Category: Blogs

Note: This piece could be said to contain spoilers. At the worst, though, it could be said to presume too much knowledge of the film.

Though David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche has been lauded, and justifiably, for its acting performances, its cinematography, and its mellow, sweet mood, it tells another story, apart from a seemingly minimal tale of two highway workers in late 1980s Texas. This story is about both the meaning of work and the generation that will follow that of the film’s two protagonists. Prince Avalanche, in its quiet, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, vaguely Chekhovian way, points forward to a generation of the present, in its 30s and 40s, cast onto its own recognizance by an ailing economy, often self-employed, in a state of simultaneous freefall and perpetual opportunism–and yet, somehow, adapting to its circumstances.

Alvin (Paul Rudd) and his partner Lance (Emile Hirsch) have a job painting stripes on a highway, in a part of Texas ravaged by forest fires, in the summer of 1988. In order for this scenario to have meaning, you would have to think a bit about its context. America, in 1988, depending on (but possibly regardless of) who you talked to, was not a happy place. The economy, though it had experienced a surge in prior years, was about to go into a downturn, and by the time Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he would be able to use that economic situation as a stepping stone to get himself elected. The first Gulf War was not far off. By comparison with today’s hypersophistication, this was a far simpler time; email, for instance, was only a luxury of select academic institutions, making the ultimate importance of written letters to the lives of this film’s characters particularly poignant. The generation of people coming of age at this time would be christened Generation X, so named for their mystification at what to do with themselves, what route to follow, and towards what success. How appropriate, then, that Alvin and his partner have such a tedious, simple, and seemingly endless job, whose boundaries are both certain and uncertain. The stripes are ambiguous, as was the future of the country at this point: which way do the stripes point? Well, in a sense, like all such tasks in literature and film, the stripe-painting points outwards, at a larger situation. (Think, for instance, of the job the prison camp workers have in Life Is Beautiful: moving rocks from one place to another. Or, to make a slightly more obscure reference, consider the job James Spader and Mandy Patinkin have in the wonderful but little-seen The Music of Chance: building a wall, piece by piece, whose purpose is uncertain, under the eye of the millionaire played by Charles Durning. Or the the labor of the hapless victim in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”) Work for work’s sake, in such a circumstance, becomes as blank as it sounds.

And what of our context, the context in which the film is being watched? America is on its way to recovering from the one-two punch of the economic collapse caused by 9/11 followed by the collapse of the banks in 2008. Employment is said to be on the rise, but its rise is slow. So slow, in fact, that many American workers are without a desk; they work for themselves. Happily, in many cases, but always hungrily. Our government refers to these workers as entrepreneurs, but that is not necessarily what they are. Are they self-sufficient? Possibly. Do the trades they practice, ranging from web design to cooking to writing to food delivery, bear certain futures? Possibly. In the event of another drastic economic slide, will these people still have work? Possibly. Will the workers in Prince Avalanche still have jobs after the film ends? Possibly.

Rootlessness is embedded in the story at the film’s heart. Alvin is a seemingly rooted, determined, efficient worker; he teaches himself German for self-improvement (and to prepare for a vacation), as well as claiming to be enjoying the solitude and the simplicity of his job for the chance it gives him to contemplate the value of his relationship with Madison, his girlfriend, back home in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, TX. Rudd plays Alvin with a memorably rigid affect; he has quite often been funny but square in his previous films, and this role seems, if anything, a comment on those roles. Lance is far from rooted, seeming to have no plans but to sleep with women at any opportunity. Hirsch brings experience to this role, having been most notably seen in recent years as Alexander Supertramp, the youth who famously took off for Alaska, abandoning his belongings, attempting to live off nature, and failing, in Into the Wild. His character here is far less intelligent than Supertramp, but he has a similar mood of wildness in him. When Alvin’s girlfriend leaves him, he realizes his illusions of self-discipline have no value, and he becomes, like his partner, rootless and weightless at heart, letting loose. In one drunken flurry, the two workers paint wildly spiraling lines on the asphalt, rather than strictly measured stripes, and then dump their equipment in a ravine.

The supporting elements here do little to contradict the film’s portentousness. The workers periodically meet an elderly man in a pick-up truck who seems to have worked at their job in the past, spouting off, at one point, the number of stripes per mile; invariably, he offers them some of his homemade hooch, which they drink, later in the film, as a way to toast their freedom. He seems one part Falstaff, one part Ancient Mariner, another part Angel of History. Another odd figure, a woman both real and unreal, wanders through the ruins of a house destroyed by the fires. In what may be a dream, Alvin joins her, ultimately pantomiming the acts of coming home and greeting his girlfriend in the house’s ruins, as if to suggest that a certain way of life is on its way out: that of the stable home, the solid existence, established during the 1950s and carried on through the 1980s. These figures and scenes are rolled out with great austerity and moment, although Green applies his trademark gentleness to them, as well.

