Vivian Maier, Mystery Woman and Master Photographer

Vivian Maier, Mystery Woman and Master Photographer

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“I am the mystery woman,” Vivian Maier
says when asked her name by a child in one of her home movies, and she remains a
mystery to us today. Little is known about the specific details of Maier’s life,
despite her great photographic talent and tremendous physical presence, described
(albeit with exaggeration) as masculine, seven-feet in height, and walking with
a commandeering stride. Born in New York in 1926, Maier spent much of her youth
in France, and then later, after working in New York City sweatshops, she moved
to Chicago, where she worked as a nanny for nearly forty years. Other than this
skeletal history, the details are scattered and sparse. To one acquaintance she
described herself as being “sort of a spy,” and to businesses she patronized
she would give permutations of her name as identification. And yet paradoxically,
given this intensely private woman’s attempt to conceal the details of her
personal life, the incredible body of photographic work she left behind is now
receiving international recognition.

Is this the legacy that Maier would
have wanted? Likely not, given the way she guarded her privacy when she was
alive. This photographic evidence would have been dispersed and forever escaped
our notice if not for John Maloof’s good eye and brilliant luck in purchasing a
case of her photographic negatives at auction, or his tenacity in both
gathering physical evidence and, like a detective, meticulously piecing together
a story from the items that she collected. And so, with the release of Maloof’s
film, Finding Vivian Maier, come
looming questions—would Maier have wanted this? And, how self-serving is
Maloof’s ambition? The former was asked of the subjects who knew Maier best
(which still was not very well) and their response was unequivocally “no,” she
would have loathed the attention. The answer to the latter question is more
ambiguous. The film is a paean to Maier’s work, but it’s also a documentation
of the director’s own quest to reconstruct her identity and retroactively
position her work alongside that of photographic giants like Arbus and Avedon.
Uncovering Maier’s work has become Maloof’s obsession, and for now, it’s also become
his life’s work.

Maloof is on a quest to uncover an
identity that explains Maier’s enigmatic practice, but in so doing, he seems a
bit enigmatic himself: “You always want to know who is behind the work,” he states,
as if this is the only justification he needs to publicly reveal and make sense
of the traces Maier left behind. He’s made it his mission to “find” Maier, to
make sure that her estate is preserved the “right” way, and he says that he has
been “pushed” into this role of curator of her work. While this at first sounds
believable, and Maier’s body of work is arresting, deserving of attention, it
is hard to believe that Maloof has merely been “pushed”: he also seems terribly
ambitious. Even though he questions what Maier would have wanted, the answers
he’s given—that she would not have wanted the personally directed public
attention—don’t seem to weigh heavily on him. All for art’s sake might be Maloof’s motto. But of course, there remains
the looming question of what Maloof stands to gain from this: it seems like a
great deal. On the one hand, Maloof’s enthusiasm is seemingly borne of good
intentions. On the other, his posthumous discovery of Maier’s work, combined
with her lack of descendants and close friends to vie for control of it, means
he stumbled upon a treasure with no strings attached. And so, there are really two
stories being told in Finding Vivian
Maier: that of Maier the enigma, of reveling in her art while constructing
a narrative to stand beside it; and that of Maloof’s curatorial pursuit to
preserve Maier’s work, to sell her work, and to establish her relevance within
the art world—and through her relevance, his own significance.

Vivian Maier walked through the
world with a camera around her neck. As a nanny she took long strolls with her
charges, and they accompanied her on adventures through rundown areas of town—the
stockyards, abandoned lots, city streets. She falls in to the category of photographer
as flâneur,
as Susan Sontag identifies in On
Photography: “an armed version of the solitary walker, reconnoitering,
stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers
the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” It seems Maier developed her
practice on the street, too. She had no formal schooling, and yet she had developed
a brilliant eye for composition and lighting, a sense of humor, and a capacity
for the grotesque, as well as a flare for capturing intimate gazes on film. Her
eye for the eccentric and offbeat, framed exquisitely, made for an arresting
image. As a person, Maier was eccentric, opinionated, didn’t trust men, followed
the news and politics, and was quite brave despite her reserve, traveling the
world on her own. But as a poor woman—“too poor to die,” she claimed—working as
a live-in nanny meant that shelter and amenities were built into her job, and
this, along with her vast solitude, gave her freedom and autonomy to pursue her
photographic work, and this work comprised her life.

She left behind her over 100,000
negatives, nearly 1,000 undeveloped rolls of film, as well as cassette recordings
and short films. She also had tendencies toward hoarding, such as saving
towering stacks of newspapers for articles she wanted to read and accumulating
piles of insignificant receipts (then placing them all in storage). It’s as if
Maier’s connection to material objects in some way compensated for her lack of
intimacy with any other people besides the children she tended. The intimacy
and humor in her photographs is undeniable. And yet it seems as if Maier never
had any intention of showing these images publicly, or even sharing them with
the families she lived with. In our hyperconnected state, with Instagram and myriad
forms of social media, this is an unthinkable idea. So, we’re told that Maier
sold herself short, that something was wrong with her.

Perhaps. Perhaps Maier would’ve
been acknowledged as one of the greats if she had sought to show her work.
Maloof gets caught up with this question of why Maier was so prolific and yet so
private. And while it’s a conundrum, it’s also disconcerting to think that something
was wrong, in that Maier had an extensive practice that she didn’t try to
profit from. Maier’s lack of wealth and status may have made it difficult to show
work and have it taken seriously. And also, given that she was an eccentric woman
without connections who made work starting in the ‘50s—would she really have been
embraced by the commercial art world? It seems that she didn’t lust after this
recognition, and she didn’t think it an option, either. Maier acknowledges in a
letter she wrote to a French photo developer that she was difficult to deal
with. But there’s also the possibility that, for Maier, the work was enough.

As we look at the images—filled
with soft gazes, drunks passed out on stoops, knowing glances, so many faces,
some disfigured, some dazzling—it becomes apparent that photography was one of
the few ways Maier truly engaged with the world.  It’s almost as if she found comfort in the
distance that comes with standing behind the lens. This allowed for the brief
intimate exchanges she had in her pictures. She was endowed with the power of
the gaze while not having to give any of herself up. In this space, even an
outsider and eccentric could discover moments of intimacy.

Susan Sontag discusses the distance
and voyeurism inherent to photography: “The whole point of photographing people
is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them. The
photographer is a supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting
natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear. The
photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to
look at subjects.” Sontag is talking about Diane Arbus’ work, but it’s just as
relevant to Maier’s here. Photography provided Maier with a form of intimacy
and experience gathered vicariously, through watching others. These others “are
to remain exotic, hence ‘terrific.’ Her view is always from the outside.” And
that’s just it: Maier was always on the outside looking in. And she always took
photos—even when it seemed callous, such as when one of the children we tended
was hit by a car: she turned the camera on him and kept filming.  It seems to be a way she mitigated the chaos
of the external world.  And as an
impoverished, eccentric woman Maier perhaps saw herself within the people she
captured, too. She captured many images of herself: often refracted, at oblique
angles, always solitary except when accompanied by a child, or as a shadow lurking
over the scene.

This inability to enter the world
is not unique to Maier—but she was closed off in such an extreme way, and made so
much work, that it is remarkable that her incredible talent remained so
well-hidden. Poet Mary Ruefle identifies this inability as inherent to the
poet, too: “There is a world that poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world
everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets have in common is their
desire to enter this world.” In this sense, Maier is a true poet, and by poet I
mean artist, photographer, woman with a singular vision. Perhaps her extreme
need for privacy created the very tension that drove Maier to document so much.
And yet, here I am falling prey to hypotheses and opinions, attached to my own idea
of Vivian Maier, reconstructing her narrative in a different light than Maloof,
but still just as much a fabrication.

Maloof is a curator—and with his
meticulous sense of detail, his strong inclination toward achievement and
connection, and his eye for the market, he’s also extremely shrewd. But he’s
something of a conquistador, too, claiming Maier’s work, in a sense, and making
the recognition of her work his mission, when perhaps it’s just enough that her
work is seen. Maier herself would probably recoil from her growing celebrity. Her
philosophy of life is, surprisingly, rather communal, as she said on tape: “It’s
a wheel—you get on, you go to the end, and someone else has the same
opportunity to go to the end, and so on, and somebody takes their place.
There’s nothing new under the sun.” The wheel of fortune spins around, Maier’s went
down, and in her descent brought Maloof up with it again. There’s nothing new
in that either.

 “The new creativity is pointing, not making,”
claims poet Kenneth Goldsmith. “Likewise, in the future, the best writers will
be the best information managers.” And following his logic, the best artists
will be the best curators. In this sense, Maier’s extensive body of work is the
perfect discovery for Maloof, who now identifies as a filmmaker and
photographer—Maier was a prolific artist whose life is a mystery, whose posthumously
discovered work echoes that of other great photographers of her era, and whose
prints can be multiplied and distributed. We can read into her what we want,
and with Finding Vivian Maier’s
widespread release, this seems to be just the beginning of the making of
Maier’s personal mythology. But perhaps we’ve already found all we need by
looking at her photographs.

Anne K. Yoder’s fiction and nonfiction have
appeared in The Millions, Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other publications. She
has received fellowships from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
and the Summer Literary Seminars. She currently lives in Chicago.

Second Sight: How Channel-Surfing, an iPod, and PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED Restored a Movie Critic’s Eyesight

Second Sight: How Channel-Surfing, an iPod, & PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED Restored My Eyesight

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The comfort you find in routine can, at times, be
overwhelming. You turn on your computer for the first time in weeks to check
your e-mail. You have hundreds of unopened e-mails in your inbox, but it’s one
of the most recent ones that catches your eye. It’s an invitation to a
promotional screening. You haven’t been to a movie, let alone a promo
screening, since mid-December. You accept the invitation, explaining to the PR
person why you’ve been dormant for the last seven weeks. You get dressed for
the first time where the destination isn’t a doctor’s office. The ride in the
car is mostly quiet, the radio providing most of the entertainment. Certain
turns on the highway seem familiar. Yes,
we turn right, then left, then right again. You walk into the theater and
the sound of people rushing to the concession stand or their assigned
auditorium washes over you. You remember that most promo screenings are either
in screen 9 or 8, and without missing a beat, the ticket-taker says your
screening is in screen 8. Your party gets allowed in first, annoying the people
still waiting to be let in. (Ahh, the perks of being with the press.) You walk
down to the very front row and take a seat. The screen is huge. You had
forgotten how big the screen was. You wonder how much will you see? Will it be
better than before? The lights go down and, for a brief moment, you panic.
Darkness is something you’ve come to associate with dread, not joy.

I have a friend who rejects the notion of using New Year’s
as some kind of line of demarcation. You don’t need the start of a new calendar
year to start over. Every day provides an opportunity to start anew. This
sounds perfectly reasonable, but I confess the events of this past New Year’s
Eve led me to believe that only ominous things lay ahead for me. I was in my
home office, catching up on end-of-the-year reading, thinking about my year-end
top 10 list, and generally taking it easy. I was really procrastinating because
I had a couple of deadlines hanging over me. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street had just come
out and I was starting to gather my thoughts on a piece about Scorsese being a
director of comedy. I had just spent the last couple of weeks watching every
Scorsese movie in chronological order, which is something I do every time a new
Scorsese movie comes out. It was seeing GoodFellas
at age 11 that made me want to be a critic. I was always a rabid watcher of
television and movies, but Goodfellas was
the first movie where I knew I had seen something different. I became obsessed
with every facet of the movie. I went out and bought the soundtrack on cassette
(!), which began my lifelong obsession with pop music. I also studied the
evolution of gangster movies, as 1990 saw the release of Dick Tracy, King of New York,
Miller’s Crossing, and The Godfather Part III. (To this day my
two favorite movie genres are Gangster and Musical.) I talked and wrote about
the movie constantly. I knew I was still too young to fully comprehend its
themes of Catholic guilt and loyalty, but I kept trying to figure them out.
(I’m still trying.) I soon realized that criticism, be it of movies, music,
television, literature or any other form of entertainment, allows you to work
through your emotional responses to what you experienced, and by doing so you
are bringing into focus the reader’s own emotional responses. It was through
critical writing that I was able to see the
world more clearly. I chose to be a movie critic instead of a music critic
because movies got to me first. As I arrived at this choice, I never really
dwelled on the inherent contradiction of being a blind movie critic. (To be
completely accurate, I was born blind, but through numerous operations as a
child, I now have extremely limited eyesight.) I guess the sight of seeing
someone walk into a theater with a white cane in one hand and a movie ticket in
the other is a little …odd? The inability to register how others see you can be
both a blessing and a burden.  

