Tag: Blogs

Errol Morris and the Expansion of the American Documentary

Errol Morris and the Expansion of the American Documentary

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Errol
Morris’ innovations have been absorbed so thoroughly into the
documentary mainstream that it’s easy to forget how controversial they
once were. Criterion has just released his first three films—1978’s Gates of Heaven, 1981’s Vernon, Florida, and 1988’s The Thin Blue Line—on Blu-Ray and DVD, with a spare set of bonus features, mostly
consisting of present-day interviews with Morris. Although Roger Ebert
championed Gates of Heaven, calling it one of his all-time
favorite films and claiming to have seen it more than 30 times, other
spectators accused Morris of condescending to his subjects, the
operators of pet cemeteries. The Thin Blue Line was damned for
incorporating fictional reenactments into its detailing of the framing
of Randall Dale Adams, an innocent man sentenced to death row in ‘70s
Dallas. Despite its critics, it turned out to be highly influential. The
true crime dramas on the ID channel couldn’t exist without it; on a
more elevated plane, neither could Andrew Jarecki’s HBO mini-series The Jinx, and it’s no surprise that The Act of Killing director
Joshua Oppenheimer pops up to give an interview on Criterion’s disc.
Together, these three films expanded our notion of what documentaries
could do. 
Gates of Heaven looks surprisingly staid and calm now, compared to the projectile vomiting and unhinged rants of Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital and Welfare.
At least half of the film consists of carefully posed interviews. Rather
than pretending to capture reality on the fly, Morris set his subjects
in deliberately arranged settings. They’re usually at the center of the
frame. The light source is sometimes visible. A telling prop or two—a 
particularly ornate lamp, a framed photo of a dog, an abstract painting—can be seen in the background. Without calling attention to
themselves, Morris’ images are attractively lit and framed. 
Gates of Heaven
is divided into two halves. The first 40 minutes chronicle Floyd
McClure’s rough attempts to get a pet cemetery going, while the final
part depicts a working—and, seemingly, flourishing—cemetery called
Bubbling Water. The opening half portrays a world that doesn’t feel like
the ‘70s. The women, in particular, seem to be stuck in a ‘50s Douglas
Sirk wonderland, making no attempt to live up to the fashions of the
time. That changes later on. One cemetery owner speculates that the Pill
made pets more popular by allowing women to enter the workforce instead
of cranking out babies but leaving their need for nurturing and
companionship intact But the real difference in the film’s two sections
is that between storytelling and character study. At first, Morris seems
fascinated by the ins and outs of a failed pet cemetery. In the second
half of Gates of Heaven, he becomes more interested in the people
attracted to such a business, including an amateur rock guitarist who
plays him home-recorded tapes of his music and a former insurance
salesman who got fed up with that racket but still talks like he’s in
it. 
Throughout,
the sentimentality of Morris’ subjects threatens to become
overwhelming. I don’t think the director sneers at them, but he keeps a
polite distance. Yet 37 years after the film was made, their lack of
media savvy seems refreshing. These days, many of the middle-aged and
elderly women who appear before Morris’ camera would probably consult
fashion magazines, before appearing in a documentary. The subjects of Gates of Heaven care more about their late pets than looking cool; Morris isn’t mocking them by revealing this . 
Vernon, Florida
takes Morris to Les Blank country (although without Blank’s
multiculturalism – all but one of its subjects is a white man.) It
originated as a documentary about a town nicknamed “Nub City,” famous in
the insurance industry for the number of self-mutilations leading to
fraudulent claims there. However, Morris’ attempts to make a film about
that practice got him beaten up, and he decided to abandon that idea and
concentrate on the more peaceful folks of Vernon, Florida.
Unfortunately, this film feels even more distant than Gates of Heaven.
The twin hobbies of Vernon residents seem to be hunting and
Christianity – not surprisingly for a small town in the South – but one
senses that Morris appreciates them at a remove. At one point, a man
asks him if he’s ever fired a gun and then instantly senses that he
hasn’t. Stylistically, Vernon, Florida relies  more on montage than Gates of Heaven,
although it also uses long takes of its subjects talking. This time
around, they’re almost always filmed outdoors, in situations that seem
less controlled than those of Gates of Heaven. Still, Morris’ appreciation of small-town eccentricity paved the way for narrative films like Blue Velvet and Raising Arizona. 
In the seven years between Vernon, Florida and The Thin Blue Line, Morris worked as a private detective. That job experience paid off. However, he also took a large stylistic leap with The Thin Blue Line.
As Charles Musser’s liner notes point out, Randall Dale Adams, unjustly
convicted of murder, is color-coded white; the real killer, David
Harris, is bathed in orange light and interviewed in front of orange
bricks, matching the tone of his jail-issued clothes. 
The
film is famous for introducing reenactments to the documentary. It’s
notable how sparingly Morris uses them. For the most part, the only
reenactment is the murder scene, constantly repeated as the story is
retold by another participant or witness. The scene itself is shot in a
fragmented style. Morris’ direction is hyper-real. Throughout, the film
never spoon-feeds the spectator. No interview subject is ever identified
on-screen by name; while it’s easy to figure out who Adams and Harris
are, the minor figures in the case are cited only in the closing
credits. The true crime dramas that it influenced do their best to
imitate narrative fiction, offering relatively seamless dramatizations.
The film still uses interviews to make most of its points. Morris also
returns to a handful of motifs: someone stubbing out a cigarette in a
full ashtray, a close-up of a clock on a wall. 

