films are morally sophisticated without crossing the line into adult difficulty, and there is enough suspense at enough different levels to rivet the whole family. Other live-action gems are Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), starring the eternally charming Myrna Loy, and The Trouble with Angels (1966), starring Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills.

From "The Trouble With Angels."

The Trouble with Angels – which may be my very favorite kid’s movie – tells the story of a teenage troublemaker (Mills) who is sent to a convent school run by a formidable mother superior (Russell). Mills engages in various subversive high jinks – powdered soap in the sugar bowls, etc. – but gradually comes to respect the nuns’ example of quiet dignity and selflessness and in the end decides to join the order herself. What’s striking about the film from our twenty-first century perspective is how firmly and confidently it’s on the side of adult authority rather than teenage rebellion. The film takes for granted that Mills and her fellow students are ignorant and immature and that they require adult guidance; so too the film takes for granted that adults have something to teach.

The Trouble with Angels is no masterpiece, but it reminds us how radically the culture has changed. Far from teaching what it means to be an adult, today’s kiddy fare ceaselessly sounds the trumpet of revolt against parent and school, commitment and discipline, anything that thwarts the impulse of the moment. Practically, such films do the bidding of a trillion-dollar advertising-entertainment nexus that sees in every emancipated, impulsive child an emancipated, impulsive consumer. The contemporary American adult, meanwhile, submissively accepts the dismantling of his own authority, having absorbed over a lifetime the Baby-Boomer doctrine that the stern adult is always the bad guy. It occurs to me that an entire counterrevolutionary parenting philosophy is contained in the simple injunction to behave more like Rosalind Russell in The Trouble with Angels and less like Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame. Continue reading »

By David Ross. I notice that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is slated to appear in Woody Allen’s next film, Midnight in Paris, due out in 2011. For the first time in about twenty years, I feel a genuine impulse to eavesdrop on the suffocating repetition and solipsism of Allen’s once great, now moldering career.

I keep my eye on Carla Bruni not only because she is one of the most beautiful women in the world and it’s hard not to keep one’s eye on her, but because the hint of wit and personality makes her beauty fascinating. Who can resist the Cleopatran glamour of a comment like this:

“I grew tired of rocks stars. I wanted a man with his finger on the nuclear trigger.”

Musically, she has been tasteful but not timid, turning, for example, an obscure Yeats poem, “Those Dancing Days are Gone,” into a creditable shuffle. Yeats delighted in beautiful women. I’m sure his shade is amused and gratified.

For the full effect, however, Carla must be experienced in French. Her first album, Quelqu’un M’a Dit (2002) is particularly fetching (you can see her perform Raphaël here). She delivers the entire album in a breathy purr, as if whispering in your ear.

Bruni is not a weighty or ambitious artist, but she is a completely feminine artist. In the American musical tradition, by contrast, even the most demure maidens – Norah Jones, for example – have inherited at least a suggestion of the old blues salt, a certain existential bone to pick in the gruff tradition of Robert Johnson. I would not trade this blues sinew for all the kittenish purring in the world, but Bruni makes for a delicious change, as well as makes clear what, in part, it means to be American.

In related news, widely reported rumors have it that Bruni’s marriage to the French president has become, shall we say, modern. Only in France could the first lady and the president simultaneously carry on affairs while the nation watches in a mood of mild titillation and amusement.

[Editor's Note: rumors of the Bruni-Sarkozy simultaneous affairs remain unsubstantiated - although the folkloric appeal of these rumors seems potent to the French.]

[Editor's Note: picking up on the music theme from Steve Greaves' review below of the "Gemini Rising" web series, LFM contributor David Ross talks guitar movies today.]

By David Ross. Here is Guitar World’s list of the fifty greatest guitar-oriented albums. Any list that prefers Blizzard of Ozz to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland is, to say the least, mentally and emotionally defective.

We have still not caught up with Electric Ladyland. The twin monuments of “Voodoo Child” (the long version) and “1983″ are markers of rock at its farthest extreme of creativity, expressive freedom and jazz-like virtuosity, but I am equally stunned by what seem – at first blush – the album’s more modest tracks: “Crosstown Traffic,” “Long Hot Summer Night,” “Electric Ladyland,” “Gypsy Eyes,” “Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” “All Along the Watchtower.”  Each of these tunes is modest in comparison only to others on the album; on their own terms, they exceed in intricacy and originality and exuberant power just about anything ever done in the history of rock. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who never achieved anything like this dizzying, preternatural mastery.

