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The Brando Standard: How Modern Actors Struggle Productively With Marlon Brando’s Legacy

Nearly ten years after his death, Marlon Brando
remains a walking alchemist’s vial of contradictions: the heavy build of a
bruiser, a brawler, a thug, that still evinces a leonine haughtiness that let
him play noblemen and generals in his prime; a quicksilver sensitivity that
flits through his most savage actions like the tail of an electric eel whipping
through dark water. And, of course, there is his handsomeness: a masculine
angularity so intense that it can’t help but invite the same worshipful scrutiny
commonly shown to the Marilyns, the Bardots, and the Lorens – which puts him,
like them, in a gilded cage of good looks, where people are reduced to their
bodies.

Though the name Brando
still evokes the memory of a time when nobody had ever seen anyone like him
before; it has also, ironically, become an adjective of choice when describing
a certain type of actor: a (usually) White, (usually) young, (always)
attractive man of great talent who will let himself be broken down over the
course of a film, who will brood and rage heroically and release a few
strategic tears before his inevitable (even if pyrrhic) triumph. Leonardo
DiCaprio is one of these actors, so is Christian Bale. Nicolas Cage was one of
these actors until he devoted his post-Oscar career to the sort of He-Man action
hero parts that Channing Tatum could sleepwalk through. When Cage does return
to the kind of rigorous roles that defined him as a capital-A actor—like his
turn as an ex-con in Joe—even the
most positive reviews lament his overall artistic decline (the headline for one
recent write-up says it best: “Joe
reminds us why we liked Nicolas Cage”). Johnny Depp literally wore a leather
jacket in one of his first classic roles; that of teen dream/gearhead hellion
Crybaby, which was, in and of itself, an homage to and a loving spoof of
Brando’s Wild One.

Each of these actors has an onscreen element stitched
together with aspects of the Brandoesque. And yet, for all of their formidable
talents, and for all of the power and ingenuity in their performances, this new
generation still doesn’t quite compare with Brando himself. The Brando standard
(which derives its definition, for my purposes, from the “young Brando’s”
persona and body of work) isn’t ultimately about swagger or artful brutishness.
It’s about vulnerability—but not the conventional vulnerability traditionally
allowed to leading men: coming gently undone in front of his love interest;
crashing hard after his mission or merger or perfect family life (or all three
at once) falls apart; surviving (barely) a brutal beating from his nemesis.

Brando’s vulnerability is rooted in what his acting teacher,
Stella Adler, defined as “his great physical beauty—not just good looks, but
that rarer thing that can only be called beauty.” That beauty is an essence
that feels as delicate and attenuated as Terry Malloy’s fingertips while he
plays with Edie’s white glove in On The Waterfront; and as elemental, as
thick with sex and need as Stanley Kowalski’s cry for his wife. “Brando took
over the vanity and posing and sheer willfulness of a good-looking woman … and
he gave it a male twist”: With these words, critic Harold Brodkey most aptly
describes the dichotomy that defines the Brando standard and gives it its
power—a tempestuous blend of what Brodkey calls “the rigorously male” with a
surrealistic kind of beauty that can’t help but call attention to itself, the
kind of beauty most associated with actresses and models, the kind of beauty
seen as a means to an end. Most of Brando’s early roles, the ones he’s most
known for, use this tension between brawn and beauty to accomplish something
extraordinarily subversive for the time of Father
Knows Best: turning the alpha male into a sex object.

Terry Malloy may be the anti-hero of On the Waterfront,
pissing away his talents as a boxer by serving as hired muscle for the mob; but
Edie, the brainy “Plain Jane” sister of the kid whose death Terry inadvertently
causes, sends the plot into motion. The heart of the film may be the arch of
Terry’s redemption, but it finds its pulse in the parallel narrative of Edie’s
sexual awakening. He’s in awe of her education, and all-too-keenly aware of his
own limitations—his bosses call him a dummy, all brawn and no brains. Edie is
the convent girl with the teaching job in her future; her belief in him gives
him a sense of legitimacy he’s incapable of finding on his own. All he can
offer her in return is his magnificent body and the promise of pleasure. Edie’s
face in the infamous glove scene, and in the scene where Terry teaches her to
drink beer, is a symphony of barely-repressed lust.

Smart, ambitious and uncompromising, Edie is the archetype
of a heroine in an early Brando film. What makes her, and all her cinematic
sisters, such as Cathy from The Wild One or
Josefina Zapata from Viva Zapata! (In
which Brando plays the late revolutionary Emiliano Zapata) so unique is that
she doesn’t particularly need
Brando’s character, but she wants
him—even though she has more promise in her pinkie finger than he has in the
sculptural bulk of his entire body. Perhaps the clearest crystallization of
this kind of relationship comes from Viva
Zapata! where Josefina teaches her peasant-born husband to read while
they’re in bed. Zapata is shirtless, his dark, muscular chest thrown into
relief by thin white sheets; our attention is called to the earthy grandeur of
his physique, but also to the emotions playing over his face—awe of the words
themselves, fear that he’ll never learn them, and shame that he’s as needy as a
child before the woman who was, moments before, in thrall to him.

Terry Malloy and Emiliano Zapata are certainly two of young
Brando’s more tender characters, but even his unabashed brutes like Stanley
Kowalski or Johnny from The Wild One embody
(quite literally) this dynamic. Stanley and Johnny are capricious beasts,
animated by instinct and chaotic whim; this gives them their erotic potency.
Stella Kowalski waxes raptly to her sister about how Stanley broke all the
lights in the house on their wedding night. She’s of the manor-born and he’s a
grease jockey; she’s vastly smarter than he is, but that doesn’t matter when he
rips his shirt off.

In The Wild One,
Cathy, the shy waitress who finds herself drawn to Johnny after his biker gang
invades her small town, doesn’t gain the same pleasure of a bare-chested
Brando; she does, however, get to hold onto him as they ride on his chopper, to
feel the engine thrum through the small of his back and the backs of his
thighs. The leather-jacketed rebel astride his Harley is an icon of American
masculinity (which Brando was arguably an architect of), but Johnny’s face
remains inscrutable, impassive; the camera holds on Cathy as desire blooms
across her features. Still, in the scene that follows, she dresses him down for
ravaging her town, calls him out on his macho bluster. All Johnny can do is sit
and listen. He knows she’s right. She’s more than right, in fact. She’s superior to him.