According to John Pierson’s book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, no less a director than Spike Lee cited The Thin Blue Line
as the only concrete example of a film that caused social change. Here,
Morris proves himself to be a careful, patient storyteller. He was
never a lawyer, but he thinks like one. He lays out the facts of Adams’
case and allows Harris to figuratively hang himself. He also presents
Adams as a likable character—Adams comes off as a film noir hero, in
fact. If Morris flirts with elements of fiction here, he does so with
great care. The Thin Blue Line spoke truth to power loudly enough
to get a man released from jail. It’s too bad that Morris’ subsequent
encounters with Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld are far meeker
engagements. Taking on the criminal justice system, Morris proved more
than up to the task; faced with the questionable judgments of
politicians, Morris let them drone on without challenging them too
often.

Steven Erickson is a writer and
filmmaker based in New York. He has published in newspapers and websites
across America, including The Village Voice, Gay City News, The Atlantic, Salon, indieWIRE, The Nashville Scene, Studio Daily and many others. His most recent film is the 2009 short Squawk.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: How ‘The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Skewers Empowerment Culture

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: How ‘The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Skewers Empowerment Culture

nullBack in the early 2000s, a friend and I worked together on
creating a musical medley based on all our favorite songs. We featured artists from
Ani Difranco to Radiohead. Our favorite silly addition was a song by Ja Rule
and Ashanti called “Mesmerize” which was utterly and fantastically terrible. In
my favorite line of this atrocious song Ashanti sings about how, for a woman,
love is always pain, to which Ja Rule sweetly and patronizingly replies, “It’s
a man’s world. But I understand.” 

Barring the fact that these lyrics seem like a complete non
sequitur, the assertion that female pain is a kind of status quo smacked deeply
of condescension. The fact that this catchy and absurd song got airplay
multiple times a day, as if we all could seemingly care less about what a dumb message
this was sending us, made it feel as though it were actually benign.

I laughed when I first heard the lyrics. I grew up in a home
where a woman’s identity was measured by suffering. In the world of my mother’s
telenovelas, women were constantly
beating their breasts and crying and cursing the heavens. To be a woman was to
endure various pains—the pain of childbirth, the pain of philandering boyfriends
and husbands, often the pain of domestic abuse. Young beautiful women
experienced pain at being harassed, and older, less beautiful women faced
instead the pain of invisibility.

I think for a long time I felt that if I could be as “American”
as possible I could be free from this old-fashioned and debilitating portrait
of what it meant to be female. After all, in America I received lots of
messages of “girl power.” But these messages never seemed to reach the women of
my generation, myself often included, and, ten years later, many of my young
American female students are consumed with the same fears and kinds of sadness
that I tried to shut my eyes to when I was young. They worry about how they
look, and if they are likeable enough. They worry about if they are too girly,
or not girly enough. They worry about whether they’ll be objectified or
ignored. Room after room of young women who feel no more empowered than I did
at their age. Room after room of young women who laugh off a sexist song
because it just hurts too much to actually confront what it means.

The Unbreakable Kimmy
Schmidt is about a woman who was kidnapped by an insane preacher when she
was 14 years old, and held underground in a bunker for 15 years. When she
emerges she’s ebullient. Her personality is infectious. Her desire to rebuild
her life and not be seen as a victim is palpable. In the opening credits, we
get this nifty autotuned theme song with the catchy lyrics, “White dudes hold
the record for creepy crimes. But females are strong as hell.”