In response to the stupidity of Guitar World, let me offer a brief list of guitar-related movies and concert films that are bound to interest the aficionado:

• Wes Montgomery: In Europe 1965 (1965)
• Devil Got my Woman (1966), featuring Skip James, Son House, etc.
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live at Monterey (1967)
• Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock (1969)
• Jimi Plays Berkeley (1971)
• Jimi Hendrix (1973), the standard biopic
• Joe Pass 75 (1975)
• John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and Paco De Lucia: Meeting of the Spirits (1979)
• Leo Kottke: Home & Away Revisited (1988)
• Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble: Live at the El Mocambo 1983 (1991)
• The Search for Robert Johnson (1992)
• Paco De Lucia: Light and Shade (1994)
• Led Zeppelin (2003), featuring a mélange of concert footage
• Tom Dowd and the Language of Music (2003)
• Jeff Beck: Live at Ronnie Scotts (2007)
• Les Paul: Chasing Sound (2007)
• It Might Get Loud (2008), featuring Jimmy Page, Jack White, and the Edge
• Remember Shakti: The Way of Beauty (2008), featuring John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain

Here is Jimi Hendrix in a unique performance on an acoustic twelve-string, from Joe Boyd’s 1973 documentary Jimi Hendrix.

I should particularly mention Meeting of the Spirits, which offers more or less undigested footage of Larry Coryell, Paco De Lucia, and John McLaughlin in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Those who associate the acoustic guitar with Peter, Paul, and Mary are in for a surprise: imagine instead a trio of F-22s engaged in precision maneuvers at multi-mach speed.  Coryell and De Lucia are consummate musicians, but McLaughlin, who is all but nerve-connected to the guitar, his left-hand so economical that it seems not even to move, is something else entirely.  During the long title cut – a version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra standard – he seems to enter a trance and channel strange melodies from beyond the realm of logic and reason.  Meeting of the Spirits leaves no question that only Jimi Hendrix has more deeply plumbed the possibilities of the guitar, and that McLaughlin belongs with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus in the starriest pantheon of post-bop jazz.  Meeting of the Spirits, by the way, was merely preparatory.  There followed an even more impressive McLaughlin-De Lucia-Al Di Meola collaboration, captured for posterity on the classic concert album Friday Night in San Francisco.

Thematics of emptiness: on the set of "The International."

By David Ross. I believe that we are witnessing Europe in its death convulsion. I have in mind Europe’s economic situation, which is worse than ours insofar as there’s no pro-growth, free-market, small-government solution waiting in the wings – but even more I have in mind its spiritual situation. Vastly admiring Children of Men (one of the most moving books I’ve ever read), I’ve been reading some of P.D. James’ mystery fiction. She brilliantly evokes the symptoms of spiritual decay: empty churches, childless couples, bureaucracies people dislike but nonetheless accept as faits accomplis, monuments and traditions that lurk as depressing wraiths of former glory. While living in the UK from 1996 to 2000, I remember picking up on this funereal aura and finding it very unfamiliar and unaccountable. Americans are simply not used to thinking of themselves as occupying the dying embers of history.

James, however, is detached from this dynamic: she observes it without embodying it and understands it only in terms of its external manifestations. She is like H.G. Wells’ Victorian time traveler, puzzled and appalled but in no position to philosophize the finer points of the situation she encounters. In his unnerving novel Elementary Particles (titled Atomised in the UK), Michel Houellebecq provides a full theory. In his historical scheme, the rational impulse arose as a kind of mutation in the cultural DNA of the West; rationalism promulgated scientific materialism; scientific materialism dismantled the structure of religious faith and negated all systems of meaning that transcend the self; the spiritual vacuum was filled by – could only have been filled by – an ultimately unsatisfactory and self-destructive hedonism and social atomism. If this scheme is familiar to the point of being trite, Houellebecq has a subtle feel for the texture of this reality (its brittle intellectualism, its flatness of affect) and a rigorous, dark instinct for the equivalency of all actions once they have been drained of anything except physical meaning. He is also particularly good at demonstrating how his philosophical premises play out in the individual case.

Juliette Binoche in "Cache."

Fancying itself on the cutting edge, film has institutionalized the post-modern manner, but its dabbling in glass and chrome set design, in the spectra of blue-grey, in fractured narrative, is usually nothing more than window dressing. Tom Tykwer’s The International (2009) is typical: a bland thriller involving the usual corporate conspiracy dressed up as post-modern statement. Far more to the point is Michael Haneke’s Caché (English title Hidden, 2005), in which a French literary pundit (on television, of course) suddenly begins to receive cryptically threatening letters and surveillance video of his own house. The film is an intricate cultural puzzle, but its most basic comprehension is that the post-modern bourgeoisie is resourceless to defend or even justify its existence – and that history, far from having ended, increasingly threatens the equilibrium of Europe’s culture of weakness and indulgence.

Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera from Superbad.

By David Ross. Back in the day, all kinds of people were plausibly brainy society girls like Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story, working girls like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday – but in our day the mind itself has been knocked from its pedestal, and ostentatious braininess or even quick-wittedness has become a form of social disease. The socially acceptable posture is an easygoing indifference to little things like knowledge, logic, and consistency (“Dude, take it easy, what’s the difference.”). All of this is implicit in the evolution of the 50’s egghead (object of bemused respect) into the 80’s nerd (victim of locker-room sadism and prom-night ridicule). Continue reading »