Many of Brando’s
supposed heirs apparent don’t allow themselves to be as similarly objectified
as he was. Like Cage or Bale, or latter-day DiCaprio, the roles they choose are
too rooted in a more conventional masculinity: These characters may possess
great depth and sensitivity, but they are, at the end of the day, cops and
superheroes, soldiers and executives who just happen to have matinee idol
looks. One could argue that Nicolas Cage’s performance in Moonstruck comes close to the Brando standard, given that his
character, Ronny, a baker who lost his hand to a bread slicer, strikes a spark
inside lonely widow Loretta. However, the friction that strikes this spark
comes from equality, not imbalance: Ronny and Loretta well-matched in intellect
and temperament; their first date is at the opera, and they first fall into bed
after one of those fights where the lovers are really parsing out who’ll be the
unstoppable force and who’ll play immovable object. Unlike Edie and Terry, or Josefina
and Emiliano, nobody is “the brain” and nobody is “the body.”

DiCaprio, who started his career as a teen heartthrob, has
transitioned away from films like Titanic
or even Total Eclipse, where his
gamine prettiness drives the movement of the film—whether that’s stirring the
heroine to abandon her posh, if constraining, lifestyle for him or driving a
legendary poet to madness and his greatest work. Some of Christian Bale’s
roles, like Bruce Wayne or Patrick Bateman, have required only a sort of
perfunctory handsomeness; a good-looking man will fit the bill, but he doesn’t
have to inspire actual lust. Indeed, the hyper-attentiveness to Bale’s
appearance in American Psycho is a
testament to his character’s soulless superficiality.

Actors like Depp or Jared Leto are almost singularly
distinguished by their prettiness—even (perhaps especially) when they take
roles meant to subvert that prettiness. Much of the press surrounding Leto’s
turn as a doomed transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club focused on how
exquisite his features looked under his drug store make-up. Depp’s portrayal of
Edward Scissorhands has a romantic pathos, and not a horror villain’s
grotesquerie, because we know that his diamond-cutting cheekbones are under
that putty-pale skin with its constellations of scars. These actors lack that
tantalizing sense of menace inherent in the beefcake side of the Brando
standard. Could we ever imagine teen dream-era Johnny Depp breaking down Edie’s
door as Terry Malloy does, his embrace so forceful with need that he pulls them
both to the floor?

To embody the Brando standard is
become a razor’s edge, to possess a beauty that seems too fine to be dangerous,
even as it draws that first delectable lick of blood. Michael Fassbender is
making a career of dancing on that edge. In one of his first breakthrough
roles, as the cad who seduces the adolescent heroine of the film Fish Tank,
Fassbender seemingly exists to be objectified. The movie is skewed through
fifteen-year-old Mia’s perspective, and the viewer partakes of Fassbender’s
body with the same fusion of intrigue, awe, and lust that Mia feels. In an
early scene, Connor teaches her to catch fish with her hands; as he wades out
into the river, the camera holds tight on his back and we see the sculptural
planes of muscle shift under his snug t-shirt just as she does.

As Mia
watches the fish twitch and writhe inside his grasp, sunlight dapples the
water—illuminating how agile, how strong his hands are. That sun-color is
referenced again when Mia has sex with Connor: A crisp, painterly crescent of
yellow (presumably from a streetlamp outside her window) connects the side of
Mia’s cheek with Connor’s fingers, which stroke Mia’s hair. Connor is the male
equivalent of the party girl who coasts on a hard body and an easy charm; he
can’t give Mia any of the perks we’d commonly expect the December to offer the
May in that sort of affair: no hard-won wisdom, no finer things in life—just
pure bone-quaking pleasure. But there is a dark current churning under the
stream of Connor’s roguish good looks: When Mia discovers that he has a wife
and a daughter not-too-far from her age, Connor lashes out at her with the
force of a cornered snake. And yet, Mia seems as if she’s always known that
Connor had the capacity for great cruelty. Her facial expressions, post-coitus,
register equal measures relief and regret; she knows better than to do what
she’s just done. Then again, so does Stella Kowalski.

None of the sex in Shame, which is arguably the film
that Fassbender is most known for (mostly because it showcases the organ he is
most celebrated for), approaches the roughest approximation of pleasure. His
character, Brandon Sullivan, compulsively seeks out encounters that are the
equivalent of pressing his thumb into bruises hidden under his clothes. He
cycles through a coterie of call girls, Web-cam hook-ups and skin mag models;
so there is no lover whose view we can enter. The only prominent female
character, Brandon’s sister Sissy, is a sloppy jangle of raw nerve; she serves
as a mirror image of Brandon’s arctic reserve. Director Steve McQueen’s camera frames
Fassbender’s body like a museum centerpiece: We first behold him in the nude,
walking drowsily from bedroom and bathroom; everything behind him is lit in
muted hues, giving Technicolor clarity to a musculature that would make
Michelangelo weep.

Fassbender certainly possesses a Brandoesque beauty, but
he’s also got Brando’s chaotic potency. Brandon’s most pronounced moments of
self-loathing come as assaults on Sissy: The scene when he, half-naked, pins
her to the couch and screams in her face is a sort of nihilistic inverse to
Terry Malloy’s romantic door-smashing. Like Terry, Brandon is savage with need,
but his need isn’t for love or affirmation; it’s for obliteration, release.
Still, the film seems to wink at us by casting a GQ Man of the Year as a sex
addict; even as we watch Brandon debase himself with increasing abandon, we’re
tacitly asked, “Yeah, but you’d still hit that, right?”

Like Fassbender, Ryan Gosling has been branded as the
thinking woman’s sex symbol. And like Fassbender—and like Brando before
them—his handsomeness (to put it mildly) is inextricable from his onscreen
persona. The Place Beyond the Pines opens
with a close-up of Gosling’s immaculate abs as his character, a stunt rider
turned bank robber, flicks his switchblade around with an absent-minded
elegance. His lover, Romina, knows that he’s impulsive at best, violent at
worst; no good will come of him, and she’s got a better man at home. And yet,
like Edie and Stella and Cathy before her—and like every male protagonist who
has ever found himself helpless before a femme fatale—she is powerless before
the promises inherent in his sly half-smile.

Gosling’s character in Blue Valentine, Dean, has
a similar blue-collar appeal; he’s a high school dropout who, much to the
consternation of his wife, Cindy, a successful nurse, doesn’t aspire to be anything
other than a house painter. When they first meet, Cindy is an Edie, a quiet,
studious girl who comes alive under his touch. The most significant (or at
least, the most discussed) sex scene in Blue Valentine is the moment
when Dean goes down on Cindy; the focus gliding from his back and shoulders to
her rapt face. Gosling exists only as an agent and avenue of female desire; the
camera doesn’t return to him afterward, it holds on Cindy as she sighs “Oh God,
Oh God,” again and again.