This idea of female strength and solidarity pervades the
entire series, as Kimmy offers words of wisdom to her boss, Jacqueline, who is
struggling to come to terms with her life after her divorce. “I survived,”
Kimmy opens up to her, “because that’s what women do. We eat a bag of dirt,
pass it in the kiddie pool and move on.” In one episode, Kimmy attempts to give
a pep talk to a bunch of women awaiting plastic surgery. In another, Kimmy
helps rescue a bunch of women from an exercise-based cult.

One of the most subversive things about The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is the way the show satirizes the way
that survivors are often victimized by a culture that cares more about juicy
details than actual healing. The show also demonstrates how the “women are
strong” narrative that emerges from this culture might not be as feminist as
one might hope. On the one hand, the narrative of female strength frees women
from the stereotype of femininity as weak and submissive. On the other, it
presents female strength as deriving entirely from the ability to endure
patriarchal injustice after patriarchal injustice over and over again. In this
way, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt also
skewers “empowerment culture,” from the girl power ethos of the 90s to today’s #yesallwomen
activism. Women in empowerment culture band together out of necessity, not
necessarily because they have a lot in common as individuals, or truly want to
be friends, or comrades in arms. The four “mole women” could not be more
different from each other in interests, attitudes in life, cultural background,
or intellectual ability. Similarly, Kimmy and Jacqueline bond over their
identity as women and survivors, but could not be more different in about every
other way imaginable.

Over the last several years, funny women like Tina Fey, Amy
Poehler and Amy Schumer have been heralded as ushering in a new wave of
feminist comedy. I feel lucky to be living in a time period where women’s
rights provide a topic of popular conversation, but I can’t help but also sometimes
feel frustrated by the popular response to shows like these, where we’ll laugh
at how terrible sexism is but feel powerless to actually change the current
culture. While humor is an effective way to get people to think more critically
about sexism, I also worry that many people are completely content to laugh and
then go along with the status quo.

And sometimes I do feel like a “humorless feminist” when it
comes to certain topics. I don’t think domestic violence or rape or eating
disorders are funny. When people talk about women’s strength as coming from
surviving these types of experiences, the only thing I can think of is that
dumb Ja Rule lyric from over a decade ago. It’s still a man’s world. I don’t
want to be told I’m strong anymore. What I want is for the culture to actually change.

In one of my favorite moments in the series, Kimmy’s close
friend Titus offers to be in charge of music for her birthday party (all of
Kimmy’s musical knowledge is based on 90s hits from when she was barely out of
middle school). After playing a bunch of house music, Kimmy asks for some music
with lyrics and gets the charming little ditty, “I beat that bitch with a bat,”
of which there is both a club version, and slower acoustic version. It’s
shocking and funny and ridiculous, except that we’ve all been to a party like
that, where we’ve heard similar kinds of lyrics. We laughed at it until we
didn’t, and then the words just faded quietly into the sound of everything
else.

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.

METAMERICANA: James Franco’s ‘Let Me Get What I Want’ Proves Once and For All That the Kid’s All Right

METAMERICANA: James Franco’s ‘Let Me Get What I Want’ Proves That the Kid’s All Right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5D8KrZCmRo

Later
this year, Hollywood superstar James Franco will come out with a new film whose
animating concept is so confusing it takes an entire article to explain and
contextualize it. 

Here’s
what happened: a few years ago, Franco listened to some songs by The Smiths to
help him write poems that he later compiled into a poetry collection entitled Directing Herbert White. He then turned
those Smiths-influenced poems back into Smiths- and poetry-influenced songs. He
then gave those songs to high school students in Palo Alto and asked them to
translate the songs into a third creative genre—cinematic screenplay—and based
on the resulting screenplays, he and his band Daddy (yes, he has a band) wrote an
album’s worth of new Smiths-, poetry-, and screenplay-inspired songs. The
student screenplays have now been produced, and, with the aid of songs by
Daddy, comprise a film called Let Me Get
What I Want.

You can watch the first music video to emerge from this project here.