Perhaps it is over-ambitious to read too much into a quiet, quaint, sweet film like this. Perhaps its tale of a relationship between two men is, as has been suggested elsewhere, nothing more than that, an accomplishment in and of itself, a worthy hook on which to hang rhapsodic scenes of the Texas landscape, and in which to deploy the sorts of poetic, offhand lines this director has been known for since All the Real Girls. On the other hand, though, its temporal setting urges a more socially and historically aware reading, as do its symbols, all fairly obvious ones: the monotonous stripes; the highways which, as do all highways, point both ways; the scorched land, from which we can be sure more foliage will grow. One of the film’s final images would seem to seal the deal, thematically: that of children dancing, carefree, in the sun, little knowing that as they grow older, they will, like the film’s protagonists, struggle to make a path through a scorched economic landscape.    

Max Winter is the Editor-in-Chief of Press Play.

In a souped-up cinematic landscape of robots, superheroes and CGI, the
western and its dusty cowboy rides on—despite mixed results. Django Unchained and True Grit drew urbane audiences and accolades, but the turd that
was The Lone Ranger fell atop an ever
taller pile of manure. A ride through the celluloid cowboy’s evolution might
(almost) explain why Disney, in all its financial prowess, would gamble $225
million on a talking Tonto.

The cowboy figure found an immediate home in American
cinema. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—a circus-like cavalcade featuring crack
shot Annie Oakley and a parade of the planet’s finest horsemen (Native
Americans, Mongols, Turks, Gauchos, Bedouins, et al)—was a favorite subject of
early motion pictures. America’s first blockbuster, The Great Train Robbery (1903),
was a vivid cowboy heist pic that—113 years after its creation—makes me wince at
its grizzliest bits. Stuffed like too much sausage into a snug baby blue get-up,
the Lone Ranger and his grunting sidekick, Tonto, were successors to a long
line of serial pic cowboys that included wildly popular Red Ryder and singing
cowboy Gene Autry. Geared towards kids more than adults, these squeaky clean
“smooth-like-a-Ken-doll” cowboys were sermons in spurs, embodying virtue among
the cacti. They never drank, smoked, swore or winked at women. As America
entered WWII, the moral certainty of Ken Doll cowboys stoked our collective
fire of righteousness and racism, and painted us a history myth of preordained victory. 

The cowboy-iest cowboy films—such as Red
River, My Darling Clementine and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—were created
in the years immediately before and after WWII.  The films reflected the same nationalistic
righteousness as the serials, but they were made for adults—adults with the war
on their minds. So the heroes grew grander and more macho. Like Cowboy Kings, they
drank, gambled, fornicated, and shot up bad guys. They embodied bloodlust. The
West’s evolution into economic prosperity was the perfect allegory for America’s
expansion into the world economy. John Wayne in Red River wasn’t just driving his cattle to market; he was driving
the engine of American capitalism.

After WWII, male characters across every film genre began to change. It
was the birth of the anti-hero, and cowboys—despite their hyper-masculinity—were
not exempt. Like the returning servicemen themselves, they grew complex, jaded
and vulnerable. They’d seen things. Bad things. They were never looking for
trouble, but trouble always found them. Gary Cooper in High Noon, Glenn Ford in 3:10
to Yuma and Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance were reluctant to kill, but dammit,
sometimes a man needed killing. 

Though frozen in time and rigidly tethered to a landscape, westerns
changed. Goodbye, John Wayne—hello, James Dean, whose character in Giant (1956) morphs from a lowly cowboy roughneck
into a misanthropic oil tycoon (foreshadowing the Hearst-like figure of There Will Be Blood). In eight short years,
the myth of the self-made man transformed from John Wayne’s bold cattleman in Red River (1948) to Dean’s pathetic Jett
Rink, babbling drunk to a big empty room—effectively bucking the myth off its
high horse. These films are also referred to as revisionist westerns, but they
didn’t revise the formula or the history (the Earps won the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral [1957], like
they did in My Darling Clementine [1946], like they actually did in 1881)—cowboys simply evolved into more
three-dimensional characters.