Brando’s talent is a large diamond held to the sun, casting
light in an infinite array of colors. There are many other elements of his work
worth excavating and many worthy successors to that work. Idris Elba’s turn as
Stringer Bell, the wannabe kingpin who could’ve been a contender, comes
immediately to mind, as does Joaquin Phoenix’s war-wrecked vagrant in The
Master. So parsing out such a narrow standard for the Brandoesque may seem
unnecessary in a supposed golden age of acting (for men, at least), where
performers on the small and silver screen alike are challenged to renegotiate
the tropes of conventional masculinity.

But even in a time when Batman can have his back broken in a
summer blockbuster and the man in the gray flannel suit can break down in a
pivotal pitch session, male protagonists are allowed to be much more than their
appearances; and this is seen as something that gives them their heft, their
depth. Most of the actors who’ve been deemed modern-day Brandos possess degrees
of his talents and intensity, but precious few of them come close to evoking
his vulnerability. Brando’s willingness to open himself as more than just a
lover or a fighter, a rebel or a brute, but an object of lust still feels
transgressive. He is naked, even in a torn t-shirt.

Laura Bogart’s work has appeared on The Rumpus, Salon, Manifest-Station,
The Nervous Breakdown, RogerEbert.com and JMWW Journal, among other
publications. She is currently at work on a novel.

Days Like Lost Dogs: In Support of Loose Ends in Procedurals from TWIN PEAKS to TOP OF THE LAKE

This month marks the 24^th anniversary of what
could be considered the first of the now-increasingly popular season-long
“hyperserial” procedural crime dramas—the pilot episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This show swapped the sequins
and mansions of traditional nighttime soap operas for a talking log and a Black
Lodge, and it countered TV’s biggest previous question at the time—Dallas’ “Who shot J.R.?”—with another
question: “Who Killed Laura Palmer?”

In a criminal courtroom, a prosecutor wouldn’t ask a
question to which she didn’t know the answer, but the opposite is true during
an investigation—anyone confronting a mystery must ask an ocean’s-worth of
questions and learn from whatever might wash ashore: grief, silence, anger,
misdirection, more questions. A crime show called “Occam’s Razor” would almost
certainly be a flop (or last for only one episode). Television has evolved
since the 1980s to accept that audiences can handle more than simple resolution,
but why is it too much to ask that viewers push past the need for any resolution at
all?

Though Twin Peaks (or perhaps ABC’s marketing department)
began with a big question that set up
an expectation that the show would be high in single-plot resolution, it was arguably
most successful when it provided more questions than answer. Lynch himself said:
“The murder of Laura Palmer was the center of the story, the thing around
which all the show’s other elements revolved—like a sun in a little solar
system. It was not supposed to get solved. The idea was for it to recede a bit
into the background, and the foreground would be that week’s show.”

Laura Palmer’s murder—not the revelation of her
murderer—gave the show its heat, its gravity. Without that sun, once Laura’s
killer was revealed (well into season 2), the show’s planetary makeup began to
spin a bit out of its orbit.

Twin Peaks was
dark, but sincere. It was ambitious, but also terrifically personal. It made
television humor lyrical. And it was both hyper-local, and also situated a bit
outside of time—leading us to wonder if the red curtain separating our world
from the next was actually inside the Black Lodge, or rather hanging at the Twin
Peaks town border itself. The show set a new standard of negative capability that
television had never seen before—striking notes of the low-ball absurdity of shows
like Fantasy Island (sans quicksand traps) and the macabre of The Twilight
Zone, and impleading Lynch’s cinematic influences, like Hitchcock.

Enjoyment of Twin
Peaks also required this negative capability from its viewers, but Lynch
didn’t ask anything of his audience that he didn’t seduce out of his own
characters, or even his collaborators on the show. Agent Dale Cooper was just
as enchanted by his cherry pie as he was by the specter of a dancing dwarf.
Sheriff Truman may have been a bit puzzled by Cooper’s strategies (e.g., looking
for leads by saying a suspect’s name, then throwing a rock at a bottle to see
if it breaks[1]), but
gladly accepted his new friend’s help in whatever form it arrived. And when
Lynch called up Twin Peaks co-creator
and screenwriter Mark Frost during the show’s production and said, “Mark,
I think there’s a giant in Agent Cooper’s room,” the only possible response
from Frost was “OK.”

And it was, hypnotically, OK. The whole knot of Twin
Peaks became greater than the sum of its loose ends.

Often the mark of a show’s fortitude is measured by how deftly
it sets its fish hooks into shows that follow: X-Files, Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, Lost, and
even—specifically admitted by David Chase—The
Sopranos took permission first granted by Twin Peaks and used it towards freely weird ends. These shows all
delighted in the unresolved. People still ask David Chase about what happened
to the
wounded Russian in “Pine Barrens” as much as they might have water-coolered
about what they knew happened to Adriana, Vito or Big Pussy (RIP Adriana &
Vito, who didn’t deserve it).

And this fearless evasion of resolution also delighted its viewers. Each
of these shows has, at its base, a cult adoration that lounges at the core of
any larger popularity it might also enjoy. The truth is out there, but so are we.

Now a new post-Sopranos generation of shows has taken on the
specific task of the season-long crime procedural model pioneered in Twin Peaks and re-introduced us to the
hyperserial killer: AMC’s version of The
Killing, Sundance’s Top of the Lake,
and most recently and bro-splosively, HBO’s True
Detective, just to name a few. Each sets itself in motion on the rational
tracks of a whodunit and attempts to use both the intuitive and the atmospheric
as a third, energizing rail. There are plenty of valid critiques of each of
these shows, but in the end, the most pervasive seem to be aimed at the coherence
with which they resolve their central crime-question.

But what if these types of shows refused to answer their own
big question? What if they began with
an answer (“Laura Palmer is dead.”)
and let the show ask the questions? If what they do best is mystery, and what
they do worst is solution, then why not simply not do the worst thing. Why not let the viewers metabolize their
expectations and let the stories do their own work?

Who Didn’t Kill Rosie Larsen?

The Killing is
arguably less ambitious than Twin Peaks
and a bit less interested in its main characters than True Detective, but AMC has certainly proved itself to be a network interested
in creating original, rule-busting shows. It was smart to adapt the original Danish
series of The Killing, but the network set
up its audience with too clear a directive from the jump, nodding to its
predecessor by reprising its promising big
question strategy—this time: “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?”