The
upshot here is that Franco has engineered a compositional process that mirrors the
way culture moves in the Internet Age: from one genre to another, with each
successive genre translating (and also mistranslating) the same source material
in its own way. The best part is that not only is Franco letting us see the
results at each stage in the process, but his “final” product—a film and its accompanying
soundtrack—offers us both listenable music and watchable film, making it not
only a suitably complex concept-driven artwork but also a likely entertaining
one. If avant-garde literary artists and filmmakers are pissed at Franco, as
they usually and currently are, they have a right to be—but only because Franco
has a (to them) unimaginable budget, not because the ideas Franco is working
with are subpar. They’re not subpar; frankly, they’re pretty great. It’s not a
popular thing to say, but it’s not a difficult position to defend. If the late
novelist David Foster Wallace once criticized the American postmodernism of the
1980s and 1990s as “hellaciously un-fun,” and in doing so prophesied the
imminent demise of postmodernism (and its poster-child irony) as a generative
cultural paradigm, young artists like Franco have taken the hint and begun
producing avant-garde art that’s at once cerebral and a visceral delight.

In
lauding Franco as I do here, don’t misunderstand me: plenty of writers and
filmmakers are coming up with ideas just as good as Franco’s, they’re just not
coming up with as many of them all at once, and in so many different genres,
and all while living a life in the public eye that’s equal parts “hounded
celebrity” and “pariah for every disappointed artiste-cum-barista from Seattle
to D.C.” Those who hate Franco’s art, and the (to them) obscure motivations
that drive its production in such copious volume, are the sort of artists who have
always hated those who step outside anticipated roles. These artists often find
ways to double down on the status quo without seeming to be doing so—they
maintain their bohemian street cred even as they strangle in its crib any
audacious innovations in art. In the end, though, Franco’s critics are
profoundly misunderstanding what they’re critiquing. They believe themselves
superior to Franco as artists if they can (variously) write a better screenplay
than Franco, write a better poem than Franco, and so on—when in fact Franco’s
creative persona has nothing to do with quality per se, and everything to do with the new byword in the arts:
interdisciplinarity.

Franco
masterfully
coordinates multiple genres, discrete disciplines, and disparate
resources in a way the
rest of us can’t, not only because we’re poorer but because, generally,
we’re
not as smart or creative as Franco is within his own context—that
context being
a life of limitless resources, staggering visibility, and a restlessness
that
many celebrities deal with through moral sloth or gestural
charity work. While it’s true that much of Franco’s smarts and
creativity are
attributable to him being wealthy and famous enough to know and
collaborate with some very smart and talented people, even here we must
say
that the ability to aggregate talent is both rare generally and
vanishingly
rare among the Hollywood elite—even as it’s perhaps the most critical
skill an
artist can possess in our present age of collaboration and
intertextuality. Postmodern dialectics have given way to metamodern
dialogue, and Franco knows it.

In
other words, given his local and cultural contexts, Franco is, conceptually
speaking, hitting the ball out of the ballpark nine times out of ten. His
projects, both Let Me Get What I Want
and its immediate predecessors,
are conceptually astute even when (sometimes particularly when) they fail as
individual artworks. Is Directing Herbert
White a particularly good book of poetry? No. Is it any good at all? Not
really, at least if we judge it using conventional standards of craft, form,
and imagination. But the concept behind the book, that being to have a famous
person unabashedly write earnest poems about what a celebrity’s life is
like—which, judging from American culture, is all anyone wants to know about
celebrities anyway—is ingenious in its way. We didn’t get that kind of fan
service from Jewel, or Billy Corgan, or Leonard Nimoy, or any of the other
Hollywood darlings who’ve decided to try their hand at poetry. Franco writes
poems entirely responsive to who he is to us as well as who he is to himself,
and in making that difficult and perhaps unintentionally selfless decision he’s
exhibited a sensitivity to context which, surprisingly, even today’s most
multi-generic artists seem to lack. Indeed, American poetry—by way of
example—has repeatedly made national headlines over the past couple years for
its brazen commitment to giving exactly no one in America what they want, for doing
almost nothing to write verse that reflects the culture in which it’s being
written, and meanwhile—on top of that—for arguing loudly about how it’s
preposterous to expect it to do otherwise. Franco has made a different
decision, and in the context of his cross-generic career it’s clear that that
decision was motivated by the actor’s artistic vision rather than financial
gain. Franco doesn’t need the cash, after all.

It’s
time
for the Franco hate to stop. Viewed at the level of a career rather
than
on the level of individual artworks, Franco is Hollywood’s most
interesting,
daring, and multi-faceted artist. Hating on him is not only easy to do
but also
easy to justify as coming from a protective instinct—that is, the idea
that the
arts must be protected from the intrusion of dilettantes like Franco. In
fact,
the anti-Franco madness is as retrograde, conservative, and reactionary
as any
inclination we find in the arts today. It says that not only should we
all stay
within our generic and subcultural boxes, but that delivering
anticipated
results is always preferable to displaying uncommon (even if only
intermittently winning) daring. In fact, the reverse is true, a premise
for
which Franco is the poster-child. In light of the age we live in, and
the
explorations of genre and how artists live and interconnect that should
be
happening right now across all genres, the truth is that James Franco is
as intelligent and creative as any of his peers, and perhaps much more
so.