In 1953, a new kind of cowboy rode into town—thanks to
the popularity of Shane: the Stranger. With
no personal history (sometimes, not even a name), the Stranger makes the world safe
for the little guy. He’s a cop without a badge, or, seemingly, a heart. After WWII,
many veterans were suffering from what we would eventually recognize as PTSD. They
felt estranged from their nuclear families and the entire American dream myth. The
Stranger has no bad memories because he has no history—he’s just a hobo with a
horse and a gun.

Throughout the 60s , the legitimacy of “legitimate” authority and a corrupt,
predatory system became an increasingly familiar theme in film: The Manchurian Candidate, Dr.
Strangelove, Z, M*A*S*H*, In the Heat of the Night, Serpico, Papillion, and Cool Hand Luke. Beamed straight into living rooms, footage
of the Vietnam War would allow Americans access to carnage unseen on our home
turf since the Civil War. And as the nation’s confidence of the 50s withered, the
western shifted its focus from the good guys to the bad guys. In Vietnam-era
westerns, we rooted not for the hero who saves the day, but for the cowboys with
convictions as broken as our own. They were second generation to the Stranger,
but many straight-up criminals who didn’t give a hoot about saving the day. Clint
Eastwood’s Man with No Name in Leone’s A Fistful
of Dollars takes money from the bad guys to kill other bad guys. A
veritable Möbius strip of killing. These cowboys prayed to no God, honored and obeyed
no woman, and toiled for no man. In films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Once Upon a Time in the West, The
Wild Bunch, The Long Riders and Young Guns, the message was simple: fuck
the system. 

Reflecting the brutality of the war, the violence and misogyny quotient shot
through the roof and depicted a raging river of murder and rape. Sam Peckinpah’s
Wild Bunch has been credited with
visually introducing Americans to the bullet hole, and in the first fifteen
minutes of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a
Time in the West, Henry Fonda (once a Cowboy King of Kings) shoots an
entire family, and one surviving little boy, dead. And oy vey—what’s with all the rape, High Plains Drifter, Josey Wales, et
al?! Poor Sandra Locke. If she was on a wagon train, rape was just over the hill. 

One of the marked recent shifts in the western has been in its portrayal
of the cowboy’s connection to family, and of the family unit. One episode of Bonanza
will tell you: once upon a time, family was the institution for which the
cowboy fought and the bedrock to which he returned. Myriad depictions of the
Earp brothers reflect the western’s preoccupation with kin. Gary Cooper embarked
on his epic battle in High Noon not to keep the townsfolk safe (they
were all cowards), but for his wife. Unable to sustain a family like the one he
fights for, Shane drifts on to points unknown. Estranged from their real
families, bad guys followed surrogate families of criminal gangs. Everybody had
a posse.

Unlike the Stranger, cowboys of the Vietnam era had backstories that
included their families. You either got a little taste, like Jason Robards in Once Upon a Time in the West (“You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother. She
was the biggest whore in Alameda and the finest woman that ever lived. Whoever
my father was for an hour or for a month . . . he must have been a happy man.”) or you got the whole horrific
enchilada, as in The Outlaw Josey Wales, when
the titular character’s wife and son are sadistically murdered on screen.

It’s remarkable that the untethered Stranger sustained so many popular
films, as backstory allows us to bond with a character, and he didn’t have one.
But once the cowboys collective’ backstories began to emerge, the picture that
developed was: family is a liability. It slows you down, makes you weak, and invites
heartbreak. In the FX series Justified, families are comprised of criminal
fuckups who will either shoot your ass or get you shot. Lead character U.S.
Marshall Rayland Givens is terrible
at sustaining familial relationships—he can’t even show up on time for his
pregnant wife’s sonogram appointment. They’re separated, by the way.

For example, Jesse James was the subject of
The Long Riders (1980) and The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), but the representation family in both films could
not be more different. The Long Riders stars four sets of siblings:
James and Stacy Keach as the James brothers; David, Robert and Keith Carradine
as the Youngers; Dennis and Randy Quaid as Ed and Clell Miller; and Christopher
and Nicholas Guest as the Fords. Director Walter Hill saw that the brothers’
bonds manifested on screen. The relationships were sources of solace and
invigorated the characters. The Keaches appeared in most scenes together.

In The Assassination… Frank
James, played by Sam Shepard, is rarely on screen, and when he is, he’s
isolated and anxious. Charlie Ford taunts his brother Robert, played by Casey
Affleck, sadistically—you can understand why the kid’s such a weirdo. Their
whole Ford family seems estranged, though cramped in their lonely farmhouse.
Sycophantic Robert looks to Jesse as a surrogate father figure. All the
characters look outside their families for  acceptance. In the poetic
opening sequence, the narrator says of James’ children, “They did not know
their father’s name.”