Again we have a murder, a (supposed) angel/devil girl-victim,
and an angel/devil obsessed investigator. The big question wasn’t answered for
audiences until the end of Season Two, which left many viewers feeling like the
show broke up with them via text message (on a flip phone, no less) after two years
of a wrenching but ultimately forgettable committed relationship. The nuance,
mood and humanity of the show—though slickly meditative—concerned itself only
with a linear path to Rosie’s killer, and when all you have is a murder,
everything looks like a crime scene.[2]

Push past the conceit of the investigation, however, and
exacting, nuanced character interaction become richly visible, like dusting for
prints. Michelle Forbes as Rosie’s mother Mitch delivers one of her finest
performances. She’s physically etched with her pain. Add that to the ways she
and Brent Sexton as her husband Stan Larsen convey the way tragedy distorts the
passage of time, the way tragedy distorts routine, and the show—though
difficult and raw—finds a particular, necessary truth in storytelling. As such,
The Killing might best be categorized
as an intelligent TV show about grief asking its audience over on a date to
watch a mediocre TV show about solving a murder.

“You Don’t Own It
Like You Thought You Did”

True Detective
spends imagery as currency to put a down payment on its audience’s loyalty. The
South spreads out before us like a Sally Mann retrospective, tired and
tempting, one long morning after. Just like Twin
Peaks and The Killing, though not
part of its marketing package, we get a big
question in the first episode: “Who killed Dora Lange?” Just as in Twin Peaks and The Killing, a young girl’s corpse is arranged for us like
sculpture, in all its macabre beauty.

True Detective attempts
to specialize (and spectacle-ize), as might delight Agent Dale Cooper, in the
local color. Sweet tea and obese women in day pajamas. Long stretches of two-lane
highways and weary prostitutes in trailer communities. A certain way the
landscape infiltrates the characters—the way Rust Cohle uses a drag on a
cigarette as a semicolon. Everything an invitation for us to come over for
supper. Everything lined up for us to drawl some conclusions.

Throughout each episode, though, an image narrative runs
parallel to the action and dialogue—the visual version of a voice-over. We are
excited because of where the layered images and dialogue and characters take
us, not because of where the plot narrative leaves us. With the exception of
being nearly entirely humorless, True
Detective seemed to have all the tools it needed to overcome its own big
question, to charm its audience into valuing storyline over plotline.

And yet much of the chatter leading up to the finale zeroed
in on Who Killed Dora Lange, the detailed speculation sometimes
reaching A Beautiful Mind-esque
heights. When the show’s finale proved a bit more ordinary—or at least
didn’t answer all the questions each episode’s clues seemed to collage—it
was as if the Internet itself audibly pouted.

The Portrait of a
Lady

From my view, the most successful of these crime-hyperserials
since Twin Peaks is Sundance’s Top of the Lake, created, written and
directed by Jane Campion. It’s billed as a “TV Mini-series,” though it turns in
only one fewer episode than the first season of True Detective. The show leans
on the lush New Zealand landscape just as heavily as True Detective leans on the languor of the South or The Killing leans on the drear of
Seattle, and it offers us the familiar victim with talent/grit and
protagonist-investigator with accompanying angels/demons and introversion/strength
(Elisabeth Moss as lead detective Robyn Griffin—and if I can forgive Woody
Harrelson’s marble-mouthed Southern accent, you can forgive her bent-nail of a
New Zealand one).

But even from its opening act, the show distinguishes itself
in an important way—we know something has happened to a young girl named Tui, but
we also know she’s not dead. Even so, Campion still generates a haunting story,
a rich tension, and shades in the classic detective-victim bond in a more
nuanced, less fetishizing fashion than True
Detective or The Killing (or Twin Peaks, even). Top of the Lake takes Lynch’s note of letting the crime recede into
the background while the characters unfold their lives in its wake.

The varsity-level discomfort this produced in some critics
was perhaps a sign of its success. Mike Hale of the New York Times began
his review with what I thought was a compliment: “There are times during
‘Top of the Lake’ when you can convince yourself that you’re watching a mystery
story about a girl who goes missing. But that sensation never lasts.” That was
not a compliment. Hale later calls Tui’s disappearance “a MacGuffin,” and seems
to demand that each of the show’s plotlines come attached to a life preserver
he can cling to.

With a small show, Jane Campion made the landscape bigger.
She does answer the crime-question (and it is
the weakest moment of the show), but she does it quickly enough that viewers
aren’t left in a comfortable, or resolved, place. She doesn’t ignore the notion
that a criminal can be discovered and punished, but that discovery and
punishment don’t solve the crime—the
consequences continue to be lived by everyone involved.

“Harry, I’m going to
let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present.
Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen.”

Campion has said “acting is about vulnerability.” I’d offer
that viewing is likewise. What I wish for audiences is to give themselves a
present: resist that feeling of betrayal fingered by David Foster Wallace in “David
Lynch Keeps His Head”—resist the feeling that when directors and writers
seem to fail in rewarding the suspense an audience endures with a morally
self-satisfying conclusion, that “an unspoken but very important covenant has
been violated.”

Let there be shows that hold an audience in suspense, but
not hold as in handcuffs—hold as in a spell. Let the crime be another part of
the landscape. If there is a big question, let it be answered with other intimate
questions. Let viewers sit in the discomfort of their not-knowing, of their wonder
and fear, of the unresolved-ness of a show’s resolve. Let these hyperserial
crime shows live in the world of poems and short stories, rather than airport novels—not
puzzles to be solved, but lakes to be dredged by the imagination.

[1] Kimmy Robertson, who played receptionist Lucy Moran
in Twin Peaks, illuminates this idea one bulb further with an anecdote from her days on the set: “There’s a scene where Kyle [MacLachlan] had to
throw a rock and hit a glass bottle. [Lynch] sat us down and told Kyle he was
going to hit the bottle—and that bottle was freaking far away. Kyle hit it, and
everybody freaked out. It was like David used the power of the universe to make
Twin Peaks.”

[2] Part of the let-down, too, of finally knowing Who
Killed Rosie Larsen wasn’t just the short walk on a long pier—it was also what
David Foster Wallace prescienced based on an insightful notion in one of his
essays from 1995. Wallace:

“The
mystery’s final ‘resolution’, in particular, was felt by critics and audiences
alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was…but the really deep
dissatisfaction—the one that made audiences feel screwed and betrayed…was, I
submit, a moral one. I submit that [the victim’s] exhaustively revealed ‘sins’
required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the
circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to those sins. We as
an audience have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these
certainties need to be affirmed and massaged.”