Seth Abramson is the author of five poetry collections, including two, Metamericana and DATA,
forthcoming in 2015 and 2016. Currently a doctoral candidate at
University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is also Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, whose next edition will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: ‘Transparent’ and the Drive for More Progressive Media

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: ‘Transparent’ and the Drive for More Progressive Media

nullIn the first season of Transparent,
Maura (Jeffrey Tambor), the central protagonist of the series, is in the process of coming out
as transgender to her adult children. In an effort to claim an identity she has
long tried to hide from public view, Maura packs a few things and moves from
her comfortable, beautiful house to a small LGBT friendly apartment complex
called the Shangri-La. In one episode, Maura comes home to find a huge party
going on next door. After trying to politely request that they turn their music
down several times, Maura is exasperated. Using her shoe to bang on the wall
separating their apartments, she calls them “motherfuckers” and “faggots.”

What to make of Maura’s use of this homophobic slur, as a
testament of exhaustion and frustration? This scene occurs shortly after Maura
is insulted and humiliated by a woman who yells at her, calls her a pervert,
and demands that she leave the ladies room.

Maura’s use of the term “faggot” in this scene is deeply
affecting—it’s thoughtless, a knee-jerk response to dealing with a situation
beyond her control. The term is not used a way to reclaim its power; she’s
furious and she wants to hit her neighbors where it hurts. The fact that
someone for whom LGBT rights are deeply personal errs in how she uses language
at a moment of exhaustion and pain is not meant to portray Maura as a
hypocrite, but as someone who is human. In a culture where racism, sexism, and
homophobia are rampant, it’s easy to fuck up.

One of the things I love most about Transparent is the tenderness with which Jill Soloway treats her
incredibly flawed characters. Often, the ease with which characters say cruel,
dismissive, or disrespectful things to one another is downright shocking. Each
of Maura’s children is portrayed as self-absorbed, and the manner in which
Sarah, Josh, and Ali come to terms with their father’s transition is deeply
flawed. All three children make jokes about how “weird” the situation is. Josh
tries to learn about the trans community from a porn site and Ali attempts to
learn about what it means to be transgendered from pursuing sex with a trans
man she meets at a gender studies class.

In his now famous article for New York Magazine, “Not a Very PC Thing to
Say,” Jonathan Chait argues that the emphasis on being politically correct is
hindering free thought and expression. A lot of very intelligent articles have
been written discussing the ways that Chait ignores how PC language functions
as a way to protect the most marginalized members of our society. But I also
think it’s important to consider how PC language also doesn’t always achieve
its immediate goals. People can parrot any number of PC terms while still
having perfectly lamentable ideas; genuinely sensitive thinkers may, as
Benedict Cumberbatch recently did when he used the term “colored” to refer to
black actors, make deeply regrettable mistakes.  Language can be deliberately wielded as a
weapon. It can also be unintentionally hurtful. The fact that celebrities,
writers and actors are pressured to think critically about their word choice in
today’s world doesn’t mean that we are being censored. It demonstrates that we
as a society are moving in the direction of empathy. 

Nonetheless, while today’s Internet landscape is obsessed
with words, our insistence on shaming others online as the primary means to
correct mistakes doesn’t necessarily encourage sensitive thinking. The age of
Twitter is an age of slogans, of a politics predicated on being “with us” or
“against us.” You don’t have to know very much about a cause or social issue to
use a hashtag. Real change won’t come from socially ostracizing allies who make
mistakes. It comes from cultivating empathy, from showing people just why
certain terms are dehumanizing.

Online progressive spaces spend a lot of time dissecting the
many problems in the media representation of marginalized groups. Recently, The
Representation Project released a video entitled “Demand Better Media in 2015”
which shows an assorted medley of media wins for women, as well as a variety of
examples of places where media failed women. The clip ends with a cry for us to
demand better media, as well as a list of helpful links that we can click on to
support media that “got it right,” or complain about the media that “got it
wrong.”

Indeed, women make up a tiny percentage of artists, writers
and producers. We need to hear more diverse stories, to tap into women’s
potential, as Emma Watson recently called for in one of her “He for She”
speeches.