I was also applying to journalism graduate school with the
intent to concentrate on criticism. The deadline was January 4th,
and all I needed to do was write a couple of essays. It was 5:30pm, and I just
opened my Word document to hammer out one of the essays. I got up and went to
the kitchen to get a drink of water and talk to my sister-in-law. I was away
from my computer screen for no more than 15 minutes, but when I returned the
text of the Word document was all blurry. I couldn’t read a thing. I thought
maybe it was my monitor. I turned to the CCTV I have on my desk. (A CCTV is a
large monitor with a camera shoved up its midsection that allows me to place
any kind of written materials on a tray in order to magnify it for reading.) I
had just received the Criterion Blu-ray of Michael Mann’s Thief and it was still sitting underneath the monitor. I turned on
the CCTV and flipped over the Blu-ray so I could read the text on the back
cover. No luck. Concern, not panic, washed over me. Maybe I was just
overworked. I informed my brother of this development and we agreed that I
should shut things down and rest. Seeing as all my doctors are in Houston and I live in San Antonio (and
going to an ER on New Year’s Eve held zero appeal), I hoped things would
improve in the morning.

Morning came and there was no improvement. Everything was a
blur. I could tell if there was light but not much else. When I looked at the
Christmas tree all the lights were just one blurry glob. The blinking red star
atop the tree became a blinking red splash of color. I called the on-call
doctor in Houston and she offered to open the office if my brother and I were
willing to make the trek. We put our heads together and decided it was
necessary to make the trip. We figured the problem was one of three things: 1.)
my eye pressure had gone way up, 2.) my cornea was rejecting, or 3.) my retina
had detached. We took comfort in the fact that all three of these things could
be treated. (As it turned out, we were wrong. )

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The on-call doctor took my pressure and turned out not to be
that high. The first thought was maybe the cornea was rejecting. (I had had my
third cornea transplant back in 1996.) My brother and I had prepared to stay
overnight and come back first thing in the morning when the office would open
for business. The next morning the cornea expert ordered an ultrasound of my
left eye. It turned out there was a massive amount of blood in my left eye and
they couldn’t tell if my retina had detached. It looked as if it was still
attached, but didn’t know for sure. We were referred to a retina specialist in
San Antonio who would be better equipped to help me. I was also told that I
should just rest because it was going to take time for the blood to dissolve.
It was January 2nd,
and I realized that this was something that wasn’t going to resolve itself in a
couple of days. It was at that moment I decided to let go of the idea of finishing
my applications to grad school. I just knew that whatever was happening, trying
to carry on and finish an application was simply impractical. Surprisingly,
this didn’t get me too down. Sometimes being forced to let something go can be
a good thing.

An appointment was made for Wednesday the 8th. My doctor turned out to be one of the best retina doctors around. Nevertheless, It
was a long and intense appointment. The fact that it was my first appointment
meant I had to provide an extensive and detailed rundown of my medical history.
Being born with Glaucoma, multiple surgeries, cornea transplants, and much more
were discussed. I realized halfway through giving my history that I’d been
through a lot. I was stunned that things had gone so well for so long. I
remember having the thought that maybe I was lucky my vision had lasted this
long and this blurriness meant things were finally shutting down. I also
realized this was the first major development with my vision without my mom
taking charge. As she had passed six-and-a-half years ago, I hadn’t had to deal
with any kind of medical emergency without her knowing all the answers. With my
older brother now taking point, it hit me: the possibility of losing my vision
meant I was going to have to take charge. I flashed forward to an image of
myself as a blind old man and was having to get around without any assistance. Fear
settled in.

Another ultrasound was done and it showed that there was a
lot of blood and also floaters in my eye. Dr. Mein referred to it as “trash,”
and that he needed to first clean out the trash before he could truly determine
if my retina was attached or not. An out-patient procedure was scheduled for
the following Thursday. (“Out-patient procedure” is a more soothing way of
saying “operation.”) As a kid I would literally get sick to my stomach the
night before an operation.  While I
didn’t get sick, I did regress to that level of dread. I knew the procedure was
necessary. My vision had deteriorated so badly that I could no longer see the
blinking red star on the Christmas tree. At one point my vision had gone all
pinkish-red due to the amount of blood in my eye. I dreaded nighttime. I slept
lightly because the act of waking up in the dark when you knew it was daylight
was pretty rough.

The morning of my eye procedure was also the day the
nominations for the Oscars were announced. My brother read me the list while we
waited to be called to get prepped. I wondered if I would get my vision back in
time to watch the telecast. I was excited that The Wolf of Wall Street got nominated, and then realized I might not get a chance to see a Scorsese movie for a second time in theaters. I
always see a Scorsese movie at least two or three times in a theater. Was it
going to be the last Scorsese I would actually see?

By the time they came to wheel me away I told my brother,
“I’ll be right back.” I was awake for the entire procedure. They numbed my eye,
then they put a speculum under my eyelid in order to keep it open. (Think Alex
in A Clockwork Orange minus the
ultraviolence.) My vision became like an out-of-focus animation cell. I figured
I was staring into the light. I started to see these Tylenol-red lines floating
around. I assumed it was the blood in my eye. Then, I would hear this bzzz sound, and the red would go away.
Dr. Mein didn’t play music but I thought I heard some soothing ambient noise.
His voice was calming as he whispered to the other people in the room. He was
good at whispering to such a degree that I couldn’t make out anything he was
saying. You know that old saw about when you lose one sense the other four are
heightened? It’s mostly true, but not in a David-Strathairn-in-Sneakers kind of way. You become acutely
sensitive to every sound or ache or surface—and you usually assume something’s
wrong. You retreat into your mind, and that’s not always a good thing. I
remember at one point during the procedure, I flashed back to High Jackman’s
final scene in Prisoners. One of my
favorite movies of 2013, the movie is all about a survivalist who is constantly
preparing for the worst-case scenario, and when it comes he realizes being
prepared is not the same as being ready. I realized that I was always prepared
in the back of my head of going blind, but now, in the middle of surgery, I
realized I was far from ready.

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The procedure went well. The doctor got rid of the “trash,”
and it looked as if my retina was still attached, but we didn’t know to what
extent the damage had been done to my eye. I had come to realize that Dr. Mein
never tipped his hand in getting your expectations up. Every piece of good news
was delivered with a cautionary warning. The retina was attached, but we had to
also make sure the cornea didn’t reject and my eye pressure stabilized. There
were a lot of moving parts that needed tending to. (At one point I was told
that the eye is one of the slowest things to heal in the human body.) My family
became like the family at the end of Silver
Linings Playbook: we were excited with scoring a 5 instead of a 10. We had
to wait a few days before determining what else could be done. It turned out I
had what is known as a choroidal, which meant that the connecting tissue
between the retina and the sclera had torn. This required a gas bubble to be
injected into my eye. The purpose of the bubble was for it to push the tissue
back up against the retina. This meant I had to bend over at a 90 degree angle
every 15 minutes out of every hour I was awake. (Think getting prepared for
impact when a plane is going to crash.) I could also kneel over a footrest to
achieve this position. Luckily I didn’t require a full gas bubble. If I did, I
would’ve had to lay on my stomach 45 minutes out of every hour for weeks. The
bubble I got took up about two-thirds of my field of vision. The bubble
consisted of a neon-pink border surrounding a darker circle that surrounded a central
circle that is supposed to provide a hole to see out of. It’s like looking
through a circle of dirty water. Before the bubble I couldn’t see anything.
Now, all I could see was this bubble.

And so it went. I developed a new routine that gave me a
little bit of structure. January went by slower than a Bela Tarr movie. It
became Good Morning America followed
by Live with Kelly and Michael followed
by The View followed by CNN.
Sometimes I would change things up and listen to The Price is Right. I say “listen” because I couldn’t make out
anything on the TV screen. The afternoon consisted of The Ellen DeGeneres Show followed by Jepoardy!. The end of Jeopardy!
signaled that evening was about to start which meant nighttime. With my
brother and sister-in-law at work and my niece at school, I had to rely on my
memory to remember which channels were which. I surfed for anything that would
distract me. I became an armchair expert on the Michael Dunn trial. (Sadly, I
called the verdict the moment I heard his bullshit testimony.) I looked for
movies to listen to that were light in tone so I wouldn’t have any dark
thoughts or images in my head. Stripes was
a good one. I had seen it so many times growing up that I could practically see
it in my head. One night my brother came across The Shining and I made him change it. I didn’t need those endless tracking shots swirling in
my head. I remember thinking is this what I have to look forward to if my
vision doesn’t improve? The thought of going out to the movies and attempting
to be part of the critical conversation became an alien notion. What’s the
point of going to a Scorsese or a Fincher or a Nolan or a Malick if you can’t see it? I called my sister at one point,
and trying to put a positive spin on the situation, I said, “I guess I can
become a rock critic.”

The weekends were marked by awards shows and the NFL playoffs.
I listened to the Grammys, the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards, and
the SAGs. I became detached from the proceedings. Not being able to read or
type meant I was unable to engage on social media. I wondered if I ever would
again. I knew technology for the blind allowed for talking computers that read
the onscreen text, but things like Facebook and iTunes were not very blind
friendly. Would I ever make a playlist again? I know there are more important
things than managing your iTunes library, but the prospect of not being able to
do the things you do without thinking was the first thing that popped into my
head. Some friends would call and let me know what was happening in the real
world. That’s how I was able to keep up with the yearly Armond White fiasco and
how the Ebert doc was being received at Sundance. I thought about Ebert a lot,
and how he managed to preserve his critical voice long after he lost the
ability to speak. Would I be able to do the same? I had cornered the market on
blind movie criticism, not realizing it was a one-of-a-kind skill set. 

I tried to visualize what
I was hearing. The new seasons of Girls
and Justified started, and the
very verbal natures of these shows allowed me to construct the blocking and
settings in my head. On the days my dad would come over to keep me company,
we’d watch Justified and listening to
Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder do his soft-spoken intimidation of people provided
some fleeting moments of relief. True Detective
was more difficult. With its Sam Shepherd-meets-Jeff Nichols “poetic”
dialogue, its back-and-forth structure, and its backwater setting, I knew I
wasn’t experiencing the whole story. I intuited that the pregnant pauses, the
sideways glances, the visuals were a
major part of the story. (I stopped watching after three episodes.)

I then remembered an essay by my friend Ian Grey about his
recovery after a major accident and how movies and music saved him. I grabbed
my ipod, and after using the sound of the clicking wheel in order to guess
which “Artist” I was selecting, I started to listen to music. The media
coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of The Beatles coming to America prompted
me to revisit Beatles for Sale and my
personal favorite, Rubber Soul. The
Stones’ Emotional Rescue and
especially side two of Tattoo You were
on a constant loop. (The Prince-like ballad “Worried About You” from Tattoo is a particular favorite.) I
reconnected with The Kinks’ second record, Kinda
Kinks, with “Nothin’ In This World Can Stop Me Worryin’ “Bout That Girl,”
“Never Met A Girl Like You Before,” and “When I See That Girl of Mine” being
highlights. One day I stayed in bed and switched from Syl Johnson (“Let
Them Hang High,” “I Can Take Care of Business”) to mid-‘60s Joe Tex singles (“I
Want To Do Everything For You”), and Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Supper Club, with a performance of “Bring It On
Home to Me” that is so overwhelmingly powerful it can make anyone into a
believer. Listeningng to the Cooke performance made me think of Michael Mann’s Ali and how it was used as the bedrock
for the movie’s stunning opening sequence. I then suddenly realized that my
love of music and movies is pretty much equal, yet I chose to concentrate my
writing on an art form that is, shall we say, more challenging than the other.
I don’t know why. I may never know why.

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Then, one day I was sitting on the couch with my dad,
channel-surfing, and came across Peggy
Sue Got Married. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola during his ‘80s
wilderness period, it’s a movie I saw many times as a kid. Having not seen it
in years, we decided to watch. A variation on Back to the Future (which came out a year earlier), Peggy Sue Got Married is more fanciful
and slyly more profound. It contains Kathleen Turner’s finest performance as
Peggy Sue, a 43-year-old wife and mother who is given the opportunity to go
back in time and make different life choices. What surprised me is how vividly
I could recall the movie even though I hadn’t seen it in years. An early
sequence got to me: It’s 1960, and Peggy Sue has passed out after giving blood
at her school’s blood drive. A couple of teachers decide to take her home.
Sitting in the back of a car, the radio starts to play The Champs’ “Tequila” as
she looks out the window. The camera stays on Turner’s face as she sees the
landmarks of her youth. Everything feels new again. (The Oscar-nominated
cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth is warm and nostalgic without being gauzy.)
When she arrives at her childhood home, Peggy Sue tentatively approaches the
front door. An off-screen voice cheerily says, “I left the door open!.” It’s
Peggy Sue’s mother, played by Barbara Harris. The moment her mom enters the
room Peggy Sue reaches out to touch her. Without it being said, we realize that
her mother has been dead and she’s seeing her for the first time in years. The
scene climaxes when she sees her younger sister Nancy (played by Sofia Coppola
in a fine bit of acting), and rushes towards her. (It’s never stated, but we sense
that maybe her sister is either dead or that they don’t speak to each other.)
Even as a kid I knew this scene was an early emotional peak in the movie, but
now it resonated even more. The seemingly random development of not being able
to see (and possibly facing the reality of not seeing again) was being
reflected back at me as Peggy Sue saw her childhood one more time. Ebert
believed movies were the best vehicle to create empathy, and my ability at that
moment to use critical thinking in order to make this connection with a movie I
hadn’t seen in years gave me hope.