The show to which Wallace was
referring? Twin Peaks.

Amy Woolard is a writer and child welfare/juvenile justice
policy attorney who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is a graduate of
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her
work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review,
the Massachusetts Review, the Indiana Review, The Journal, Fence, and the Best
New Poets 2013 anthology, among others. You can find her at shift7.me, and on Twitter as @awoo_.

METAMERICANA: Is James Franco a Creep? Thank God We’ll Never Know

This
past week, James Franco was “caught” propositioning a seventeen
year-old Scottish tourist via Instagram and text message. The
Internet subsequently exploded with speculation that the scandal was a cynical
concoction, just a clever bit of performance art-cum-free publicity for
Franco’s forthcoming film Palo Alto, whose plot (based on a Franco short
story from the collection of the same name) details a high school soccer coach’s illicit
affair with one of his female players. If you have a lot of time and even more
patience, you can read the intricate conspiracy theories alleging that we’re all being played
for fools, or (alternately) that the whole brouhaha merely proves that Franco
is celebrity swine. You can also find subtle variations
on these two themes, for instance in an article on Slate that begs Franco
to “just” be a creep rather than that far more odious manifestation
of eerie eccentricity, a performance artist.

In
keeping with the theme of this column, however, I’ll offer a third hypothesis:
That the real question is, why should we care whether James Franco’s a creep?

I
don’t say this as a moral observation, since the fact that Scottish teen Lucy
Clode (if any such person exists) is above the age of consent certainly doesn’t
clear Franco of the taint of impropriety. This is a high-schooler on holiday
with her mom, after all, and the celebrities we most admire refrain from cynically
exploiting their positions for sexual advantage. Nor am I offering up some
holier-than-thou nonsense about how we shouldn’t hold celebrities to a higher
standard than anyone else, or shouldn’t care about their personal lives at all.
It’s no more unreasonable to titter about what Brad and Angelina are doing than
it is to marvel at Michelle Obama’s latest dress; it’s natural to be interested
by those we believe have more interesting lives than we do, even if,
admittedly, that sort of interest saps our energies for more productive,
ennobling, and (not for nothing) interesting endeavors.

In
any case, if we’re to be enthralled by the lives of the young and famous, James
Franco isn’t a bad place to start. Whatever else he may be, he’s undoubtedly an
interesting man. In addition to pursuing four graduate degrees simultaneously
and requesting public financing for
his film projects despite his enormous wealth, Franco has also made some of the
most interesting meta-art of this century and done yeoman’s work as a
philanthropist, not just including work on behalf of young filmmakers but also
the fight to cure AIDS and eradicate illiteracy.

So
the reason to set aside the question of whether James Franco is a creep has
nothing to do with whether the man himself is of natural interest to
self-anointed celebrity-watchers; no, the main reason not to care whether
Franco is or is not a creep is that it’s far more interesting not to know than
to know. Whatever your opinion of fellow budding auteur Shia LaBeouf—who Franco
infamously defended in the New York Times after
the former plagiarized several individuals and then plagiarized his apologies
for those plagiarisms—he’s
certainly a more compelling figure now that he appears to have become an icon
of American metamodernism than he was when running away from
explosions in slow-motion with Megan Fox in the dismal Transformers: Revenge
of the Fallen. Some may quibble here and say that the only thing worse than
being a self-indulgent artist is being a self-indulgent wannabe artiste—as
LaBeouf would indeed be, were his stunts not partly inspired by an entirely
serious artistic philosophy originating in the most respected salons of Western
Europe—but
the argument here isn’t that LaBeouf is interesting because he’s
(alternately) the genuine article or a phony, but that he’s interesting because
in the Age of Information, the only mysteries left are those no amount of
information can dispel.

It’s
widely known among metamodernists that Shia LaBeouf did not, in fact, write the
“Metamodernist Manifesto” that now bears his name, which was in fact written three
years ago by British photographer Luke Turner;
likewise, it’s widely known to committed metamodernists that metamodernism
isn’t particularly interested in plagiarism like LaBeouf’s, nor are the
“metamodern” influences LaBeouf has publicly cited (like postmodern
poet Kenneth Goldsmith) actually metamodernists themselves. But when does it
stop mattering what someone intends, or knows or doesn’t know, or (in the case
of Franco) is or is not—when the ambiguities they leave in their wake are not
only intellectually provocative and ethically instructive but also pretty damn
entertaining? Which was more interesting to you: Joaquin Phoenix’s bizarre
appearance on David Letterman at a time when we believed the Academy
Award-nominated actor had retired from acting and inexplicably taken up rap, or the movie it turned out he was
putting on that act for, 2010’s I’m Still Here, which managed
even a middling 54% on Rotten Tomatoes only because, at the time it was
released, the jury was still out on whether it was a documentary or performance
art?

The
ambiguities that lie behind these actors’ behaviors suggest not that ignorance
is sublime, but rather that the particular breed of ignorance born when either
of two diametrically opposed possibilities is equally possible is, in fact, one
of the only avenues of transcendence left for us. Whether it’s trying to determine
if Alison Gold’s now-infamous song “Chinese Food” was sincere or a parody, or trying to
make the same determination regarding this song, we increasingly find the most
rigorous challenges to the status quo to be, rather than those that entrench
long-abandoned principles or deconstruct still-conventional structures, those
that remind us that the phrase “Information Age” is and always will
be a misnomer. The idea of the Information Age is perpetually dangerous, not
because it permits us to act lousily both anonymously and with impunity—though
it does—but because it deludes us into believing we know much more than we
actually do.

For
all the social media hoopla surrounding James Franco and Shia LaBeouf, and all
the “news articles” detailing the latest escapades of both actors,
the newsflash the Information Age denies us is this one: We don’t know the first damn thing about either James Franco or Shia
LaBeouf. All we even think we know is the fraction of what
James and Shia choose to let us see which media filters then permit us to
discover online. This distillation is then further filtered through our own
ability to comprehend lives and contexts entirely foreign to our own. And
because what James and Shia choose to let us see is undoubtedly dictated by
inscrutable personality traits and obscure eccentricities inherent to both men,
the sincerity or insincerity of any data relating to Franco or LaBeouf is not
only unknown to us but also (to quote Donald Rumsfeld) unknowable.