In Django Unchained, King
Schultz’s accent and dentist wagon provide a taste of his backstory. His
romantic fairy tales suggest that he has known love, maybe even family, but
he’s not looking back. So he’s a practical, successful killing machine. Like
Josie Wales, Django is burdened by his well-drawn past and visions of his
beloved wife Brunhilde beaten and raped. When King begins to feel obligations
as Django does—obligations to principal—he acts from his heart, and dies for
it.

Portrayals of women characters and their prominence in westerns are
(slowly) improving. But while their presence usually indicates a tighter familial
bond, they, too, struggle to lift the dead weight of their family units. In Meek’s Cutoff, Michelle Williams must act
against her husband and extended family to save them from death on the Oregon
trail—and they are not helping. Mags
Bennett on Season 2 of Justified is savvy enough to free her family from the poverty
of rural Kentucky, but also ruthless enough to shatter her son’s hand with a
hammer when he defies her. He deserved it.

Films like Meek’s Cutoff, The Lone Ranger and most notably Django Unchained signal a new age of
for-real revisionist westerns—ones that bestow acts of bravery, dignity and
heroism on characters who have never been western heroes (traditionally minor
ones)—especially women and people of color. By setting a gladiator movie (which
tracks a slave’s journey to emancipation via violence) in a western landscape, Tarantino makes of Django a new kind of cowboy—but with old roots. After he blows up the last of his enemies,
and is ready to ride off with his beloved Brunhilde, Django’s horse—for no
reason—does this little dance, like Trigger! As the corny background music
swells, Django becomes a full-fledged Ken Doll cowboy, albeit dressed way cooler.
Because Django’s origins were the lowliest, his rise is the stuff of classical mythology.
American cowboys—i.e. white guys—have known hundreds of years of supremacy, and
only a few dozen as failures, so their return to hero status would be a short,
probably boring flight. And since dastardly white guys continue to hunt us
little guys and gals for sport, it’s getting harder to root for them in any
capacity. 

Except as Losers, which may be the new black for white cowboys: busted men
overwhelmed by failure and loss. Like AMC’s Longmire—an
old school, taciturn, bad-ass Wyoming sheriff, driven to despair and drunk
driving over the death of his wife. Or Tommy Lee Jones in No Country For Old Men, haunted by mankind’s inexplicable brutality.
Or Tommy Lee Jones, again, in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Cuckoo!). On season 4
of Justified, two troubled, PTSD-plagued
veterans squared off in an episode-long ambush; both wore cowboy hats, but only one made it to season 5. They’re
all a far cry from heroes, unless heroism entails living “long after the thrill
of living is gone.” White cowboys aren’t dead, per se, but they might be,
reluctantly, considering Zoloft. The fun ones, like Rayland Givens, are real shits.

Which leaves the western hugely understaffed in the hero department, so minor
characters—who we can root for without ambivalence—are stepping up. Rapper Common
plays Elam Ferguson in AMC’s Hell on Wheels—a freed slave in league
with a former Confederate solider. But Ferguson’s no mere sidekick; he’s got
the brawn and brains, his own story
lines, and he gets his own nookie. Nookie’s very important. Tonto never got any
nookie. And unlike the 1969 original, the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit followed the book and its
intended hero—14 year-old Mattie Ross. 

In 1974, as the black sheriff of a white town, Black Bart in Blazing Saddles could’ve only been played
for laughs. Today, they might try to pull it off straight (or campy, a’la Wild Wild West), and it just might fly.
But the emerging formula for success seems to begin in realism—a historically
accurate premise, like Django, as opposed to an old stereotype smothered in CGI,
like Tonto. Blazing Saddles showed us precisely how dumb Tonto was by superimposing
his vocabulary onto a white guy named Mongo (short for mongoloid). 

Disney saw color when they should have been looking for character. Or at
least a script [Cue sound of Slim Pickens yee-hah-ing
as he rodeo-rides a nuclear warhead to oblivion].

Alas, it’s an evolution, not a revolution. The genre’s bedrock is
hyper-violence, racism and sexism. Portrayals of Native Americans—and Johnny
Depp playing Native Americans—and Johnny Depp playing cowboys alongside Native
Americans—is a whole other essay.