Slowly, my vision started to get less blurry. While January
moved at a snail’s pace, February went by in a flash. I became acutely aware
that time moves both agonizingly slow and incredibly fast. The four light bulbs
that hang over the family room table went from a single bright blurry glob of light
to four separate blurry globs of light. I would look into the bathroom mirror
and see an out-of-focus reflection. For a moment I thought I was having an existential
crisis. Then, one day I found myself sitting at my desk in my home office for
the first time in weeks. I turned on my CCTV and I was able to faintly make out
the back cover writing of the Thief Blu-ray.
Soon, I could read it without straining. I decided to go to a promotional
screening and watch Liam Neeson save a plane full of ungrateful passengers. I’m
glad I chose to see a B-level highjack-airliner thriller as my first movie to
see instead of something more significant. It took the pressure off of thinking
too much. (For the record: Non-Stop is
a fun entry in the highjack-airliner thriller genre, but still doesn’t beat the
terrific Executive Decision.) Two
days later my dad and I went to see The
Past. (We sat in the front row so my dad could whisper the subtitles to
me.) I caught up on True Detective.
(Its Zodiac-like plotting is quite
impressive.) I got to see the Oscars. And I got to see The Wolf of Wall Street for a second time in a theater. My doctor likes
what he sees so far. There’s no telling how long my vision will stay healthy. A
year? Five years? Ten? The cornea I have at the moment has been intact for
nearly eighteen years. Do I have that much time left? Maybe half that time. I
don’t know. What I do know is I’m ready.

Aaron’s Ten Best
Movies of 2013

1.    
Fruitvale Station

2.    
12 Years a Slave

3.    
American Hustle

4.    
Before Midnight

5.    
The Wolf of Wall Street

6.    
Prisoners

7.    
Blue Jasmine

8.    
Rush

9.    
The Past

10.   Gravity

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television.

Hannah Horvath from GIRLS Is the Last Thing the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Needs

Hannah Horvath from GIRLS Is the Last Thing the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Needs

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I
studied poetry at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 2007 to
2009, and had an amazing experience in Iowa City, primarily because,
as a non-traditional student, I was largely left to my own devices by
the program’s famously hands-off curriculum. To be a thirty year-old
poet at the nation’s oldest graduate creative writing
program—seventy-eight years old this year—is to marvel at how anyone
in America can be permitted so much license with so little
responsibility. Currently, the university fully funds all Workshop admittees with
tuition remission and either fellowships or teaching assistantships, and
it requires in return little more than attendance at one three-hour
writing workshop per week. Sure, in the first of a student’s two years
in Iowa City, he or she is likely to take an ungraded
seminar or two (one run by and for working writers, rather than through
the university’s English Department), but in the second year of the
curriculum, most students do little more than take independent studies
and thesis hours. It’s a two-year writing vacation, and one I was happy
to have as a poet still finding my footing. What it isn’t, or shouldn’t
be, is a hideaway for entitled, directionless young people for whom
living anywhere but a cosmopolitan enclave on the nation’s East Coast is
a source of shirt-rending psychic turmoil. By sending Hannah Horvath
(Lena Dunham) off to Iowa City for two years at the Writer’s Workshop,
HBO’s Girls is giving not just the Workshop but the discipline of creative writing in general exactly what it doesn’t need: a bad rap.
The
student body of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop comprises, at any one time,
about a hundred poets and novelists; depending upon the semester, the
permanent faculty is made up of three or four poets and three or four
fiction writers. Speaking only from my own experience—but mindful, too,
of the similar experiences reported by dozens of fellow Workshop
graduates—you couldn’t ask for a more talented and artistically diverse group of classmates than the ones you routinely find in the Workshop’s
creative writing courses. That said, you also couldn’t find many
bohemian communities in the United States that are less diverse in
several important ways: namely, in terms of race, ethnicity,
socioeconomic status, and educational background. By and large, the
student body at the University of Iowa’s most revered graduate program
is white,
upper-class, and well-pedigreed. Blacks and Latinos in particular are
woefully underrepresented, as are members of the working class and those
from smaller, regional institutions of higher education. When I
attended the Workshop in the late aughts, an appreciable percentage of
my classmates hailed from just two universities, Harvard and Stanford;
had wealthy parents (some of whom were donors to the program); or had
lived for years in provincial but ostensibly worldly enclaves like those
found in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
To
be clear, everybody in America has every right to apply to the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop if they wish—and, if admitted, to
attend. My classmates between 2007 and 2009 were no more responsible
for the circumstances of their birth than I was then or now. And the
majority of the largely white, upper-class, well-pedigreed student body
at the Workshop is made up of talented, committed authors whose future
work will undoubtedly be worth reading. The question, rather, is whether
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—institutionally, that is, and not as a responsibility of any individual (faculty, student, or staff) associated with
the program—does the discipline of creative writing an implicit
disservice by leaving the impression that creative writing is reserved
for children of privilege from the coasts. If the hard sciences have struggled for
years against the (not entirely) unfair impression that they do
little to actively recruit women and minorities, the struggle of
creative writing since its first appearance in academia in the 1880s has
been to shirk the sense that it’s a haven for sheltered,
arrogant, self-indulgent bullshitters.
All
of the above is Exhibit A for why it’s a sad day—and by no means a
cause for celebration—when we discover that one of the most sheltered,
arrogant, self-indulgent bullshitters on American television today is
likely headed to Iowa City. Whether you love the show Girls
or detest it, it’d be tough to call series lead Hannah Horvath anything
but that archetypal spoiled white kid with whom the streets of New York
City are increasingly lousy. Unlike previous generations of young New
Yorkers, this generation seems less invested
in either the history of the city or, more importantly, its
unparalleled contributions to American art and the American literary
community in particular. And while it’s fair to say that Girls critiques this new class of New York City-dwelling enfants terribles
as much or even far more than it glamorizes it, the fact remains that
the medium of television invariably glamorizes anything it depicts, and
American viewing audiences invariably under-theorize their
entertainments. Whatever Lena Dunham’s motivation might be in depicting in
agonizing detail the lives of seven to ten young people many of us would
want nothing to do with, the fact remains that New York City is already
popularly identified with such figures but the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
(to its great benefit) is not. Bringing Dunham and crew to town will
erase once and for all
the lingering fantasy that the most visible institution in graduate creative
writing is a diverse, resolutely populist haven.
Perhaps this is one reason the University of Iowa has now formally denied Dunham’s request to film episodes from Season 4 on the university’s
campus. The official explanation is that such filming would cause
disruption to the institution’s educational mission—possibly
true–though more plausible would be an acknowledgment that University
of Iowa in general and the Writers’ Workshop in particular has
little to gain by being dramatized through the eyes of an entitled and
only intermittently self-aware New Yorker. For the Writers’ Workshop to
be ready for primetime, it would need to commit itself to a
forward-looking admissions policy—one in which former students of
faculty members, or current students of friends of faculty members,
receive no leg up in the admissions process; one in which existing
pipelines between certain colleges and the Workshop (notably, Harvard
and Stanford) are stopped up; and one in which all forms of diversity
(including socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, and sexual orientation) are
given at least some consideration by application readers.
Not
all the blame for the Writers’ Workshop being so homogeneous falls on
the Workshop itself. As someone who’s interviewed literally thousands of
MFA applicants since 2006 as part of his doctoral research, I can say
that many such applicants, particularly those who are gay or non-white,
are leery of moving to a town in Iowa that’s 83% white and (not unusual
for a small city) overwhelmingly straight. Given how politically
progressive the town is, however, and frankly how homogeneous most
American locales unfortunately are—my own home state, Massachusetts, is
84% white, but I don’t hear of artists refusing to move there—it’s
regrettable that some of the nation’s most talented poets and writers might potentially
feel Iowa City isn’t welcoming to anyone but the Hannah Horvaths of the
world. The truth is that the
Writers’ Workshop offers a community in which anything goes and
everyone is welcome, a fact made more probative by the Workshop’s
dramatic segregation (culturally and geographically) from the bulk of
Iowa City’s university and non-university communities. The best way to
feel stifled at the Writer’s Workshop is to come to it with
overdetermined expectations about what writing (or, for that matter, Iowa)
really is; another is to come to Iowa City adamant that you’ll do
nothing to complicate your relationship with your past—whether it be
your past as an artist, or your past as a cloistered resident of New
York City.
Nothing in the plot of Girls thus
far indicates that Hannah is ready to leave behind either her New York
City sensibilities or her sense of herself as not just unique but
superlative. Writing is neither a glamorous profession nor one in which
practitioners benefit much from self-glamorization; the age-old adage to
“write what you know” is profitable only when you first forget what you
know, something Hannah has never seemed capable of or even very much
interested in doing. Not only is Hannah unready for the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, the Workshop—however much it might be able to see Dunham’s interest in it
as a net positive—isn’t ready for her, either. And until the discipline
of creative writing does more than it has thus far to focus attention
on writing as a sustainable practice for the many rather than the few,
for the working
class every bit as much as the well-heeled class, the sort of attention
Girls can bring to it will likewise be more a danger than a boon.

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Orphans, Refugees, and Architectural Spaces: The Dream of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Orphans, Refugees, and Architectural Spaces: The Dream of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

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There is something about human spaces that speaks to us
directly, that triggers every human impulse we love and fear about the world. Several
years ago I visited Barcelona, a city that is renowned for its unique and
colorful architecture. I was swept up in the romance of color, the cake-like
spirals and soft curves of Gaudi’s churches and parks, but it wasn’t until my
friends and I visited an old, gutted church in the heart of Girona that I
understood God, or at least, what human beings call God. The Girona church was
simpler, less ornate and almost empty, unlike any of Gaudi’s churches, which
were filled with as many tourists as there were practitioners. I felt dwarfed
by the height of the ceilings and frightened by the coldness of the walls, the
stillness inside of me. I’ve felt awed by the earth before, by sunsets where
the sky collapses into color, by the silence of an empty beach, the moon
lighting up the ocean. But none of these experiences managed to move me as
strongly as this moment in an entirely man-made space.

Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is about human spaces as much as it is
about people. For years now, Anderson has meticulously crafted and created
architecture that elicits amusement and awe—each child’s bedroom’s in The Royal Tenenbaums is an entire world,
each space a character in and of itself. Steve Zissou’s ship in The Life Aquatic is warmly planned and
meticulously crafted. Even the campsites of Moonrise
Kingdom show the quaint necessity of human planning, of the obvious, almost
primordial need human beings have to craft and create their space in the world.

The Grand Budapest
Hotel elevates this intimate understanding of place to a greater status.
The hotel, though shot in delicate pastel hues, seems as grand and impenetrable
as the mountains surrounding it. When we first see the interior of the hotel,
we see that its once beautiful and extravagant facilities are all in disrepair.
Mr. Moustafa, or Zero as we come to know him as a younger man, has allowed the
hotel to fall into a space of gentle decay, neither closing the hotel nor
providing the proper maintenance to keep the hotel alive.

At surface, the film seems plays out like a mad caper, a
zany, colorful fable, with entertaining characters, but at its heart, The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson at
his most melancholy. In the film time does not heal all wounds, and characters
do not learn and grow and triumph. They endure, despite the war and because of
their commitment to love and honor. This is a film about loyalty, about being
faithful to the places we love as well as the people we long to come home to.
When Zero Moustafa stays at The Grand Budapest, he chooses to stay in the same
room where he lived as a lobby boy, the first place he was able to call a home
after becoming a refugee and an orphan when his parents were killed during a
never named war in a far-away place.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is the privately carved world of
Monsieur Gustave, the hotel’s concierge who has made the hotel his life, and
who loves the hotel with every part of his being; it is also a symbol, which
changes constantly over the course of the film. Regal and imposing in its early
days, the hotel is as much a place for the wealthy to escape from the realities
of the world as it is a place of refuge for Zero, who has nowhere to go. Over
time, the hotel loses its luster and fades into a symbol of the ravages of
time, as much as it showcases the ravages of war. 

A building isn’t a photograph or a letter. It can’t be
easily destroyed. I’ve lived in Northwest Washington, D.C., for almost eight
years, the longest I have ever lived in a single city in my adult life. Over
the years, the city has taken on different shapes and shades. When I first
moved to D.C. from Boston, I thought the new city would save me: from the fear
of not knowing what to do after I graduated from college, and from the end of a
relationship with a person I couldn’t imagine being without. D.C. cracked me
open in a way cities I had lived before never did. I eagerly learned its
rhythm. I wanted to call it home.

In D.C., everyone is going somewhere new. There is a
tremendous amount of pressure to get ahead, to go somewhere else, to transition
into the next best thing. A lot of urban American cities are like that. But it
takes time to truly love a place, just like it takes time to truly love a
person. Places we visit for short periods of time remain tinged in romance, the
warm light of nostalgia, but places that feel like home involve more
complicated relationships, housing both wonderful and terrible memories.

I have often had to reinvent myself in this city, and by
reinvent I mean I had to reorient myself in relationship to the city, after
people I cared about left it, or left me, or I left them. Sometimes places
still evoke vivid memories and I find myself randomly shaken for no apparent
reason, overwhelmed by the sight of a restaurant or tree or crack in the
sidewalk I had once known in connection to someone else.