But some tenets within this call for justice do seem
problematic. Who is the arbiter of what types of violence on screen and in
games are harmful or not harmful? The notion that video games cause violence
has been disproven in countless studies at this juncture, and many of the
scenes of violence that The Representation Project pins down as bad for gender
relations, like Grand Theft Auto, could certainly be viewed as satire
intended to get us thinking about the media we are consuming. Others also seem
a bit unfairly cherry-picked. Sons of
Anarchy, which was picked apart for reinforcing harmful ideas about
masculinity, has featured one of my favorite characters, Gemma, a complex
female protagonist, who turns what it means to be an older woman going through
menopause on its head. And, of course, there are constant debates about whether
or not Game of Thrones is “good” or
“bad” for women. The series has presented varied depictions of female power,
while also depicting what would have been very real concerns for female
characters in this particularly violent fantasy world—the threat of sexual
assault.

I don’t think we can achieve parity by getting rid of media
that doesn’t neatly fit into a neat, progressive checklist, especially since
art may present racist, sexist and homophobic language in order to deconstruct
it. It’s important for us to make a distinction between language that condones
hate, and art that uses this kind of language deliberately in order to
interrogate the status quo. 

It’s also important for us to remember that learning to be
conscious of our choices is a process that takes time, energy, and, often,
involves making mistakes. In Jon Ronson’s aricle, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up
Justine Sacco’s Life,” Ronson describes how today’s shame culture has both
positive and negative ramifications. Our ability to expose and denounce racist
and sexist beliefs helps to hold people accountable for saying terrible,
dangerous things. But it has also contributed to a culture where shaming is
considered perfectly acceptable. In his article, “The Anti-Vaccine Movement
Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works,” Matt Novak claims that shaming can
be a quite effective means to promote social change, as long as we shame
movements, rather than humiliate individual people. This distinction seems to
me to be an important one. In today’s world individuals who are caught saying
terribly offensive things are often publically crucified and while humiliation
can certainly frighten some individuals into using more appropriate language,
it doesn’t dissolve hate. One only has to look at the endless barrage of
harassment, including rape and death threats, that many online feminist writers
receive, in order to see hate speech online is thriving.

Transparent
triumphs in part because it highlights how gaining empathy is in itself a
process. Maura is gentle, dignified and strong, but earlier episodes show her
making complicated decisions and various mistakes. Maura’s children are
portrayed as selfish, but also genuinely caring. Ali objectifies the men she is
dating and uses them for sex, but she also deeply cares about her stepfather
Ed. Sarah is completely self-involved and impulsive, but she is also the
sibling most genuinely empathetic with her father’s transition, rallying her siblings
to be supportive as well. Josh is temperamental and a womanizer, but you can
also see glimpses of how he wants to be a better man.

Soloway has faced scrutiny for making certain choices, like
hiring Jeffrey Tambor, rather than a trans woman, to play Maura. Soloway has also
been criticized for sharing a photo on social media, which combined images of the
Kardashian family and an advertisement for Transparent,
in reference to speculations about Bruce Jenner’s gender identity. Her
apologies fell on deaf ears to some, while others view her acknowledging her
mistakes as genuine. This type of real-life dialogue mimics the content of the
show itself, which emphasizes that individuals have the potential to change,
evolve, grow, and learn. Transparent
shows us a world where people are often not getting empathy right, but also
shows us a world where we have the power to learn from our mistakes and become
better, more empathetic people.

Transparent
succeeds because it goes beyond today’s hashtag activism to show us a nuanced
portrait of one trans woman’s experience of coming out, and one family’s
experience adapting to that change. The show’s depiction of today’s world is
fraught with contradictions: Maura has the freedom to be herself in a way she
never could have in the past. She explains to her daughter, “People led secret
lives. And people led very lonely lives. And then, of course, the Internet was
invented.” But, of course, the world has changed a lot, and also very little,
as Maura faces everything from awkward stares to outright discrimination. Her
children love her, but are also confused and are often incredibly insensitive.

Transparent shows
how the cultivation of empathy is in itself a process, a societal one, and also
an individual one. Unlike a show like Mad
Men, where stylized scenes often give in to nostalgia, while still
criticizing the world of the 60s, Transparent
pushes back against any sense of wistfulness. In the opening montage,
images from the past dissolve into scenes from the present.

When discussing their father’s new gender identity, Josh
wonders, “What does this mean? That everything Dad has said or done before this
moment is a sham? Like he was just acting the whole time?”

“It just means we all have to start over,” Ali replies.