We
can watch films in which either Franco or LaBeouf is featured and know whether
we’ve enjoyed each actor’s performance; we can decide for ourselves whether we
find either man attractive or charismatic; we can choose to be titillated or
bored by either one’s shenanigans; but ultimately, “James Franco” and
“Shia LaBeouf” are merely constellations of data that make us feel
things we do or don’t like to feel. James Franco is not a realizable human
being to me, nor is Shia LaBeouf, nor could they ever be until I had met them several
times and observed first-hand all those human quirks the “Information
Age” makes it harder rather than easier to access: body language;
intonation; treatment of strangers in real-time; split-second reactions to
unexpected stimuli; the ability to listen; general temperament; private
fidelities and infidelities; and so on. The biggest lie of the Information Age
is that it’s the age of actionable and reliable information. Our need to know
whether James Franco is respectful to women and capable of distinguishing
between a child and an age-appropriate peer is merely our need to cash in on
the promises implicitly made to us by the Age. We think that we ought to
be able to know things, so we insist that we do—even when we manifestly don’t.
Or else, as in the “Lucy Clode” imbroglio, we chase the rabbit down the
rabbit-hole in a vain attempt to locate “truth.”

When
I consider how misinformation (or merely information that’s impossible to
confirm or deny) can empower me by denying me access to ready conclusions—that
is, by keeping me in a state of suspended intellectual and emotional
titillation—I realize that, unless I get to know James Franco or Shia
LaBeouf personally, the value of the terms “James Franco” and
“Shia LaBeouf” is really no more and no less than the quality of the
ambiguities they leave in their wake. To observe the same phenomenon in another
public sphere, I can, for instance, dislike U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)
because he’s an obvious fraud—which he undoubtedly is, even according to
members of his own party—but
I can also dislike him for being an uninteresting compendium of data in a world
in which parcels of data constantly compete for my attention. The fact that Ted
Cruz doesn’t really require my attention is attributable not only to his
political rhetoric being conspicuously unjust and destructive, but also to the
fact that it’s all too easy to slot him into my mental diagram of the American
superstructure.

We
are, all of us, powerless in the face of so much data. We can’t distinguish its
value, and pretending otherwise diminishes us. The best course of action for
those of us hoping to weather or even transcend this generation of
unaccountable hot air is to watch, when we have time, astrophysicist Neil
deGrasse Tyson on “Cosmos” (a television program that deals only in data that’s been
subjected to the scientific method), and then, whenever we don’t have time, let
the generative ambiguities of data-dumps like “James Franco” and
“Shia LaBeouf” power-wash us clean of all our false ambitions.

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.

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

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 4^th,
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. )

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 2^nd,
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 8^th. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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?

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

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.

13 Ways in Which RED RIDING Can Satisfy Your Jones for TRUE DETECTIVE

The stars of last night’s finale of True Detective were Errol Childress’
Cary Grant accent, his mentally challenged stepsister, his creepy labyrinth,
and Rust’s epiphany about love in the universe—which sucked up air time at the
expense of about 90% of the case details—details that, for my money, were far
more interesting than Rust’s epiphany. Will
Rust exact revenge on the Tuttle family? Will Marty and Rust continue to fight crime
together as private dicks? Why was Billy’s mouth sewn shut? If he was dead, why
was he so well-preserved? Will we ever find out why Errol had those burn marks
on his face? What was the song Errol was whistling? While
speculative pairings for Season 2 abound on Twitter, actor Matthew McConaughey
recently told a reporter, “We won’t be back for season two…Season one was
finite. Eight episodes, that’s the [end of conversation].”

So how are you
going to quench that thirst for a tall glass of hardboiled noir topped with a
side order of pedophile rings, smothered in police corruption until season 2—if
there is one? Try Red Riding, based on David Peace’s books, The Red-Riding Quartet. Set against a
backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, Red Riding’s narrative
complexity combined with grizzly brutality gave birth to a new subset of hardboiled
crime dubbed “Yorkshire Noir.” Three of Peace’s books were made into episodes
for Britain’s Channel 4, which ran in 2009 and were released theatrically in the states in
2010.

True
Detective stole big from Red Riding. It’s a far more savage depiction of
police corruption and poverty with fewer allusions to the occult and philosophy.
The three episodes run from 1.5-1.75 hours each. With all the rewinding you’ll
do to make sure you caught the dialogue, your total viewing time will be about
the same as True Detective—though Red Riding can’t compete with the time
suck of poking around Reddit for Yellow King theories or Googling “capuchon
Mardi Gras.” Sorry. Nothing will fill that hole.

Warning:
Spoilers abound below, but with Red Riding’s thick-as-Hasty-pudding accents, it
helps to have a leg up. You can read the books first, watch with subtitles,
precede/follow your viewing with episode synopses, or all of the above—the way
some people do with Game of Thrones. It’s worth it.

1. Three Is A Magic Number

Both True
Detective and Red Riding jump through three different time periods. In True
Detective: 1995, 2002, and 2012; in Red Riding: 1976, 1980, and 1983. The time
jumps and fractured narrative throughout True Detective, and in the second
two episodes of Red Riding allow us to witness the evolution of the characters—as
well as their cognitive dissonance. We see the mistakes they’re making as they
make them—and that they’re telling lies as they tell them. We watch Marty give the
court reporter a rim job in the past, while his voice over in the present lectures,
“A man without a family can be a bad thing.” But as Rust will tell you,
linear time’s for squares.

Time jumps give
the storylines more ambiguity and slipperiness. In both, every crucial,
case-breaking detail has been reported to, and ignored by, the cops. Files and
evidence have been lost, hidden, and destroyed. But because we’re time jumping,
if it’s an important detail, we’ll touch on it again and again. Most detective
stories trot out their flashbacks at the end, like Murder She Wrote, which
always made clues found in the linear present glint and yell, “Look at me! I’m
a broken fireplace poker!”

2. Location, Location, Location

Place is as
crucial in both True Detective and Red Riding as any of the stories’ characters.
For True Detective, the hurricane-ravaged bayou landscape of Louisiana
reminds us all that men and their machinations inevitably fall victim to nature’s
insatiable maw. Think of all those long aerial shots of the water slicing the
land to lace. If you stand still long enough, kudzu’s gonna choke you out.

Red
Riding takes place in the green-grey drizzle of Yorkshire. Historically, the land’s
awash in blood. One long shot of a doomed little girl wandering home along Yorkshire’s
ancient, narrow streets—flanked by dilapidated shacks that look like Charlie
Bucket’s house in Willie Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory, from which a rheumy set of eyes peers out a toaster-sized
window—says it all: these angelic little moppets have been fodder for the grinding
stone from time immemorial.