Zero is grateful for the Grand Budapest, because the small
closet-sized room he is offered as a lobby boy is his safe space, a place for
someone who had nothing. But when the author, who is never given an actual
name, interviews Zero about why he decided not to close the Grand Budapest ,
Zero said he decided to allow the hotel to remain open in honor of his wife,
Agatha, who had died years before. “We were happy here,” he tells the author,
remembering the times that he, Gustave and Agatha all spent together.

Of course, the places we love are nothing but reflections of
ourselves. After Gustave  is wrongfully
accused and arrested for the murder of Madame D., an elderly patron of the
hotel that he was having an affair with, he is sent to prison, where he behaves
the same exact way he did at The Grand Budapest, offering plates of gruel, as
if they were slabs of filet mignion, to his criminal compatriots.

If the places we live make us, we also make the places we
live. No wonder Zero Moustafa doesn’t have the heart to tear down a world he
loved dearly; and no wonder he didn’t have the heart to build it back up
either: after Gustave and Agatha were gone there was nothing left to rebuild.
Any refurbishing would have been a new creation. In the end, The Grand Budapest
is offered the peace of cremation, as every part and piece of it slowly drifts
away.

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed four times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book.

Better Red Than Dead: Director Gabe Polsky Revisits the Cold War Through Hockey

Better Red Than Dead: Director Gabe Polsky Revisits the Cold War Through Hockey

Sport is nothing if not a battle
of ideologies. The West Coast offense versus the Option. Tradition versus sabermetrics.
Defense wins championships. In the Cold War era, international sport provided a
unique look into all manners of ideology, from citizens’ approach to sport to
the all-encompassing Communism versus Social Democracy debate. From Olympic
boycotts to defections to Rocky IV,
sport provided a venue for discussion of larger issues of ideology through the
microcosm of its very nature and metaphor. Nowhere was this more evident than
in hockey.

As a Canadian, I was taught the
greatest hockey team of all-time was the 1972 Team Canada that beat the Soviets
at the Summit Series. Paul Henderson’s series-clinching goal had as much
magnitude as our national anthem. Similar arguments were made of the 1987
Canada Cup team that boasted both Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. That’s the
greatest hockey I’ve ever seen, or likely ever will see.

For Americans, I imagine a
similar argument could be made for the 1980 Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid
(they’d be wrong, but my nationalist bias causes me to digress), if not for the
team then for the virtue of its victory. But history is born of nationalism,
written not so much by the victors, as Winston Churchill suggested, but rather by
those with a medium with which to argue who was the greatest, who were the
heroes, the villains, and indeed the victors. Filmmaker Gabe Polsky’s upcoming documentary
Red Army “tells the story of the most
dominant sports team in history: the Soviet Union’s Red Army ice hockey
team.” 

Polsky is the son of
Russian-Ukrainian immigrants, and grew up in Chicago. He played hockey at Yale.
I don’t for a second doubt his credentials as a hockey documentarian (even though my Canadian
passport demands I should) nor his affection for his subject matter (it is
infectious). But my immediate reaction, as a Canadian, as a hockey fan, to the
above quote from the film’s production company was: I’ve got a whole country
that disagrees with you. However, I will admit, Polsky’s argument is
compelling. And according to its director, Red
Army is about more than hockey. It’s about an era. It’s about the rise and
fall of an ideology, and the end of the Cold War.

While North American hockey was,
and is, built around stars, the Red Army team was more interested in the
collective. As Polsky says, “A lot of Soviet ideology ended up in sport. They
didn’t emphasize the individual.” This shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, as
the Red Army team was the international face of a communist dictatorship. They
took their brand of hockey and social order around the world, to battle on the
ice and in spectators’ minds.

As a student of the game, I had
always believed that creativity was born of individuals such as Gretzky, Orr,
Lemieux, who took us out of our seats to revel in their artistry.
Interestingly, Polsky argues the opposite, that it is the collective approach that
truly bred creativity, likening it to “what Brazilians did with soccer…
[they’re] more creative and they have more style to the game, brought a more
artistic approach to the game. A more beautiful game.”

Red Army uses Soviet defenseman Viacheslav Fetisov as a
narrator of sorts, a vehicle through which to tell the film’s story. Fetisov
played through “three generations of Soviet teams,” and was one of the first
wave of Russians to be allowed to play in the NHL. What’s compelling for Polsky,
a hockey fan who grew up during these eras, is the transition of Fetisov from
enemy (on the Red Army teams), to sympathetic character (in his desire to play
in the NHL), to endearing fan favorite (in his later years with the Detroit Red
Wings). Polsky sees Fetisov as the ultimate embodiment of the Cold War, from its
rise to its eventual fall.

If Fetisov’s story represents the
arc of the protagonist, then the story’s antagonist is Viktor Tikhonov, the head
coach of the Red Army team during its most dominant era. Tikhonov was the
communist dictator of a team during a communist dictatorship. To his team, he
was the USSR itself. When I was growing up, invested and engrossed in the later
era Super Series and the 1987 Canada Cup, I recall thinking Tikhonov’s embodiment
of evil was straight out of a Bond film, and indeed Polsky calls him a “perfect
villain.”

The director recalls a story of Vladislav
Tretiak, perhaps the greatest goaltender to ever strap on pads, asking his
coach if he could train at home because he wanted to see his family. Tikhonov
told him “no” and that if he didn’t train with the collective he “wasn’t
playing.” Contrast this with Tretiak’s rival and competition for the greatest
goalie ever title, the Montreal Canadiens’ Ken Dryden, who sat out during the
1973-74 season over a contract dispute, and used that year to complete a law
degree at McGill University. Perhaps nowhere better can we see the vast
difference between the ideologies resting on opposite sides of the globe than
in the dichotomy of the goaltenders’ narratives.

Just as communism never made it
stateside, the practices of the Red Army team never became part of the habits
of the NHL, with the exception of the Scotty Bowman-era Red Wings, who employed
the Red Army’s 5-man units, as opposed to the North American system, which
interchanges 4 forward lines and 3 defense pairings. Interestingly, Fetisov
(who Bowman drafted in 1975 while coach of the Montreal Canadiens, despite
knowing he’d never be allowed to come to the NHL) was a part of those team, as
were Red Army disciples Vyacheslav Kozlov and Igor Larionov. Teams that notably
won three Stanley Cups during Bowman’s tenure.

Bowman appears in Red Army, creating a bridge between
ideologies and histories, as he also coached against the Red Army in the 1976
and 1981 Canada Cups, as well as what has been called the greatest game ever,
the Red Army versus the Montreal Canadiens on New Year’s Eve 1975. But the NHL
has always eschewed innovation, and the influence of the Red Army begins and
ends with Bowman. But does the argument for the more virtuous system, in hockey
and beyond, end there as well? The Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War ended and the
Soviet Union with it. Russian players came to the NHL, and are now a staple in
the league. Red Army will be a
fascinating look into a part of hockey’s history rarely told, and an intriguing
look into an era of the sport that defines its mythology.

Red Army (directed by Gabe Polsky and produced by Jerry Weintraub and
Werner Herzog) will be released later this year.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The
Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among
others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY
with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare
Books, 2008), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press,
2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out
Hockey Player (Found Press,
2013). His next poetry collection, Bourbon & Eventide, is forthcoming in 2014
from Invisible Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

The Hour is Getting Late: The Outsider Status of INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

The Hour is Getting Late: The Outsider Status of INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

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The outsider status of Inside Llewyn Davis’s
main character makes it apt that this
film, despite being one of the best released last year, was shunned by the
Oscars. The Oscars are, in any case, sort of a double bind: nomination for (or
even winning) an Oscar is a bit like being hailed as intelligent by the village
idiot: no big compliment if it happens, yet still a biting insult if it
doesn’t. Being embraced by the Academy is no enviable artistic achievement, and
may not even offer a guarantee of more financial support or industry clout; yet
being ostracised isn’t an accepted badge of artistic honour either, and most
big names in the industry do seek and cherish those little golden statuettes.
What is it about this film then that, despite all its many artistic merits,
ruled it out of consideration for all the big prizes? Is it the setting, and
its inhabitants: the proto-hippies and bearded folkies of the early 60s folk scene?
Is it the protagonist, a grumpy, misanthropic beatnik? Is it the downbeat tone,
or the lack of an unambiguously happy ending? Or is it the Coens themselves,
still seen as arch, intellectual, and overly ironic?

Oscar Isaac is perfect as Llewyn, his mien
a fluid but implacable blend of hangdog rancour and world-weary disdain. It’s a
bittersweet, gently rebarbative performance that ebbs and flows between
sympathetic and repellent. Llewyn’s actions are rarely laudable, his
personality never aspires to ‘clubbable’, and it would be easy to see him as a
parasite—bumming cigarettes and sleeping with his friends’ girlfriends. And,
as it happens, a lot of people do see him that way. Everybody he meets seems to
feel that Llewyn is kind of an asshole, and it’s a general consensus from which
Llewyn himself seems reluctant to demur. But somewhere in the ineffable amalgam
of character and performance, there is something that snags our sympathy and
keeps us from despising him. If we don’t quite cheer for this curmudgeonly
underdog antihero, we at least murmur half-hearted approval as he shuffles
disconsolately from one unedifying episode to the next. So it’s easy to see, perhaps, that a film
based around such a character would be unlikely to get the Academy’s juices
flowing: there’s no character arc, no repentance, no sense of cinematic bildungsroman.

Isaac’s performance is doubly impressive in
that the folk singing segments aren’t fudged: Isaac is called upon to deliver
full song performances, and he puts them over very convincingly. Given that
it’s crucial to the character, and the plot, that we share Llewyn’s uncertainty
over whether he has what it takes to make it or not, the performances are
exquisitely balanced on the very edge of being remarkable: they’re impressive,
and certainly very enjoyable in their own right, but they leave us wondering
about whether they are quite good enough to suggest a special talent at work.
But whatever the merits of his musical performances, it’s Isaac’s perpetually
downcast, warily resentful demeanour that defines the role. Isaac—his
forename an ironic, Academy-nudging insult handed down by God—had serious
competition in the Best Actor category this year, but to exclude him from the
nominations entirely adds further unnecessary proof of what a joke the Oscars
really are.

That the central performance is so strong
is fortunate, given the inescapable fact that some of the supporting cast could
be better. Justin Timberlake—a member of the entertainment industry about as
simpatico with early 60s Greenwich Village folk singers as George W Bush was
with Nelson Mandela—acquits himself adequately in a role that suits his
chronic lack of gravitas; playing Llewyn’s folksinger friend Jim, Timberlake is
gauche and nerdy, and it’s okay because the character suits the actor so well.
Carey Mulligan, however, is woefully miscast as Jim’s (musical and romantic)
partner Jean. Given to the kind of shrill overacting that threatens to tear the
cinema screen in two, Mulligan’s worst scene of all comes when she and Llewyn
stroll through Washington Square Park, discussing the fact that she is pregnant
but, since she once had a fling with Llewyn, cannot be certain who the father
is. Spitting vitriol, she berates Llewyn for forcing her into the agonising
predicament whereby she may have to “get rid of a perfectly good baby” because
she can’t be certain it’s Jim’s. Slowly, calmly, Llewyn asks her: “Have you
ever heard the expression, ‘It takes two to tango’?” To which she pithily
replies, “Fuck you.” The contrast between the two performances is irreducibly
stark: Isaac is nuanced and underplayed; Mulligan is slip-shod and histrionic.
It’s sufficiently bad that it raises the question of why the Coens didn’t ask
her to turn it down several notches, or even the horrific possibility that they
did ask her, and this was the toned-down version. The role is totally wrong for Mulligan, and her performance is
terribly wrong for the film. To top it all off, she sports a ridiculous
haircut, which makes her look like something out of a parody folk musical—”The Rutles do Greenwich Village.” On the other hand, the contrasts between
Jean and Llewyn, and between Mulligan and Isaac, serve to underscore the sense
of alienation and outsider status inherent in Llewyn’s character.

The Coens themselves were once Hollywood
outsiders and, although that no longer applies, with this film it’s almost as
though they’ve come full circle; which in itself is fitting, given the circular
narrative structure of the film. The
Academy’s attitude to the Coens could perhaps best be summarized as: “Hey, are
these guys putting us on?” The answer, of course, is: “If you have to ask…”
Perhaps the Academy feel betrayed? By embracing ‘Fargo’ back in the
mid-Nineties, they let the Coens inside the tent, only to find that they kept
on taking the piss.

Like the novels of Thomas Pynchon, or the
lyrics of Bob Dylan, the Coen Brothers’ films teasingly invite interpretation
and analysis. In the case of the Coens, there’s no need to diligently examine
the warp and weft of their narrative in order to discover intriguing patterns
or idiosyncratic braidings: loose threads poke out everywhere, and it’s up to
us to decide whether we should grasp at them or not. Those of us of analytic
bent may opt to tug at such threads, hoping that unravelling them will provide
us with a clew we can use to navigate our way through the connotative
labyrinth, and thus find our way to the core. Sometimes, we can’t help falling
for such ideas, even though we’re fully aware of the distinct possibility that,
even if we did find our way to the heart of the maze, all we’d find there would
be a mocking question mark scrawled upon the wall.