In my favorite scene of the series, Maura lights Shabbat
candles for the first time, a Jewish tradition reserved for the mother of the
house. I love this scene because it highlights the wonderful juxtapositions
that characterize the entire series—the desire for tradition, stability and
wisdom leads each character back to a faith that is literally thousands of
years old, but each character is also constantly reconciling this drive with
the recognition that these traditions need to evolve in order for them, and for
us, to truly thrive.

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.

METAMERICANA: On Crispin Glover’s Epic Performance Art

METAMERICANA: On Crispin Glover’s Epic Performance Art

nullBetween
1987 and 1995, actor, musician, and author Crispin Glover gave America
one of the longest-running and most inscrutable performance art projects
of the postwar era, and did so on one of the largest stages available
to any performer in the States: late-night television. Even now, twenty
years on, the exact nature and purpose of Glover’s project is
unclear–as it’s been deliberately left unclear by its creator–even
though anyone with access to the Internet and YouTube can trace each
stage of the project’s development. What we find, when those individual
and temporally far-flung stages are combined, is an exemplary piece of
“metamericana” that may well have been decades ahead of its time.

*

Crispin
Glover has always been an idiosyncratic and even downright strange man,
and he still is today. In 1987, however, Glover’s quirks were far less
well-known, as besides a forgettable Friday the 13th appearance and a single high-profile role–as the George McFly (both the younger and older versions) in Back to the Future–he’d only been featured in a single movie (River’s Edge) that more than a handful of American moviegoers had seen. And in fact Glover was left off the second and subsequent Back to the Future movies for a reason: he had ideas of being a genuine artist, an ambition of which the director of the Back to the Future
films, Robert Zemeckis, has never been accused. (Zemeckis, among a
number of high-profile, high-grossing thrillers, also produced the Paris
Hilton vehicle House of Wax.)

Though
only 23 in 1987, Glover had already published a novel and performed in
several low-budget art house flicks. He’d also begun writing some
bizarre music that would later feature prominently in his performance
art, which for the purposes of this article I’ll refer to as The Crispin
Glover Project.

*

The Project began in 1987, with Glover’s publication of a novel called Rat Catching. Possibly the first metamodern novel–it was written a decade before David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest—Rat Catching was a pre-Internet remix the likes of which America had not yet seen (at least in its popular culture). What Glover did in Rat Catching
was take a public domain text–a 1896 manual for how to catch and kill
rats–and alternately blacked or whited out large sections of it to
create his own storyline. Sentences were also rearranged at will, and
captions to the many pictures included in the original manual were
altered; finally, Glover’s name was sloppily affixed to the title page
over the name of the original author.

Rat Catching
is an astounding and disturbing book, one that simultaneously
deconstructs an existing text and constructs from it a new and only
partially related one. It juxtaposes deconstruction and construction in a
single “reconstructive” literary act. Importantly, the novel was
eminently readable, even if the purpose behind its deconstruction of a
rat-catching manual–or even the purpose of the novel Glover replaced
that manual with–was unclear. Rat Catching was therefore not so
much a degradation of language conducted with a political point in
mind–as is typically in the case with work we identify as
“postmodern”–but a re-purposing of language made with no obvious
critique in mind, or at least no evident critique, but only the desire
to create something new and unforgettable.

At the same time that Rat Catching was being published, Glover was finishing up work on Rubin and Ed,
a low-budget film that (unbeknownst to Glover at the time) wouldn’t be
released for several more years. It was in this context that Glover made
his first appearance on the David Letterman show, an appearance still
regarded as one of the strangest five minutes in television history.

*

On
July 28, 1987, Glover, sporting glasses, unusually long hair, and
platform shoes, conducted a five-minute interview with Letterman–if it
could be called that–before Letterman walked off the set in both
disgust and (he would later indicate) a fear for his personal safety.
Here’s a clip of Glover’s first appearance on Late Show with David Letterman:

Note
that Glover answers most questions while looking into an unknowable
middle distance, seems either scared or anxious (it’s not clear which),
and begins his descent into outright lunacy only after a woman in the
audience–many now believe her to have been a plant–begins heckling
him. “Nice shoes!” the woman shouts, and everything quickly deteriorates
into madness.

In
the early stages of his "breakdown," Glover seems to be raising the
question of how the media covers celebrities (he takes out a wrinkled
newspaper clipping to opine about it, and certainly appears to be
dressed as someone other than the celebrity he was and is) but at no
point does any real commentary or critique materialize. What Glover
does, instead, is nearly fall off the stage and then execute a possibly
impressive and certainly violent-looking karate kick.