3. Cops Gone Wild

When Rust
says, “I’m police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity,” it
means he’s capable of doing bad
things. When a bunch of cops boisterously toast, “To the North! Where we do
what we bloody want!” we know they are
doing bad things.

4. Smokestacks
In both shows, the gray concrete towers and power lines of factories and plants
loom in the background, reminding us that police and pedophiles aren’t the only
ones killing off the residents. The poor are prey; cops, religious jerkoffs,
and corporations are hunting them for sport. No one’s watching. No one cares. Bludgeoned
on the ground, choked by the air.

5. Thick Regional Accents

Certainly, “With
all the dick swagger you roll you can’t spot crazy pussy?” was one of True
Detective’s shiniest gems, but if Rianne Olivier’s
crab trappin granddad’s “Ehbuhdy dink
dey gone beh sometin
dey nat” made you swoon, Red Riding is for you. These
lads are not only slogging through Yorkshirese, they’re hardcore mumblers and
furtive whisperers to boot. Subtitles help, but David Morrissey (the Governor
for The Walking Dead and Time Lord Jason Lake on Doctor Who) is especially
incomprehensible—yet one of the most compelling characters in the series. You
just gotta sit back and let his deee-licious chocolate-colored corduroy suit
and tan tie do the talking.

6. ‘Staches Make the Men

As do
sideburns, beards, mutton chops, bugger grips, mouth mirkens, and chin
chocolate. In Red Riding and True Detective’s sea of face pubes, it’s the clean-shaven
characters who seem out-of-step with the world and estranged from their own consciences.
As 2010 Rust gets in the Gregg Allman face lace race , his perceptions of the
case and himself grow clearer (“I know who I am. And after all these years,
there’s a victory in that”) whereas clean-cut Marty doesn’t know who he really
is until he cries in his hospital bed. In Red Riding, the squeaky-cleanest
character, Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter, is thoroughly despised
by everyone, including the woman he had an affair with and wants to have an
affair with again (she really doesn’t
want to).

7. Animals

In True Detective, bodies are adorned with deer antlers; in Red Riding, severed swan wings are sewn
onto a young victims’ back—and wolves, pigs, and rats figure prominently.

8. Ritualistic Abuse & Murder

I was glad the glimpse we saw of the
video tape recording of Marie Fontenot’s murder was mostly blocked by
Marty’s back—and the grainy black and white snippet we could see looked like an
early episode of Dark Shadows. Most of the violence on True Detective was “witnessed” through
the retelling of people’s stories. We weren’t forced to watch violence
happen—except for shooting Reggie LeDoux—and damn, that felt good. We saw the crime scenes and the
survivors—not the act of violence, but the aftermath. While Red Riding
normally excels in the violence department, it turns the camera away in a similar
scene to the one where Marty discovering the kidnapped children in the storage
shed* at Reggie LeDoux’s cook house. Red
Riding skips the gory visuals on that one, too. The violence perpetuated
against children in Red Riding is seen only in one dimly lit flashback**,
which is as haunting as that scene from The
Shining with the man in the tuxedo and the person (?) in the bear suit.

9. Transsexual Prostitute Survivors of Ritualistic Abuse & Murder

BJ and Johnny Joanie: the boys who
got away grew up very, very gay (and one of them lives in a storage shed*). Just
once, I’d like to see a show in which the boy who survives ritualistic abuse
grows up to be Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Guy Fieri or someone like that.

10. *Storage Sheds & Garages (pronounced gairijiz)

When you need to lay low. How low?
Like Jim Nabors singing “The Impossible Dream” low.

11. Ludicrously One-Dimensional Female Characters
Red Riding and True Detective are both Bechdel Bombs.
Aside from the trailer park madam, (“Girls
walk this earth all the time screwing for free. Why is it you add business to
the mix and boys like you can’t stand the
thought? I’ll tell you: It’s ‘cause suddenly you don’t own it, the way you thought you
did.”), the women
characters in True Detective are
fairly brainless: they’re dead, sluts, dead sluts, guileless children, nagging
wives, or old, sick women.

When Maggie tries to break out of her
dutifully duped wife role by having an affair with Rust, he gives her a taste
of some Real Man Lovin’—without all that fairy tale frosting on top that
Marty’s been keeping her down with. And how does that Real Man Lovin’ taste to
Maggie? Like licking a Port Authority payphone: totally scary and gross. So she
pulls her little pink panties back on and high tails it home—implying good
women can’t handle real male sexuality: it’s too gross. Eeeeeew! Which reminds
me of that Louis CK bit about men being naturally besieged by disgusting sexual
thoughts:

“Women try to compete. [in a woman’s
voice] ‘Well, I’m a pervert. You don’t know. I have really sick sexual
thoughts.’ No, you have no idea. You
have no idea. See, you get to have those thoughts. I have to have them. You’re a tourist in
sexual perversion. I’m a prisoner there. You’re Jane Fonda on a tank. I’m John
McCain in the hut. It’s a nightmare. I can’t lift my arms.”

The most developed female character in Red Riding is the stunned
mother of one of victims who’s playing both sides of the fence and leaking information
to her daughter’s wealthy killer. She’s a blond, breathy, sad, soft-focus
nitwit. The other is a medium who wails a lot. I like her, but she does indeed
wail a lot.

Is it possible to create a similar police
corruption/pedophile ring premise with a female protagonist? Sure. Jane Campion
did it in Top of the Lake, along with bringing other very unique female characters to the story (Holly Hunter plays a
character I’ve never seen anywhere) and lots of unexpected twists. It’s another
great show to alleviate True
Detective withdraw, but Top of the Lake becomes much more about its
cop protagonist (Elisabeth Moss)—and her intimate relationships—than the
criminals she’s chasing. And it lacks the estrangement of noir.

True
Detective and Red Riding are pure noir—which the
Oxford Dictionary defines as fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and
moral ambiguity. It’s a genre in which women, historically, have been double-D wooden
window dressing. There’s such a complete absence of actualized female
characters in both True
Detective
and Red Riding—in the midst of
such intelligent writing—it’s beyond oversight. It’s a kind of willful
blindness: because Marty (and most of the other men on the show) can’t see
women as three-dimensional characters, let’s not have any. But then again, how
many evolved women would be caught dead in the storyline of True
Detective or Red Riding? There’s a reason why smart
women do not attend dog fights. True
Detective might have a season
2, and a chance to redeem itself. I
could easily see the cast of American Horror Story: Coven eatin’ them Tuttle
boys alive. Throw Patricia Arquette in there, and cue a Cajun rendition of the theme
from Cops.