Not that we can legitimately complain if we
do find ourselves being led up the garden path, on a hiding to nothing: if the
Coens’ films offer rich pickings for the analytically inclined, they also
provide fair warning to the unwary. There’s an almost palpable sense of sly
mockery attendant, as if the Coens are playing a sort of ontological peek-a-boo
with their audiences. This is perfectly crystalised in the moment mid-way
through this film when Llewyn Davis, a marginal figure on the early Sixties
Greenwich Village folk circuit, finds himself undertaking a kind of yo-yoing,
sideways road-trip. Half-way between New York and Chicago, he encounters a
piece of service station toilet stall graffiti that offers the jeering enquiry:
“What are you doing?” Needless to say, there’s no reason to ask who
might have scrawled that latrine wall taunt: it was of course the film-makers
themselves, winking at our hard-wired tendency to look for hidden meanings,
symbolism, and allegories.

Interestingly, the plots of the Coens’
films frequently conform (albeit loosely and with wry idiosyncrasy) to the
conventions of the classic quest narrative, featuring tormented central characters
who are searching for meaning, or just trying to feel their way through a fog
of confusion and uncertainty. These characters generally labour under onerous
burdens, which typically gain weight as their stories proceed. They aren’t
heroes, or even protagonists as such; they blunder and muddle through, often
trudging in circles in the forlorn hope of generating momentum and finding some
tangent of escape. With Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coens have given us one of
their most elaborately encumbered characters to date. Llewyn can’t catch a
break. He’s broke, he’s homeless, and his folk music career is going nowhere. He
has no winter coat, no real friends, and his former singing partner—with whom
Llewyn recorded a folk album entitled “If We Had Wings”—has opted to rid himself
of his earthly burdens by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Llewyn
received no advance from the record company for his debut solo album, the
titular “Inside Llewyn Davis,” and has as yet seen no royalties from it
whatsoever. He’s disenchanted with the folk scene, and the scene seems fairly
sick of Llewyn too. As the film opens, we see Llewyn finishing off a set at the
legendary Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village; informed by the owner that a
‘friend’ is waiting for him outside, Llewyn exits by the stage door into a back
alley where he receives a vicious beating from a stranger. Artistically
exhausted, socially ostracised, financially embarrassed, bruised and bleeding:
this is how we find Llewyn at the start of his story, and we watch him roll
downhill from there, accruing an ever-expanding ball of woes and indignities,
as though he were some sort of human dung beetle.

If Llewyn ever had any propensity for good
luck, it ran out long ago. When he crashes with some bohemian academics on the
Upper West Side, he gets locked out and saddled with a cat; when he dosses at
his downtown friends’ ramshackle apartment he has to sleep on the floor because
somebody else has already booked the couch; worse still, that somebody turns
out to be a soldier—a “killing machine” as Llewyn sees him—on leave from
Fort Dix, who not only has a gig at the Gaslight but also the promise of a lucrative
management contract when he finishes his military service. In one of the film’s
most exuberant scenes, Llewyn joins in with a session at Columbia Records,
where a thrown-together pop group named “The John Glenn Singers” records a
corny, space-themed novelty record called “Please Mr. Kennedy.” Eschewing
royalties so he can instead acquire an immediate cash payment, Llewyn
henceforth has to endure people delightedly informing him that the record is
going to make him rich, since it’s destined to be a hit. To add insult to injury,
once he has the money from the recording session, he discovers that his need
for a significant amount of ready cash wasn’t quite as pressing as he thought,
for reasons that only serve to further complicate his already deeply fraught
personal life. For Llewyn, every proverbial cloud turns out to have an even
darker lining. He trudges disconsolately around downtown Manhattan, puffing out
a cumulus of disgruntlement.

Soon after, Llewyn finds himself visiting Chicago
mainly for want of anything better to do or anywhere more promising to go; but
he also knows that while he’s there he might take the opportunity to seek a
resolution to the central question of his current existence: whether he really
is the struggling artist he takes himself for, or just struggling, full stop.
Chicago is home to the ‘Gate of Horn’ nightclub, presided over by Bud Grossman,
a kingpin impresario and manager whose imprimatur would set Llewyn on the right
side of the precipitous divide between nascent and no-hoper, up-and-coming or
down-and-out. Llewyn isn’t like Bob Dylan – a fledgling genius taking his first
bounding steps – but a journeyman who has talent and commitment but no way of
knowing whether what he has will be enough to make the grade. If Bud gives him
the nod, then his troubles – or, at least, those ones specifically related to
his artistic ambitions – will be over.

Bud Grossman is broadly based on Albert
Grossman, the folk music fixer who became Bob Dylan’s famously hard-nosed manager,
although he is portrayed here (by a gnomically distinguished F. Murray Abraham)
in a way that is pretty much unrecognisable for anyone whose image of the real
Grossman derives from Dylan biographies or those scenes in “Don’t Look Back”
wherein Grossman hectors, bullies, brutalises, and connives his way through a Sixties
Britain that seems quaint, somnambulant, and utterly unprepared for the brashly
cynical American. The Gate of Horn was in fact a real club, run by the real Grossman,
but it’s also a reference to a potent piece of mythology referenced in Homer’s Odyssey, relating to the ability to distinguish between dreams which will
come true and those that are merely illusory. 
So it’s almost unbearably apt that this is the venue where Llewyn will learn
– via an audience with the all-powerful Grossman – whether his hopes of bigger
things will be dashed or buoyed up.

Real-life figures like Grossman and Dave
Van Ronk (whose memoir, ‘The Mayor of MacDougal Street’, provided inspiration
for some elements of Llewyn’s story), loom larger in the background to the
film. And of course the spirit of Bob Dylan broods over proceedings, just as
the ghost of Bogart haunted ‘The Big Lebowski’, the Coens’ lysergic neo-noir
pastiche. (We get a fleeting glimpse of the young Dylan, starting into a set just
after Llewyn has left the stage. We don’t get to see what Llewyn thinks of
Dylan, because Llewyn doesn’t get to see Dylan; instead, he goes out into the
alley to receive a beating. Given the unlikelihood of Llewyn’s ego withstanding
exposure to the cataclysmically talented Bob Dylan, it’s probable that Llewyn
would prefer a physical going-over than an audience with the young Minnesotan.)
Approaching the film from a strictly historical viewpoint, or subjecting it to the
corrosive magnifying glass lens of Dylanology, would doubtless uncover many
intriguing details. For instance, Bud Grossman’s advice to Llewyn that he
should “stay out of the sun”, which is based on the instruction that the real
Albert Grossman gave to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary: suntanned folkies
don’t sell. But such approaches would ultimately prove themselves to be blind
alleys. The film needs to be considered on its own terms; it’s not a biopic or
a mere period piece.

The Coens have said that the visual
aesthetic for their film was founded upon the cover art for Dylan’s 1963 album
‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’, which featured Dylan and his then girlfriend-and-muse
Suze Rotolo huddling together down a frozen Jones Street in Manhattan, Dylan opting
to brave the elements in a suede jacket because he wanted to look cool, whereas
Llewyn is freezing because he has no winter coat to shed. The production design
and period evocation are second to none, way above what would normally be
expected from Sixties-set movies, or indeed the much-lauded likes of AMC’s ‘Mad
Men’, etc. That said, the film’s conjuring of time and place doesn’t quite feel
rough enough around the edges – the interior of the Gaslight Café, for example,
can hardly have been so pleasing to the eye, or as free from the fug of
cigarette smoke, as it appears here. This is one of the best-looking films the
Coen Brothers have made, lacking the spectacular set-pieces we’ve come to
expect, but offering instead an understated yet no less powerful beauty that is
rich, seductive, and poetic. The colour scheme leans heavily towards coppery
greens, cobalt blues, and inky blacks, and does indeed have something of an
affinity with that iconic album cover, even if Llewyn himself is not so much “freewheelin” as “stuck in first gear.”

Visually, the links to Dylan’s 1963 album “The
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” are obvious, but if you wanted to make comparisons,
based on thematic or tonal affinities, between this film and a particular Dylan
album, then a much more appropriate choice would be Dylan’s gnarly,
counterculture-antipathetic masterpiece “John Wesley Harding,” from 1967. And
it’s safe to say that neither Dylan album is likely to be found among many of
the Academy members’ record collections; this is not the sort of pop culture
that floats their boat. Bob Dylan resonances are probably not the most obvious
way of attracting Oscar nominations, given the average age, and archaic sensibilities,
of the judges. Like “John Wesley Harding,” the Coens’ film is stylised yet
stripped down; the feel is wintry, the humor fit for the gallows, the mood
dark and portentous. Most fittingly of all, as with the angular fables
recounted on Dylan’s album, key narrative details of “Inside Llewyn Davis” are
left just vague enough to preclude any stabilizing sense of certainty. A case
in point is the precise nature of the relationship between Llewyn and the Gorfeins,
the tolerant Upper West Side academics with whom Llewyn crashes when he has
“rotated through all my Greenwich Village friends.” The Gorfeins may or may not
be the parents of Llewyn’s former singing partner, Mike Timlin, who has
committed suicide before the film begins. (Yes, they have different surnames,
but the film is full of characters with assumed names.) Alone in the Gorfeins’ apartment
one morning, Llewyn locates a copy of the Timlin and Davis album ‘If We Had
Wings’, and in a rare moment of apparent caring about another human being,
lingers for a second over the photo of Mike on the rear of the album jacket;
when Llewyn later sings the album’s title track at one of the Gorfeins’ dinner
parties, Lillian Gorfein (wonderfully played by Robin Bartlett) joins in
singing “Mike’s part”, which sends Llewyn into a rage that capsizes the
evening. Llewyn later apologies to Lillian’s husband, Mitch, who readily
forgives Llewyn, but reminds him that Mike’s death left “a big hole”. These are
strong hints, but they offer nothing conclusive. Other plot elements are left
the same way, like partially completed join-the-dot pictures. Again, this sort
of thing is likely to confuse Academy members, at best.

The narrative technique also bears certain
similarities to that employed on “John Wesley Harding,” most notably the
structure of “All Along the Watchtower.” The film begins—like The Odyssey—in medias res, with Llewyn performing at the Gaslight; from there, the
narrative, seemingly linear at first, gradually reveals itself to in fact be
tracing a long slow curve back around to where it began. As does Dylan’s
‘Watchtower’, a song that would surely appeal to Llewyn’s astringent
personality, in which the narrative curls around like a Möbius strip, so that
the song’s ostensible ending attaches directly to its opening lyrics: the
howling wind at the end of the song actually comes before the conversation between “the joker” and “the thief” that kicks
off the track. The sense of being trapped in a cyclic reality, desperately
searching for “some kind of way out of here” is one with which Llewyn could readily
identify, as is the suggestion that “life is but a joke”. As in Dylan’s song, the
narrative of the Coens’ film swallows its own tail, and this is puckishly signified
by a bravura fadeout from the mysterious stranger who gives Llewyn a beating in
the alley at the beginning of the film, to the tail of the Gorfeins’ cat as it
pads down the hallway of their apartment, on its way to wake up Llewyn. Does
this imply that the morning to which the cat awakens Llewyn is the morning
after the alleyway beating? Maybe, but in the end it’s impossible to say for
sure. In a characteristically Coen Brothers piece of gimmickry, the Gorfeins’ cat,
which is just one of a number of cats in the film – again, we cannot be certain
how many—turns out be named Ulysses, suggesting itself as an avatar for Llewyn,
and pounding home the Homeric symbolism once more. This again raises the queasy
prospect of interpretation and analysis; roughly speaking, the cat occupies a
similar place in this film as the hat motif did in Miller’s Crossing. Then
again, the Coens are on record as saying that the hat was just a hat, warning
that we “mustn’t look for any deep meaning.” It’s piquant to note that the
cover of Dave Van Ronk’s album “Inside Dave Van Ronk” depicted the singer
standing in a doorway with a cat, but there is probably less to that than meets
the eye.

The title Inside Llewyn Davis is an acid,
many-layered joke. At the Gate of Horn,
Bud Grossman invites Llewyn to play him “something from ‘inside’ Llewyn Davis,”
superficially an allusion to the title of Llewyn’s album, but also a coy,
needling suggestion that there may not be much of an interior to the character
himself. Similar criticisms have been levelled at the Coens over the years: the
central complaint boils down to one of style over substance. Of course, people
said the same about Citizen Kane. There is a perceived lack of emotion, an
absence of character arcs, and a chronic weakness for post-modernist whimsy. Yet
this film is full of emotions; it’s just that very few of those emotions are
positive. Is it a “Feel-Bad” movie? No, because there’s dark humour aplenty; it
is (barely) possible to feel for its characters; and through it all there’s an
elegiac feel, a wistful quality that is sprinkled across the icy surface of the
film like cigarette ash on the tables of Cafe Reggio.  

