Movies:
Hall Pass (Bobby and Peter Farrelly, 2011): It’s in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Crucified Lovers (1954) that a maid, upon seeing another woman crucified for cheating on her husband, cries out that there is an evident double standard when it comes to public scrutiny of the lovers. Hall Pass, by the Farrelly Brothers (whose movies I’d never seen before this one), positions itself as a critique of this double standard by following a pair of dolts (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) whose overworked and underappreciated wives grant them a “hall pass”: One week to do whatever, or screw whoever, they want. Quickly, the men’s inflated confidence is beaten down by the harsh realization that they bring absolutely nothing to the table when it comes to seducing ladies at Applebee’s.
Over the course of one night, the encounter with their own incompetence brings both men back to their wives, tails hanging between their legs. Meanwhile, their wives have respective flings only to likewise realize that there is an undeniable comfort in that uninteresting and uninterested guy that they married, who doesn’t contribute to housework or care work or anything at all, except for the reminder of who he once was when they were in college. This is a film that proposes that the double standard of infidelity can be overridden by the holy covenant sealed by that ring, if each party only took marriage seriously enough. “Well, marriage is a two-way street,” seems to be the logic here, as the film implicates both husbands and wives for not appreciating each other with only the slightest acknowledgment of patriarchy that is too entrenched in its “man dumb, woman bitch” binary to count as self-criticism. It is a sad movie.
Public Enemies (Michael Mann, 2009): Public Enemies, like Manhunter (1986) and Miami Vice (2006), is about a man whose life jumps between the two poles of lust and labor. Both involve some sexy thrill that makes it impossible to quit. (Mann, I’ve noticed, is pretty explicit in the continual suggestion that men’s Achilles heel is their tendency to meet a pretty lady and immediately get lost in the sauce.) In this film, the Mann man of big muscles and bruised heart takes the form of the bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp, with that totally empty stare). Flat digital landscapes—when you see a forest shot like this, you realize that everything is grain—and an equally flat Johnny Depp overwhelms Public Enemies with stiffness. Dillinger toting a huge gun and wearing an expensive outfit to rob a bank is an overcompensating performance; it neither saves him nor his girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). It is much like Dancer in the Dark in that once the juvenile song and dance subsides, the naive, individualistic fantasy of a purchased freedom is totally torpedoed by the law.
J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011): I saw this film the day before Public Enemies. Of course, both feature J. Edgar Hoover. I’m not particularly invested in parsing through Eastwood’s conservatism. What did especially irk me, however, is the film’s suggestion that Hoover’s (Leonardo Dicaprio) repression of his gay desires functions as the bedrock of his retaliation against adversaries like communists, anarchists, and civil rights activists. The little guy becomes the head honcho, the big boy who takes down his bullies. This is a homophobic fantasy of closeted-ness that comes from all around (for instance, the many cartoons suggesting that Trump and Putin are gay lovers), which scapegoats sexuality as an individual identity over the tangible, violent long-term actions borne from politics. And I don’t say that to defend Hoover against a misrepresentation, but to point out that Eastwood depends upon this tired device and its appearance of nuance to distract from the straightforward truth of Hoover’s character. J. Edgar Hoover did not bring about an unprecedented rise in federal surveillance of revolutionaries or send an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. telling him to kill himself because perhaps he wanted to wear his mother’s pearls as a little boy, or because maybe he was in a relationship with his protege Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). It was because he was a fascist.
I did not set out to watch the film so that I may be convinced otherwise. Sneaky omissions (notably, the actions of COINTELPRO are condensed and watered down to a handful of anti-MLK deeds) aside, J. Edgar does feature a breathtaking gothic color palette of navy blue, military green, and the speckled peach-toned grey streaks across some of the worst prosthetic makeup I have ever seen in my entire life.
Books:
I finished Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. I remember when I was eleven I found a smooth red rock on the soccer field after school, and I developed this habit of rolling it against my palm and rubbing against what I’d assumed were new ridges every time. I’ve formed a similar compulsion with this book, which I can’t say I really enjoyed but which was one of the very few novels I’ve read in years that made me feel curious. It left me with dissatisfaction and ambivalence, and I am obsessed. I cannot stop thinking about it, this enthusiastically fallacious and self-conscious book, written by a prodigious 24-year-old Delany and which won the Nebula award in 1967.
A linguist-poet is assigned with the task of translating the shadowy language of a brilliant terrorist; this project is Delany’s own measurement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language determines thought) as author. There’s an honest optimism (these words already arrive with their own cliches when placed together but I’ll take that risk) with which Delany constructs a short but narrow bridge between language and truth, and at its center, love. And of course, the writing is impeccable.
My copy included an introduction by Adam Roberts, who notes that “it would be a mistake to dismiss the novel as overwritten; or more precisely, it would be a mistake to think that the overwriting is gaucheness to be overlooked or excused. […] There is more than youthful bravado to this: the richness of style here continually foregrounds the medium of the tale. Novels, Delany is saying, are not made out of ideas, or characters, or stories: novels are made out of words.” To add to that last point, I’d posit that Delany is not exactly overwriting to draw attention to words as words (as objects), but through the more flamboyant, lyrical, or symbolic prose, he pushes the threshold of the imagination and in doing so points to the limitations placed upon words by a rigid tradition of grammar. Here are two sentences that I find to be a bit typical if skimmed but in fact so rich and emblematic of Delany’s stylistic endeavor, which is best in its gentlest forms:
Ron, shadowed and brushed with leaves, sat in the corner of the balcony, hugging his knees. Skin is not silver, she thought, yet whenever I see him that way, curled up in himself, I picture a knot of white metal.
Rhythmic with perfectly calculated and arranged rhymes, and then there is what Roberts describes as the “jarring” insertion of odd terms or phrases: The figure is “brushed” with leaves. The short U of “brushed” brings to mind a downturned movement, so one could picture the leaves floating from above through strands of hair, like maybe the caressing fingers of a taller person (Ron, as we learn, has two older romantic partners, with whom he works as a team on a spaceship; here, they’re everywhere, in the sky and in the trees). “Skin is not silver” is an obvious point to start the sentence, so we’re drawn in by the familiar of the agreeable, and then rather cinematically, there’s a cut: “Yet […] I picture”—warm skin to cold surface, “a knot of white metal.”
The next novel I’ve started is J.G. Ballard’s Crash. Meanwhile I continue to sift through a pile of things, constantly switching about. Novels function as a necessary comfort zone to anchor some consistency, so that at the very least I am reading anything at all.
Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes on the set of A Woman Under the Influence.
Recent writings:
I wrote an essay on Kenji Mizoguchi’s compositional logic (his use of three-dimensional space as it pertains to the politics within his oppression narratives) as seen in the films of his late career for MUBI.