12. Mentally Challenged Men with Physically-challenged Testicles

If you think women get the short end of the stick in True Detective and Red Riding, try being a mentally
challenged man. True
Detective’s
Burt with his bowl cut and Red Riding’s
Michael Mishkin with his finger twisting twitch share 1) a childlike inability
to withstand the violence of poverty, and 2) nonfunctional testicles. They’ve
been unburdened with all that scary sexuality simmering under Cole’s surface
and right on top of Marty’s. In True
Detective Burt has been maimed by criminals, whereas
in Red Riding, Michael’s disfigurement is congenital, but that doesn’t
mean he hasn’t suffered at the hands of cops.

This is a key difference in the shows: when Marty’s beating
the snot out of the skate punks, you can kind
of understand why. They did
double-team his daughter, after all. But in Red Riding, the violence is incomprehensible. No one beats Yorkshire cops
at beating the shit out of people; they’re sadists, and the greatest source of the
city’s pain—if not at their own hands, then by omission, by allowing
others—through their wealth or influence—to inflict pain on the little people.
As Sonchai, the Buddhist cop in Bangkok 8,
tells us, cops are merely a few incarnations away from being criminals. Red Riding’s got a lot
more bad cops on the payroll. Even the good ones are shits.

13. Kings & Crowns
Red Riding’s labyrinth can’t hold a
candle to the Yellow King’s, but we learn that the same kind of games have been
played there for many years. **“Mr.
Piggott is king today. You be nice to Mr. Piggott.”

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

Wes Anderson’s THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL: A Vivid Self-Portrait

Last week, as I watched director
Wes Anderson take the stage at Lincoln Center to introduce the premiere of The Grand Budapest Hotel, I was struck
by the unusual deep-purple color of his suit. I almost wrote this off as an
inconsequential choice by the famously quirky director. But once the film began
rolling, I realized that Anderson’s colorful attire was actually his subtle
synchronization with the film’s leading character, Monsieur Gustave H. This
character dons the same shade of plum throughout the entire film, and soon I
couldn’t help but see that the similarities between the two went far beyond
their purple garb. The fascinating parallels between Anderson and his leading
man make this film his most soulful and self-reflective work to date.

Anderson’s exploration of this
delightful character gives us a rare glimpse into how the director views his
own world. Gustave (luminously played
by Ralph Fiennes) is the owner of the titular hotel, and his mission is not
unlike Anderson’s as he strives to preserve the particular charms of a world
that is slipping away. Both the director and his fictive concierge create
intricate but impossible worlds in The
Grand Budapest Hotel. Set in the fictional Eastern European state of Zubrowka,
this pink wedding cake of a hotel is at its peak of grandeur. Gustave directs
the Grand Budapest so that it runs like clockwork, working to maintain its
splendor before it fades and falls with the oncoming war.

With idiosyncratic fervor, Gustave—like Anderson—tries to preserve his whimsical tastes despite the realities
around him. We watch Gustave speed through the halls, fastidious in his duties,
upholding comically high standards. One can imagine a similar eccentricity in
Anderson’s creative work, requiring exquisite attention to detail and
everything just so. Indeed, actors from
Anderson’s veteran cast have described the director’s meticulous production
methods as genius, beginning with his own detailed sketches, animations, and even
a suggested reading list for the cast.

It is hard not to see Anderson as a
sort of innkeeper himself, directing life on and off the set with the same
spirit and extravagant standards as Monsieur Gustave H. In a recent interview, cast
member Jeff Goldblum explained how Anderson’s visionary style pervades the
entire production experience. The director, Goldblum said, “wants to make the
shooting an art project of itself.” He described how the entire cast lived
together in the same hotel during shooting and sat down each night for group
dinners, elaborately arranged by Anderson. This custom aligns so perfectly with
the ethos of The Grand Budapest Hotel,
and seems to be a striking union of character and creator for Anderson.

There is a similarity between the two,
as both Gustave and Anderson hold tightly to their peculiar visions of the
world. For Gustave, this vision is the strange splendor of the Budapest in the
face of an oncoming war. And for Anderson, it is the intricate styling of his
own filmmaking, which stands alone in cinema today. Critics often accuse
Anderson of prioritizing his stylized design over substance, but this film is a
sweet exception to this charge. Visually, The
Grand Budapest Hotel is as fantastical and charming as ever. But the story
also reaches new depths, with Anderson articulating themes that are richer and
more complex than his earlier works.

Some of that added complexity comes
from the darker and more realistic forces at work in The Grand Budapest Hotel. In past works such as Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom, the opposing powers take the form of adult
authorities. These professors, parents, and scout leaders may clash with the
protagonists, but they are hardly villainous. This latest film, however, deals
with war, brutality, and a fictional “ZZ” unit that unsubtly recalls Nazi
Germany’s SS. The violence is harsher and the darkness comes closer than usual
for Anderson.

The effect of these forces’ encroachment
on the playful world of the Budapest is a richer story—still the fanciful
world of Wes Anderson, but one that occasionally snaps the characters back into
a meaningful reality. In the same vein, the character of Gustave is not simply
a caricature. He too comes to life with moments of unfeigned grace. We learn
that Gustave is more genuine and deeply relatable than the shiny purple tuxedo
would initially let on.

One of these endearing traits is
his habit of reciting romantic poetry at length. This meaningful quirk turns
out to be representative of Gustave’s character and, more significantly, of
Anderson’s entire method. As it happens, Gustave consistently chooses the wrong
moment to pause for poetry. He begins forty-stanza poem before dinner, a
dramatic ode while escaping a maximum-security prison, never able to finish his
verses. It is a comical pattern throughout the film, and a fitting one: art
interrupted by a more urgent reality. Anderson portrays exactly this—a world
where there is less and less time for romance, beauty, and whimsy. In spite of
this reality, one man—be it Gustave or Anderson himself—works tirelessly to
uphold the old elegance.

We cannot know how much of himself
Anderson projected onto his leading man, but the resulting film is a triumph.
Anderson is true to his own narrative techniques, and the purple threads that
tie him to Gustave only enrich this: he delves deeper yet into style and
substance, putting a little more of himself into his film.

Kayleigh Butera is
a writer from Philadephia, PA. She is a recent graduate of Brown University,
where she studied American Studies and French language. She worked as the
programming coordinator of Brown’s Ivy Film Festival, the world’s largest
student-run film fest. Kayleigh is currently living in Brooklyn. She can be reached at kayleigh.butera@gmail.com.