Like everyone he encounters, possibly
including himself, we do wonder if there’s anything much “inside” Llewyn. Rather
than being capable of proffering insights into his inner core, Llewyn may even
be a stranger to his own heart. “I don’t think I’m tangible to myself,” Dylan
once suggested during an interview, and the sense of someone trying to
ascertain his own nature is palpable in Oscar Isaac’s performance. Llewyn is
the quintessential outsider, alienated from society and even from himself. Llewyn
is an outsider in Greenwich Village, since his attitude to folk music departs
significantly from his happy clappy mainstream peers; Llewyn favours the more
blues-inflected, existentialist folk songs about death and loss, rather than
the inclusive, upbeat end of the folk spectrum represented by Jim & Jean. He’s
also an outsider around his own family, and ill-suited to the line of work once
pursued by his father: the merchant marine is a refuge of last resort for Llewyn,
and even then his path is far from smooth. He’s too rough-hewn for the Village,
and too effete for the hiring hall. Ironically, the “day job” of merchant
seaman is an appropriate one, since traditional sea shanties and songs of lovers
tearfully taking their leave for long ocean voyages formed important strands in
the roots of the folk music that Llewyn holds so dear. The sea journey theme
also churns up further Homeric resonances.

Could it be that the Coens see something of
themselves in Llewyn? This may seem unlikely given their success and
established place in show business; but they were once outsiders too, cult filmmakers
prior to the mainstream success of ‘Fargo’ in 1996. Every artist, even Dylan, was
once a would-be, and each faces the prospect—however remote—that they might
one day be a has-been. Once attained, success may seem inevitable in
retrospect, but prior to success there’s always the doubt—sometimes in the
background, sometimes all-consuming—that fate holds nothing but failure. Every
artist can empathize with those who are still struggling, those who wonder
whether they just need a lucky break or whether the entire creative impulse is
a false hope, a siren call that would best be avoided lest it lures them towards
time-wasting and fruitless quests for an artistic validity that is forever out
of reach. This is Llewyn’s central quandary; well, that and the need to develop
some empathy for other people.

Overall, the film
does seem an awkward fit with contemporary cinema, and in some ways feels more
redolent of the best contemporary television series, where offbeat
sensibilities, character depth, and auteurist vision are given free reign. In
its presentation of a doubtfully sympathetic central character, as well as the
gently post-modernist trickery of the narrative, in some respects the film
feels closer to series such as ‘Breaking Bad’ than to many of the nominees for
Best Picture such as ‘Gravity’ or ‘Captain Philips’. Of course it’s not long
and baggy like those multiple-series TV shows, but it is adult and allusive and
challenges the viewer in ways that many of the films nominated for Best Picture
resolutely refuse to do.

This takes us into the murky waters that
lap around the debate over contemporary cinema’s relevance and prospects for
the future. Given the trend towards more intelligent, expansive, and
literary-minded TV shows, and the Netflix-led phenomenon whereby media conduits
are creating their own content, Llewyn and Hollywood actually have more in
common than might meet the eye: times are changing and mainstream Hollywood is
standing still, stuck in a rut, bemusedly watching the sand drain out of the
hourglass. The truth is, though, that reports of cinema’s death at the hands of
a resurgent wave of quality television, have (at best) been greatly
exaggerated. Partly this is because cinema still has a few tricks up its
sleeve, partly it’s due to the fact that these widely acclaimed TV shows aren’t
quite as impressive as people seem to think. Breaking Bad was good, yes, but
it had over sixty hours to play with, and if distilled to ninety minutes it
wouldn’t rival the best of contemporary cinema. House of Cards, the big
paradigm-shifting Netflix show, worked fine for one season (though it lacked
the 100-proof venom of the British original), but series two unravelled
alarmingly into water treading and shark jumping. The indisputable apotheosis
of the modern televisual era was HBO’s The Sopranos, but that show finished
back in 2007, has yet to be rivalled by any subsequent series, and was in any
case basically a TV incarnation of a Scorsese movie: GoodFellas: The TV Show.

So let’s agree that cinema isn’t on the
ropes quite yet. Indeed, 2013 was a particularly strong year, and although the
omission of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ from all the major award categories was a
grotesquely poor judgment call on the part of the Academy, many of the films,
actors, and directors that were
nominated were very much deserving of acclaim. On the other hand, the members of the Academy
need to realize that rather than shunning films such as the Coens’ in favour of
anodyne blockbusters like Gravity, they ought to be embracing the offbeat and
the idiosyncratic, conquering their addiction to black-and-white morality and
succumbing to the deeper pull of ambiguity and nuance. If they want to survive,
that is.  So as we continue to digest
that interminable, glitz-encrusted ceremony during which the people with the
worst taste on the planet told us what they thought the best films of last year
were, and while we ponder the future of Hollywood, and cinema itself, we should
be equally ready to meet any claim that cinema is being superseded by
television, or any suggestion that Inside Llewyn Davis deserved its outsider
status as the spectre at the Oscars feast, with an echo of the admonitory words
spoken by Bob Dylan’s joker to the thief in “All Along the Watchtower”: Let us
not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

John Carvill is a journalist who lives in the United Kingdom. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Popmatters, and elsewhere; he is the editor of the online journal Oomska.

What’s Behind the Puzzling Bum Rap TRUE DETECTIVE Has Gotten?

What’s Behind the Puzzling Bum Rap TRUE DETECTIVE Has Gotten?

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There’s something about the recently concluded first season of the HBO program True Detective that’s driven certain normally cogent television critics batty. Usually one can follow, at least generally,
naysayers’ objections to a program’s narrative arc or episode-to-episode execution, but in the case of True Detective
almost nothing the critics are saying adds up. The result is that a
beautifully written and elegantly produced drama about existential
despair on the Louisiana Bayou has become the latest pariah for hipsters
and self-anointed cultural critics alike.
True Detective
is a show with only three well-drawn characters–in fact only three
characters the show has any interest in developing at all–and one of
them is female, two male. Critics
of the show conclude that True Detective had no interest in the feminine.
It
is, too, a show that hints at a vast, murderous conspiracy of rich
white men, but finally gives viewers the satisfaction of seeing only a
single member of that ring brought to justice. In a television industry
where the conventional thing to do would have been to ensure that all
wrongdoers ever shown or hinted at on-screen were apprehended, True Detective
takes the unusual tack of conceding that sometimes even the most
dedicated detectives can only solve a small piece of the larger puzzle.
It’s a fact foreshadowed repeatedly in the show’s first season via
repeated reference to the cavernous blindspots even
talented detectives must endure. Critics of the show opine in
response–inexplicably–that True Detective
wasn’t, in fact, bucking a decades-long trend in the true crime genre,
but merely not trying hard enough. In other words, a more conventional
plot would have satisfied critics by convincing them, in a conventional
way, that the show wanted more than anything to meet their expectations.
Except that it didn’t, so they howled.
True Detective is
a program so long on abstract philosophical rumination that critics say
they couldn’t bear to hear a minute more of the existential conjectures
of
disgraced police detective Rustin “Rust” Cohle (Matthew McConaughey); those same critics warn potential new viewers of True Detective
that the show is merely a standard police procedural–even though that
genre is known to be (to put it charitably) a little light on anything
approaching abstraction generally or philosophy specifically.
True Detective is a show that’s been panned by some major media outlets–The New
Yorker, most notably–even as
everyone more or less agrees that the acting is great, the
cinematography is great, the writing is great, and the pacing is
sufficient to tie even the most skeptical viewer to their television set
every week.
If all this sounds rather strange–as though True Detective
is getting the sort of treatment reserved for cultural setpieces that
somehow destroy our sense of ourselves, placing us immediately in a
defensive stance–that’s because the whole melodrama surrounding True Detective is indeed incredibly strange. And, too, it has an
undercurrent of nastiness that’s merely underlined by the above
paradoxes. Maybe critics got sick of praising shows produced by HBO;
maybe they resented the growing tendency (see House of Cards)
for Hollywood film stars to take turns on the small screen; maybe they
tire of the arrogant, self-aggrandizing digi-hipster buzz that seems to
surround every new cable series with half a pulse; maybe decades of
egregiously turgid Law & Order spinoffs have soured the media on anything that looks even vaguely like a police procedural.
Here’s
what we know: Watching your television is not an exercise in seeing how
close a program can come to emulating your archetype of the genre you
think you’re watching. Nor is appreciating art merely a game of
deduction in which the starting point is how you think that art should
look, and the endpoint is your grave disappointment at what it actually
turns out to be and (as importantly) want to
be. If a television program features one man so traumatized by the loss
of his two year-old daughter and the subsequent disintegration of his
marriage that he no longer believes in love nor yearns for sex; if it
features another man so self-conflicted about his own soul he ping-pongs
blindly between a loving wife and psychologically immature mistresses
without seeing any of them more clearly than he sees himself; if the
villainous mob at the heart of the program
feeds off the poisonous legacy of “good ol’ boy” Southern cultural
practices like “rural Mardi Gras”; if the milieu of the show’s
protagonists–the seedy criminal underbelly of impoverished coastal
Louisiana–is one in which women are marginalized and most of the chief
actors (that is to say, most of the appalling archetypes dotting the
landscape) are male; if all these things are true, I probably won’t
recommend to friends and family that they watch such a program to find
sterling depictions of complex feminine psyches. But that doesn’t mean I
won’t recommend the show; it simply means that I’ll judge (and
recommend) the program on its own terms, adjudicating its value based
upon the story the program wishes to tell and the fidelity to that
purpose that it shows in telling it. I certainly won’t insist that any
one television program, in a nation with hundreds of them, be all things
to all people.
Matthew McConaughey’s Rustin
Cohle is an iconic television figure. Neither a hero nor an anti-hero,
he’s a man whose belief in his own perseverance is so wispy he moves
through every scene like a ghost. If you think you’ve seen Rustin Cohle
on your television screen before, you probably weren’t paying undue
attention to the show’s subtly eloquent dialogue, which
sees McConaughey ruminating on such yawn-inducing, overplayed TV topics
like how hypothetical beings inhabiting the fourth dimension would
perceive the lifespans of two- and three-dimensional beings; whether
consciousness generally and fatherhood and motherhood specifically
are in fact the original, purge-proof sins of our species; whether love
is merely a delusion of sentience subsumed beneath the broader
fallacies of free will and linear time; you know, run-of-the-mill police
procedural shit like that. If Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart is slightly
more conventional a small-screen figure–a philandering, hard-drinking
alpha male cop who becomes equally enraged at any woman he can’t control
and any man who mistreats a woman–he’s also played to perfection by
Harrelson, in fact so convincingly that when Hart’s wife says that the
foundational tragedy of her husband’s life is that he has no idea who he
is (despite seeming to play entirely to type), we believe her. It’s a
cutting critique of masculinity that those counting, instead, the number
of lines of dialogue doled out to male and female actors in the series
may have missed. In no uncertain terms, True Detective
concludes that
our nation’s founding archetype for the male body and psyche is so
hollow that the destruction it generates is merely terror and aggression
predictably filling an existential vacuum. Critics of the show respond
that it’s a procession of buddy-cop tropes. I don’t have any idea what show they were watching.
It’s true that True Detective
leaves some loose ends, and equally true that in the age of cable
television programs so expensive to produce that one never knows if
they’ll have a second season, that’s par for the course. Still, some
of the loose ends the critics complain about seem paltry by comparison
to, say, the trail of questions left behind by Lost, or Firefly, or even now long-forgotten near-classics like Rome.
Sure, we never find out why Marty’s daughter was drawing men and women
having sex on sketchpads at her elementary school, but who cares,
finally? We never found out the precise mechanism by which that prison
rat killed himself in his cell; so? And it’s unclear whether that
cowardly parish Sheriff in fact goes on to seek revenge against Rust
after the latter has credibly threatened him with execution and
professional ruin if he does, but can’t we just use our imagination to
resolve that trifling canard? And while it’s undoubtedly a much bigger
deal that True Detective
ultimately uncovers the key to only a few
murders on the Bayou, rather than the hundreds it alludes to, for those
taking the show on its own terms Marty’s explanation in the series
finale–that sometimes having good intentions and fortitude means doing
whatever one can, not everything one conceives of–seems not just
plausible but, based upon Hart’s background and motivations, earned.
Likewise, a brilliantly written final monologue by the philosophical
pessimist Cohle (portrayed by critics as “merely” a nihilist, as that’s a
pejorative term most readers will understand) is perfectly consistent with
his complicated personal ethos: one governed by deeply considered views
on consciousness and time, not (as would be the case with the
conventional nihilist) “meaning” and ethics. A key difference between
Cohle and a workaday nihilist is that the latter doesn’t believe in any
of those pesky meta-realities Rust eerily obsesses over–a fact that
makes Rust’s gradual conversion to a sort of spirituality
cleverly unsurprising rather than stupidly epiphanic.
No one will accuse True Detective
of offering many groundbreaking roles for actresses–of the three women
who get the most minutes on-screen, one is a housewife who roughly
conforms to the archetypal spouse locked in a loveless,
infidelity-riddled marriage; one is a courthouse steno who slums with
Marty as she looks for a husband; and one is a former prostitute turned
mentally ill cellphone store employee–but at some point it must be
allowed that there will be programs, albeit thankfully not too many of
them, in which the primary
relationship considered by the script is between two men. I love Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road; I certainly
wouldn’t want every film, or even a notable fraction of them,
to put two males in an existential wrestling match and see who loses and
how. True Detective at least has
the good grace to offer only the slightest relational arc between Rust
and Marty; those who say the series’ first season ends with the two as
lifelong friends are confusing the empathy of co-survivors with genuine
affection. If Rust and Marty seem likely to stay in touch after the
final credits roll, that’s because they have nothing else to do with
themselves and too little direction to orient themselves otherwise. It’s
hardly a ringing endorsement of platonic love between men. Indeed, the
more likely follow-through after the final shot of True Detective
is
that Rust kills himself shortly thereafter, and Marty continues on in
the dreary and directionless life we saw him living when Rust rolled
back into town to close out the Dora Lange case once and
for all. Those who see resolution or reunion in the mere fact that
Marty’s children and ex-wife visit him as he lays half-dead in the
hospital–or that Hart begins sobbing uncontrollably during their visit
(quite obviously tears of abject misery, not joy)–are grasping at
straws. There’s no happy ending for Harrelson’s Marty, nor does the show
allude to one.
Nor, it appears, is there any
happy ending for True Detective. Its detractors have resorted, now, to merely contending that Top of the Lake was a better program and got less attention. Okay; is this somehow proof positive that True Detective is unwatchable or (less grandly) undeserving of praise? Does the fact that The Wire is still far better than either of these two shows mean Top of the Lake is unwatchable too? Someday we’ll find out what was behind the bum rap given to True Detective; or, alternately, we won’t–and be left instead with The New Yorker claiming that one of the best-written programs of the last few years is in fact no more memorable dialogically than, if you can
believe it, Family Matters. Steve Urkel used to go on and on about fourth-dimensional metaphysical overlords, didn’t he?