Jennifer
L. Knox is
the author of three books of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by
Noon, and A Gringo Like Me—all available from Bloof
Books—and Holliday, a chapbook of
poems written in the voice of Doc Holliday. Her writing has appeared in The
New Yorker, New York Times, and four
times in the Best American Poetry series. She is at work on
her first novel.

Decadism may be defined as a dependence on the decade—as a time-keeping unit and
also as a way of thinking about changing cultural mores and aesthetics. It’s an
American invention. Decadism is America’s great contribution to contemporary fashion
in the West, which is otherwise largely the product of Paris, capital of the 19^th
century. Throwing the concept of even vaguely gradual change (the subtle
raising and lowering of hemlines, the expansion or diminution of bodices, bustles,
sleeves, and pantaloons) out the window, America saturated its version of the
decade with consumable material and industrial specifics, architectural
silhouettes, ludicrous trends, and “it” items like the poodle skirt or bell-bottoms.
As Walter Benjamin noted, “Fashions are a collective medicament for the ravages
of oblivion. The more short-lived a period, the more susceptible it is to
fashion.” The decade of America’s speed-obsessed 20^th century—say
the 1920s, the 1970s, or the 1990s, take your pick—is just so damn precise, so
recognizable. In this sense, to talk about American decades and decadism isn’t just
nostalgic; it’s an exploration of the way in which changing tastes reflect other
societal variations and upheavals.

But things
have, as things will, changed. As networked technology propels us ever more
discernibly into an era simultaneously obsessed with sharable fashion imagery
and characterized by the international proliferation of microtrends that appear
and pass away with a blasé alacrity alarming to the traditional fashion
magazine, we’ve begun to witness the consolidation of a new nostalgia. This new
nostalgia is a longing for the old way of doing fashion, for—you guessed it—the
temporality of the decade. Our new nostalgia is decadism. We’re becoming decadist all over again! Decadism is now
not merely a sign of nostalgia for the decade in question. It’s a sign of
nostalgia for decade-based fashion and thinking in general, for a system for
organizing tastes based on the notion of the decade. In this sense, though the
word “decade” (from the Greek for “ten”) is etymologically unrelated to the
term “decadence” (associated with “decay”), decadism is rapidly replacing
decadence as a kind of gently reactionary aesthetic and experiential mode. We
live in a time of archive fever, of historical tourism (from Wikipedia to Drunk History Month), of “favoriting” and
all the other preferential tools the Internet holds. Decadism allows us a
return to a less particulate, niche, complex, and incessantly updated way of establishing
taste. Decadism is a respite—not just from the present but from the future.

One of the
best places to observe decadism, both old and new, is, of course, at the
movies. Decadism does very well on film (or video, as the case may be). The
decadist work is, however, not to be confused with the period piece, the
historical drama. While some historical dramas are also decadist films, not all
decadist films are historical dramas. Decadism requires a certain decorative saturation,
a certain studied inattention to elements
not intimately associated with aesthetics, such as plot. For example, the only
imaginable excuse for the canned, comatose travesty that is Baz Luhrmann’s
recent The Great Gatsby is the film’s
decadist pretensions. While Gatsby is
obviously not a historically accurate portrayal of the 1920s, the drive to
produce a total “era” of some jazzy, boozy, gilt-plated totalizing persuasion
explains what the professionals who participated in the making of this turd
could have been thinking. Decadism is a pursuit of its own, with its own terms
and grounds. Like Azealia
Banks’s video for “1991,” which brought back delicious notes of Crystal Waters, C+C Music
Factory, Deee-Lite, et al.—and even a little hint, to my mind, of the greatly
underappreciated King of New York (1990)—decadist
films revel in establishing a thickly described and even escapist visual environment.
All movies by John Waters (pre-1994) are decadist. Much of the work of Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, even when set in the present, is decadist; The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
(1972), for example, is a priori
decadist, with its rococo loathing for the decade yet to come. Wes Anderson is
very twee and a tiny bit decadist. Pedro Almodóvar could be the greatest
decadist colorist of all time. Much as I hate to admit it, James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) has a certain decadist
bent. Utopian and even futuristic films have connections to decadism; the
decorative pleasure they imagine is quite similar to the pleasures of decadism.
Decadism is, overall, a more or less weak form of camp, an environmental camp
offered to a viewing eye (apparently) deprived of aesthetic coherence. Decadism
is not about looking into the past, but rather about converting the past into a
slightly jokey, hokey, and even surreally vivid surface, so that the past
appears as something that is not only not
lost in the present, but as something we cannot lose.