VIDEO ESSAY: Rough and Ready: The Return of the Microcinema

VIDEO ESSAY: Rough and Ready: The Return of the Microcinema

Earlier this week, Google
released an app called “Previews” for Google Glass users. The app allows users
to view a film’s theatrical trailer by simply looking at that same film’s
theatrical poster in a theater lobby. This immediacy, this growing interest in
instant access, is another advancement in our culture’s shift from the group
experience to the singular experience, in regard to the cinema. Believe it or
not, there was a time when a moviegoer might go up to the box office cashier
and simply ask: “What’s that movie about?” And get an answer!

In a diabolical twist of fate, the
technological wizardry provided by Google Glass, smartphones and tablets have
in fact put mainstream moviegoers back into archaic roles. Specifically, these
personalized smart devices are removing viewers from their respective, physical
audience groups and positioning them to heavily rely on their own digitized
versions of a Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope was an early motion picture viewing device that
allowed only one viewer at a time to watch a film through a peephole.
Kinetoscopes were all the rage in 1894. Today, we have the same thing—except
it’s in the form of an iPhone, or a computer.

For all of the gadgetry and instant
gratification that comes with such technological advancements, there has been
one constant in the movie-going world: the limited access to the experimental
(or underground) film catalogue. Sure, one can search for and watch a Stan
Brakhage small-gauge short film on YouTube, for instance, but that is not how a
Brakhage film should first be viewed. It would be like watching Star Wars
on your phone before having seen it in a theater. And while a Brakhage film
doesn’t necessarily require an IMAX screen or stadium seating, it does come
alive in a special way when it’s projected on a screen by a—dare I say
it?—small-gauge film projector. Why is this? Because that film projector comes
from the same technological arena that gave birth to Brakhage. It’s one thing
to watch a cute cat video (that was more than likely recorded by a smartphone)
embedded on someone’s Facebook page. It’s an entirely different thing to watch
an 8-minute impressionistic work that was filmed, spliced and then further
manipulated on physical celluloid, sitting in a dark room filled with equally
engaged and fascinated cinephiles.

While the access to this catalogue of
experimental film is hindered by the limited places of exhibition to actually
watch them, some cinematic havens exist. These “microcinemas”—as they have
affectionately been called since 1994—aren’t as common as they once were, but
they are still championed by small circles of artists and curators in certain
pockets across the country.  In Chicago,
Illinois, there is a wonderful gem of a microcinema called the Nightingale (http://nightingalecinema.org/), located in
the city’s Noble Square neighborhood. Earlier this winter, I visited the
Nightingale for one of their special exhibition programs, where they showed
films that were thematically linked to the writings of Studs Terkel. Artists
read excerpts of his writings to an eager audience between each of the films.
It was quite a sight to see. The level of engagement between orator and
listener, between abstract film work and viewer, was truly special. The
Nightingale was offering an alternative to the instant gratification culture:
it gave viewers intimate gratification instead.

And in a time of such technological haste
and overt content consumption, the microcinema offers up an old-school
rhetoric that invites moviegoers to look back on films that challenged norms,
to look forward to the new works that are breaking the traditional narrative
structure, and to open up an offline, in-person dialogue with their fellow
cinephiles. It’s the kind of feat that no Google Glass app has yet to achieve.

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content
creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually
contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW
which boasts the tagline: “Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System.” You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

METAMERICANA: SOUTH PARK: THE STICK OF TRUTH Is a Fantasy RPG That’s All Too Real

METAMERICANA: SOUTH PARK: THE STICK OF TRUTH Is a Fantasy RPG That’s All Too Real

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I
haven’t been an avid videogamer since my mid-twenties, and I’ve never been more
than a casual observer of the South Park television and film franchise,
so I was an unlikely pick to be the guy driving from Madison, Wisconsin to the
Illinois border at 2AM to purchase the new South Park role-playing
videogame, South Park: The Stick of Truth. The reason I made the nearly
hour-long drive from the Wisconsin capital down to Beloit was partly because I
couldn’t sleep, and partly because I’d heard two things about the new South
Park game that piqued my interest. First, it’s one of the only RPG
videogames licensed from a television or film franchise ever to receive
near-universal critical acclaim in the console era. Second, it is, for all
intents and purposes, a “meta-RPG,” that is, a role-playing game about
role-playing games. Given my recent insomnia and the stated theme of this column
(“art about art”) I just couldn’t resist checking it out. What I found was a
gaming experience equal parts poignant and hilarious, familiar and
unpredictable, self-referential and transgressive—exactly the sort of art we
look for, demand, and deserve in the age of metamodernism.


I’ve
watched maybe thirty South Park
episodes start-to-finish during the seventeen-year run of the television show,
a number which, I’ll concede to the legions of fanatical South Park devotees,
is embarrassingly low. But it’s a show I’ve always admired from afar, and not
merely because I know that, despite being one of the most gleefully offensive
franchises in television and (with the 1999 feature-length film South Park:
Bigger, Longer, and Uncut) film history, it’s also one of the most
decorated artifacts of the Age of Television. Time Magazine deemed
it one of the 100 best TV shows of all-time; Rolling Stone called it the
funniest show of this century’s first decade; Entertainment Weekly rates
it a Top 25 television program over the last quarter-century; it received a
Peabody Award in 2006; and it’s been nominated for ten Emmy Awards (winning
four times). For all the protests and boycotts it’s provoked, it somehow
manages to win over, in time, even its fiercest critics—or most of them. It
does this by revealing its long game to be an astutely political rather than
merely asinine one. I admire South Park not only for its persistent
intelligence, but also its dogged cultural relevance. Both Gen X and Gen Y
Americans—and soon enough, the elementary school kids of Gen Z—understand what
it’s like to be simultaneously mystified and victimized by the adults of the
generation preceding; the corrosiveness of our intergenerational inheritance is
a timeless theme that South Park
addresses fearlessly and, beneath a veneer of flippancy, with surprising
subtlety.

South
Park has gotten the
videogame treatment five times in the past, and in all cases (to hear
professional videogame critics tell it) forgettably: South Park (1998)
was said to be “one of those games that is bound to come up when you start
thinking about the worst game you’ve ever played” by industry leader GameSpot; South
Park: Chef’s Luv Shack (1999) received an aggregate score of 50% (out of
100%) from ratings tallier GameRankings; South Park Rally (2000) fared
even poorer than its predecessor, at 47%; after nine years spent regrouping,
the franchise returned to consoles in 2009 for South Park: Let’s Go Tower
Defense Play, which failed to achieve critical acclaim but nevertheless boasted
the series’ best showing to date (7.5 out of 10 from GameSpot, which noted,
with only muted sarcasm, that it was at that point “easily the best South
Park game”); and then 2012 saw a relapse for series creators Trey Parker
and Matt Stone, as South Park: Tenorman’s Revenge again reached
only about the halfway point (52 out of 100) on ratings aggregator Metacritic.

So
why does a television program with so much critical acclaim have such
difficulty succeeding when translated from its native medium to another?
Besides the obvious answer—that licensed videogames are almost always
hastily-arranged cash-grabs that pay zero attention to plot or gameplay—one
possibility is that the allure of South Park is altogether more
complicated than videogame designers have ever considered.

South
Park, which takes
place largely in the titular (fictional) town in Colorado, is first
and foremost an epic about how American children are forced to inhabit social,
cultural, and political spheres governed by adults who are idiots at best and
cretins at worst. The franchise traces the ways different children respond to
this passive, systemic, large-scale form of child abuse. Some kids, such as
series star Cartman, adopt the worst behaviors of their elders, and do so
effectively enough that many of those they’re emulating give them carte blanche
for their bad behavior; others, like Stan and Kyle, are savvy enough to realize
the impossibility of finding role models, but also pragmatic enough to realize
that navigating the madness of the adult world means from time to time
indulging madness oneself; and still others, like mute latchkey-kid Kenny,
become a sad amalgamation of the two preceding types—suffused with the
callousness of their culture but unable to accede to it entirely because they
are, after all, benignly naive and instinctively optimistic children. To watch
these kids weather the storm of American culture and its many subcultures—now indulging
racist biases because they’ve seen them performed so often and so
energetically; now getting in trouble because the depth of local adults’
depravity is beyond their understanding—is alternately hilarious and
heartbreaking. If I don’t watch the show more often, it’s because I find the
world it depicts a depressing one. And, unfortunately, one I all too often
recognize as my own.

Living
in rural Massachusetts in the 1980s, I had the same sort of middle-class
upbringing I suspect Parker and Stone did: one in which a kid has a lot of
leisure time, enjoys a Gen X sort of relationship with his parents (one marked
by distance rather than, as with Gen Y, an eerie sort of friendship), and is
therefore mostly left to fend for himself in understanding how the world works
and why. Like many kids who grew up in the mid-1980s, I was calling classmates
“faggots” for many years before I had any idea what the word meant; was a
little shy (which is not to say hostile) around any child who seemed different,
whether that child was handicapped or black or a girl or somehow physically
notable (due to height, weight, facial features, or otherwise); and, generally
speaking, learned the conventional biases of my culture via the osmosis of
television and film. It’s remarkable how odiously bias-entrenching much
eighties television and film seems in retrospect, and unfortunately eighties
children bore the brunt of it with only minimal guidance from their
elders. 

When
I see the basically good-hearted kids of South Park, Colorado—Eric Cartman, the
nominal villain, excepted—struggling to understand the cultural mores and
presuppositions they’re exposed to daily, it makes me uncomfortable because I
know that the humor of the kids in South Park is really just that: the
humor of eighties-style elementary school children who don’t know any better
than to reflexively mimic how speech-impaired children speak, or to exoticize
Asian-Americans, or to discount by 50% or more the masculinity of anyone they
identify as gay. I don’t at all mean to excuse these kids (or my child self)
any past misconduct; I merely know what it’s like to be a thirty-something
progressive looking back at his life as a South Park-age kid in the
1980s and feeling ashamed for how natural such misconduct felt at the time. South
Park is not, to me, a comedy program that fetishizes the most radical brand
of adult humor, it’s a program that dramatizes—sometimes realistically,
sometimes via absurdist metaphor—a very banal and common juvenile
experience. 

In
South Park: The Stick of Truth, the children revolt, which is probably
why I like it so much. The game’s frenetic plot follows the children of South
Park as they turn their occasional LARPing (“Live-Action Role Playing”) into a
perpetual form of escapism, with a gang of “Humans” led by Cartman vying with a
tribe of “Elves” led by Kyle to gain possession of the vaunted “Stick of Truth”
(just a stick, really). The game successfully turns an entire universe of
confusing mundanity into rosters of weapons (e.g., a basketball, a Super Ball,
a broken bottle, a hammer), equipment (e.g., medical scrubs, a marching band
uniform, SWAT gear), and various costumes (e.g., hundreds of makeup kits,
eyewear, wigs, and gloves), all ordered by their supposed effectiveness as
offensive or defensive military equipment. The designations are entirely
imaginary, of course. For instance, the South Parkers refer to Twitter as “a
carrier raven,” their backyards as castles and keeps, and their styles of
dress, personal ethics, and self-mythologies as “classes” consistent with those
found in the Dungeons & Dragons universe (e.g., Mage, Thief, Paladin,
Ranger, and Bard; the game’s one addition is the “Jew” class, inspired by Kyle’s
religion and Cartman’s unsettlingly entrenched anti-Semitism). Because the
whole affair is ripped straight from J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings)
and Gary Gygax (creator of Dungeons & Dragons), playing South Park: The
Stick of Truth is the equivalent of being a role-playing kid who’s role-playing
a role-playing game. But as with so much meta-art, these several levels of
remove from the “real” thing feel as or more real than the “originals,” in part
because being several times removed from anything “real” is more or less the
human condition in 2014.

But
South Park: The Stick of Truth removes its player still further from its
source material, because the game is as much an homage to—and a satire of—the
entire “role-playing” enterprise as it is a gamer’s translation of the
endeavor. Certain set pieces of 1990s video-gaming
(particularly RPG gaming) are here put under the microscope for criticism or
admiration: for instance, the hero of the game (a newcomer to South Park
variously called “The New Kid,” “Douchebag,” “Sir Douchebag,” or “Commander
Douchebag”) is one of RPG gaming’s much-maligned “silent protagonists,” a fact
repeatedly remarked upon and derided during the seventeen-hour run-time of The
Stick of Truth. The game’s battle sequences are turn-based, a style of play
so long ago abandoned by top videogame developers that it becomes a running
in-game joke here, as your fighting partners will sarcastically remark upon
your slowness if you take any time whatsoever planning your next move in
battle. Even Jamie Dunlap’s score—which is actually very, very good—is merely a
tongue-in-cheek medley of vaguely Tolkienesque sonic doodles. 

Certain
moments in the game are so pricelessly “meta” that I’d be hard-pressed to think
of any game this side of Final Fantasy VII so willing to acknowledge its
own artifice; and in terms of explicit rather than implicit acknowledgment of
artifice, I’m not sure we’ve even seen anything on this scale. At one point
Cartman tells the game’s hero not to speak to Mrs. Cartman (his mother) because
“she’s not part of the game”—leaving unsaid whether the “game” he’s speaking of
is the South Parkers’ LARPing or South Park: The Stick of Truth. In the
same way, a group of toughs at one point informs both The New Kid and the
videogamer playing him that fighting them “at this point in the game is really
just a waste of time.” Who are they speaking to, really, and does it matter?
One of the beautiful ironies of this type of art is that each layer of reality
shares sufficient commonalities with the others that what applies conspicuously
to one level usually applies as much or more to all the others. The more
furious the layering of realities, the more bewildering and also hilarious the
gameplay of The Stick of Truth. At
one point, Mr. Mackey, South Park Elementary’s guidance counselor and detention
overseer, warns the South Parkers against breaking one of their number out of
detention by referencing every layer of reality in the game: the source
material for the kids’ LARPing; the “game” they’ve created to LARP in; and the
videogame in which real-world humans role-play the LARPers. From one sentence
to the next you have no idea which layer of reality Mr. Mackey is inhabiting,
and that sort of sublime ambiguity is, at times, spectacular.

Of
course, South Park wouldn’t be the cultural phenomenon it is if it
merely satirized fringe practices like LARPing and tabletop role-playing games,
or even if it merely commented implicitly on the ignorance and fecklessness of
American adults. The show—and this most recent videogame based on the franchise—is
much more pointedly political than this, and much more maniacally traumatizing
psychologically. Recurring sociopolitical themes in The Stick of Truth
include mistrust of centralized government, derision for political rhetoric,
antagonism toward overdetermined sociocultural discourses, and a frank
appraisal of the way individual citizens shirk their responsibilities to one
another and (even more poignantly) themselves. Of course, all of these
commentaries are packaged in the most visually and aurally noxious plot-points
and cut-scenes imaginable—for instance, a “boss battle” in which the recently
miniaturized hero fights on the very bed his parents are having wild sex upon.
Not only are the hero’s mother’s breasts visible throughout the fight, but dodging
the hero’s father’s testicles is actually part of the in-game challenge.
Failure to do so leads to instant death.

Parker
and Stone likely became such infamous provocateurs because they know that in a
culture incapable of genuine shock, the only way to grab and hold anyone’s
attention is to cross what few boundaries of taste remain. South Park: The
Stick of Truth certainly does that, offering players everything from a
sodomy minigame aboard an alien spaceship to an abortion minigame in which you’re
asked to perform an “abortion” on a man in drag; from the playing of Nazi
propaganda sound-clips over many routine battles (owing to a “Nazi zombie”
plotline) to a quest in which you beat up homeless people at the request of
South Park’s Mayor (her reasoning: only by violently driving the homeless from
South Park can the town’s callous indifference to their existence be obscured).
Throughout, one finds religious, national, and ethnic stereotypes so
outrageous they can only credibly be received as satire; one also encounters
characters so unthinkably grotesque they can only serve as Parker and Stone’s
own winking self-satire (for instance, talking feces, giant aborted fetuses
wearing Nazi armbands, and gay leather fetishists who aid the hero by anally
consuming minor enemies). There are also dozens of lesser sight-gags, for
instance one involving the television industry: in the sewers of South Park,
regular “finds” include both feces nuggets and Emmy Awards. There’s also an
easily missed but clearly derisive reference to the Entertainment Software
Rating Board, an entity that understandably issued its sternest parental
warning (“M for Mature”) for The Stick of Truth. All of the above
suggests that the game is fully aware of exactly what it’s doing and why.
Much of it is horrifying—I cringed as frequently as I laughed—but I’d be
hard-pressed to call any of it unintelligent or undirected.

For
me, the most moving moment in The Stick of Truth came in the sewers
below the city, as the New Kid moved from caches filled with human feces, used
syringes, dirty bindles, tufts of pubic hair, and Emmy Awards to protracted
battles with drug-addled homeless men. As disgusting as the visuals of this
“level” of the game are, the music being played throughout it is—oddly—deeply
enchanting. Dunlap’s score is gentle, soothing, and vaguely mysterious. The
point here, and one I might not have gotten until I was twelve hours into the
game, is that the music of South Park: The Stick of Truth isn’t “for”
the gamer, or “for” the world of South Park adults whose reaction to their kids’
LARPing is rarely less than hostile. The music reflects, instead, the layer of
reality Parker and Stone are most invested in as kids who grew up largely in
the eighties (Parker was born in 1969, Stone in 1971) and wished to imagine
their world as something rather more beautiful than the one they saw in school
and on the news. In other words, however disgusting the sewers beneath South
Park may be, they’re still a place of some wonder for the pint-size Rangers,
Bards, and Paladins who traipse through them pretending to be questing nobly.
The game doesn’t talk down to these kids—however coarse they themselves may
sometimes be—but rather ennobles their fantasies by treating them as not just
reasonable but superlative. It was a pleasure to inhabit these kids’ fantasies
for seventeen hours, even if they reminded me not just of how beautiful
childhood can be if we let it, but also of how cruel and uncompromising it can
be when we adults do our damnedest, as we usually do, to make it that way.

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.

Director Chiemi Karasawa on Elaine Stritch, Documentaries & Working With Spike Jonze

Director Chiemi Karasawa on Elaine Stritch, Documentaries & Working With Spike Jonze

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One of the great actresses of the cinema, television, and
theater was brought to light recently in the documentary Elaine Stritch: Just Shoot Me. Stritch has won three Primetime
Emmys and been nominated for a Tony five times. Most recently, she played the
hilarious Colleen Donaghy in 30 Rock. Additionally, she
starred on Broadway in multiple plays, including Stephen Sondheim’s Company. 

As director Chiemi Karasawa studied Stritch’s body of work. the idea to make a film about Elaine emerged. Countless actors are interviewed for the documentary, including Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and James Gandolfini.
Through archival footage from performances and appearances alike, Stritch’s
unique and inspiring talent is showcased.

I had a chance to chat with Karasawa about her path from
script supervisor to documentary producer to director. From working alongside
Spike Jonze, to starting her own production company, to befriending Elaine
Stritch, an inspiring story exists within Karasawa herself.

Meredith Alloway: You first
worked with Stritch on Romance and Cigarettes! She
was in the cast and you were a script supervisor. Did you know her then? 

Chiemi Karasawa: No! That was maybe three years earlier. I do remember the
particular reverence that John Turturro [the director] had towards her.
I had the challenging job of being in charge of her lines and blocking and
continuity. She was a tornado of energy and performance! And she was so
spontaneous. I looked at him and said, ‘How would you like me to handle this?’
He said,  ‘It’s Elaine Stritch. You just
have to let her go.’

MA: Is there a particular
performance of Elaine’s that most impacted you as a filmmaker? 

CK: Having worked in the narrative film business for 15 years
and then getting into documentaries, it was the body of the work and the diversity of it. She is so unconventional
and has such a unique talent that nobody else has. Here is somebody that has
such a history behind her. She had such empathy watching herself 40 years ago.
She’s very complex and dynamic.

MA: There are some
incredible cameos in the film. How do you conduct interviews with acting icons
as well as Elaine, making the atmosphere comfortable and open? 

CK: I think the key to a lot of this success of the
accessibility of filmmaking I really have to hand over to Elaine. We never sat
her down for a formal interview; we never put up a light. As soon as she gets
past that stage of understanding who you are and she can like you, it’s all
access. She doesn’t think of herself as a star by any means. She considered
herself a working actor. She considers herself like anybody else. She kept
asking me why when I wanted to make
this film.  She and I gradually become
close friends. 

MA: Given that she’s
such an icon and you were initially blown away by her work, in what ways did
your image of her change after making the film? 

CK: First of all, I think going into it I had no idea what I
was in for. In the beginning I was so trepidatious. She scared the shit out of
me! She can be really prickly when you don’t know her. When you do know her, you
know you can’t take it personally. Now I see her as a dear friend. I recognize
the vulnerability behind her personality. That she really has such a dynamic
and modern sensibility. There’s something ageless about her that’s so
appealing. Off camera, I was going through so many of my own challenges in my
life and she would offer me so much counsel and conversation. She never
pretended to know everything. She can see so many different perspectives on
things and she’s a survivor. 

MA: You founded
Isotope Films in 2005 in order to produce non-fiction films. How has the
company’s journey been?

CK: I had been working in narrative film and TV for about 15
years as a script supervisor and I had an amazing career. I recognized that I
actually started out as a script supervisor as a stepping-stone to directing. You
have these key relationships with the actors and the DP. The crews were getting
younger and younger and I found myself giving a lot of advice. I started to
think maybe I should be doing this myself.
I recognized it was easier to turn the camera on real life, start
constructing a story, and raise money with that story. By sheer luck I fell into
making the film Billy the Kid with
Jennifer Venditti. We just started working together and that’s when it hit me.
You don’t need millions of dollars and fancy movie stars. Nonfiction filmmaking
has been much easier and more accessible. 

MA: Documentaries are
notorious for not making money and because of this, many filmmakers steer away
from the medium. How can a documentary filmmaker stay passionate about their
non-fiction story without spending too much money? 

CK: I think first off all you have to [want to] tell a story
a lot of people will want to see. That will facilitate investments. Also,
having the talent to bring those stories to life in the best way helps. You have to
have a talented editor. Editors are storytellers, they’re among the most important
elements of the team. The other thing is there are so many other avenues for
filmmaking now. People are making short web content sponsored by industries.
They’re looking for content. A lot of commercials are borrowing from the
non-fiction world. A lot of doc filmmakers are making commercials. People need
to explore all the other avenues of content and figure out how they can align
with corporations and people that have the money.

MA: You’ve been a
script supervisor on some incredible projects, from High Fidelity to Coffee and
Cigarettes. It’s a position that I think many aspiring writers
and filmmakers overlook. How did you get involved and what does the position
actually entail?

CK: It’s true with many positions below the line on a film
crew. I was exposed to it because I was an assistant to a producer. His film
went into production and I got taken to set many times and that’s when I first
saw the woman sitting next to the director and I thought that’s the job that I want. It’s a perfect vantage point. You’re watching
take after take. You’re engaging with all the key players. You’re on set every
moment the camera’s rolling. Your job is to pay attention to the take. It’s a complicated
job, but it you can master it, it’s the best place to watch a director
direct.

MA: Given Spike
Jonze just won the Oscar for Her, and
you’ve worked with him many times, I have to ask what was it like working with
him!

CK: I worked with him when he was coming out of the music
video world. It’s interesting because by the time I was working with Spike on Adaptation, we’d
already been working in commercial work for seven years. I had a lot more experience working with
directors before he directed his first film. I think he found it a relief for
me to be with him! He is not afraid of experimentation. He’s not afraid of the
first take. He’s not afraid to roll camera without a rehearsal. He exploits the
spontaneity of the situation, the authenticity of response.

MA: So you’ve done
narrative and documentary. What’s next? 

CK: Just because I spent so much of my career in the
narrative world, I really don’t see any boundary between fiction filmmaking and
nonfiction filmmaking. Right now I’m being commissioned to produce a screenplay
of a true story. That’s what I enjoy, bringing a story to the screen. I just
like storytelling, and the way it can change and affect people.

Meredith Alloway is a LA local and Texas native. She is currently Senior
Editor at TheScriptLab.com where she focuses on screenwriting education
and entertainment resources. She also launched her own interview showm
“All the Way with Alloway,” where she scoops the latest up and coming
industry insiders. She received her Playwriting and Theatre degree from
Southern Methodist University and continues to pursue her own writing
for film and stage.