For those
longing, then, for some deeply decadist viewing, here is my own eccentric list
of ten movies with serious, for better or for worse, decadismo:

10. Dick Tracy (1990):
Let’s get this early ’90s atrocity out of the way. At first you can’t remember
whether this movie isn’t just a series of outtakes from Madonna’s “Express
Yourself” video (which would probably make for a much better film), but then
there’s Al Pacino as a hunchbacked gangster and Warren Beatty as the uptight
dude who loves yellow outerwear. Standard-setting use of cheeseball noir and
deco elements, one must admit—though the fact that this was originally a comic strip
might have something to do with that. I feel like every movie I’ve ever hated
made over the past twenty-three years was somehow spawned by this lurid 3D
adaptation of stuff that works much better on the page.

9. Seven Brides For
Seven Brothers (1954): They live on the frontier, go a-barn raisin’, and
have alphabetized names from the Old Testament. Enough said.

8. Singin’ in the Rain
(1952): It’s not lost on me that the first three items on this list are all
American musicals of some persuasion. It’s not like there aren’t a bunch out
there (Mary Poppins (1964) and My Fair Lady (also 1964), for example, are actually guides to late-Victorian upholstery),
so it’s low-hanging fruit, but one has to recognize the meta-theatrical genius
of this adorably daffy and nicely costumed Gene Kelly vehicle about the origins
of “talkies.”

7. Picnic at Hanging
Rock (1975): Come for the white lace, stay for the sunbaked hysteria.
There’s a certain Stevie Nicks thing at work in this Australian film, a ’70s
exploration of the year 1900, with, among other things, questionably accurate
hair. Beyond the clothing, this ripped-from-the-headlines tale of disappearing
virgins plays on the period feminine ideal to disturbing effect.

6. A Single Man (2009):
We’re going back to the 1960s from 2009 now, because Tom Ford wants me to. This
one makes the list for the scenes where the immaculate Julianne Moore is
getting sloppy drunk in her residence—and for the lovingly shot architecture.
Thank you Tom for making us such a gorgeous, painstakingly realized fashion
eyewear advertisement! (Here we could also throw in Far From Heaven (2002), Revolutionary
Road (2008), and other tame
postwar recreations.)

5. In the Mood for
Love (2000): Soulful and slightly
sentimental where Jean-Luc Godard is precise and political, Wong Kar-wai is still
a genius when it comes to the portrayal of the world of things. I might like to
be reincarnated as Tony Leung’s pocket comb. I’m only halfway kidding about
that.

4. Interiors
(1978): This little-known Woody Allen gem is set in the present, which is to
say the 1970s, the time at which it was made, but truly it is one of the most
stylish films I have ever seen. I could care less about the angst-y narrative
of Mother and Father’s broken marriage, but oh, those rooms! Those vases!

3. House (1977):
Admittedly, I’m cheating again, but this has to be about the most aesthetically
specific movie of all time. Actually, I think it’s about cutting-edge fashions
of 1983? Nobuhiko Obayashi makes us
consider what happens when day-glo innocence is threatened by low-budget
funhouse sadism, with just a touch of real horror (blood, wet hair). This movie
also reminds me a lot of the way cats are currently portrayed online.

.

2. Behind the
Candelabra (2013): Dear Powers That Be, I want you to know that I never
really “got” Matt Damon until I saw him with this many noses. Holy shit, this
is one of the greatest decadist films of all time and it only just appeared!

1. I recant. As I pause to think about it some more, the
truly, purely, absolutely decadist film actually portrays its own present. From
People on Sunday (1930) to E.T. (1982), only the most deeply cut
trace of the present can make for an intensely decadist experience. Thus, it’s
without shame that I say that my favorite
decadist film also mostly reflects its own present. This is Daisies (1966), about two girls who have
fun and do a “fashion show” that involves slowly prancing over a banquet table,
squishing the food, and removing some, though not all of, their modish,
mass-produced clothes.

Lucy Ives was born in New York City in 1980, received an AB from Harvard College, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
and is currently completing a PhD in Comparative Literature at New
York University. She has lived outside the U.S. for extended periods in
Hirosaki, Japan, and Paris and has studied French, German, Greek,
Japanese, and Latin, among other languages. She is the author of the
books Orange Roses (Ahsahta Press, 2013), Nineties (Tea Party
Republicans Press, 2013), Anamnesis (Slope Editions, 2009), and the
chapbook My Thousand Novel (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2009). She is a deputy editor at Triple Canopy.