After
a commercial break, Glover is nowhere to be seen; Letterman implies he
was kicked off the set. Letterman’s bandleader, Paul Schaffer,
speculates–in a moment of (for him) unusual candor and insight–that
the whole event was a “conceptual piece.” Letterman isn’t so sure, and
seems genuinely put off by Glover.

Nevertheless, he agrees to have him back on the show a second time.

*

Glover’s
second visit to Letterman’s program was as strange as the first, but in
an entirely different way: Glover is meek, harmless, and giggling, in
fact giggles so frequently that–coincidentally–he never has to answer
any of the host’s questions about his first appearance on the program.

The
short version of what’s happening: Glover, again without Letterman’s
knowledge–let alone permission–is controlling the interview. He does
so in a way that’s so confusing to the audience that they start booing
Letterman, not Glover, when the former makes repeated fun of the
latter’s demeanor, twice threatens to assault his guest, and repeatedly
implies that he’s about to throw Glover off the show again.

As
you can see in the video above, when Letterman asks Glover to explain
his first appearance, Glover refuses to say whether the clothes he wore
during the appearance were his “real” clothes or merely props. He
giggles uncontrollably and asks Letterman, “Well, what did you get [from
it]?” when the host asks him to explain his previous visit. And yet, as
odd as Glover’s words seem, everything he says to Letterman could
readily serve as a description of one brand of metamodern art: that
being metamodern art inspired by the writings of university professor
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, who coined the term “metamodernism” in 1975:

Says Glover:

(1) “It’s self-explanatory…kind of…”

(2) “There it was, or there it is…”

(3) “I feel like I shouldn’t say anything [about it]…”

(4) “I wanted it to be this interesting kind of thing that would happen that people would find interesting…”

(5) “The point…was [to create] interest…”

(6) “It was going to go to a different point…it wasn’t going to escalate, it was going to go down into a newer [sic] state…”

Letterman,
literally leaning forward in his chair to get an answer to his
questions, never gets any answer at all. “What was the point?” he asks
Glover repeatedly. But Glover, who in fact was not then (and is not now)
an obsessive giggler, and who’s widely perceived as an intellectual and
creative genius by his peers and many fans, offers no answer because
the answer is already right in front of Letterman and the audience:
Glover has used language and bodily performance to get and keep the
attention of an audience, but has done so without any evident purpose in
mind. He shows Letterman, that is, that attention is the currency of
contemporary America–a maxim that would be infinitely enhanced in
veracity and utility after the popularization of the Internet–and that
the primary value of the most successful attention-seeking art is not
that it critiques language or culture through Modernist constructions or
postmodernist deconstructions, but that it removes viewers from their
own lived realities.

When
Glover asks Letterman, “Did you find it interesting, in one way?”,
Letterman shakes his head “no.” Yet that answer is belied by the fact
that the host invited back his troublesome guest just days after his
first appearance–and would invite him back repeatedly afterwards.
Glover is so interesting to Letterman that his interest manifests as an
intense aversion he associates with disinterest.

We
see the same phenomenon at play on the Internet today: we follow and
discuss with an eerie obsession those we claim to dislike and even be
viscerally put off by; we give additional attention to people we
consider superfluous by way of writing at length about how they deserve
no attention; we follow types of art we detest with an even greater
intensity of attention than those we claim to be enamored by; we even
write critiques of that art in which we simultaneously claim that it has
no effect on its audience and note that everybody just can’t stop
talking about it. Again and again we see art that seems higher-brow and
more intricate and laud its qualities and even, specifically, its
memorability–but see no self-contradiction in our analysis when it
later fails to excite much ongoing attention at all. It’s almost as
though we know very what type of art finds clever ways to gain and hold
attention in the Internet Age, but need to half-heartedly construct
narratives in which we assure ourselves that it’s otherwise.

In
other words, when we encounter metamodern art or personalities we often
unwittingly consume the very paradoxes they and their art perform.

*

Every
episode of Letterman’s program, for decades, has been either funny or
not, either instructive or not, either “real” or “staged,” either “good
TV” or “bad TV”–except
for those nights Crispin Glover has appeared on the program, and the
few times that others interested in Glover’s creative vision have aped
his methods in the same venue.

The Crispin Glover Project was designed to overleap poles of thought and affect like “real” or “staged” in order to
create a space in which all poles are simultaneously present and
absent. Glover’s performances on Letterman are both funny and not, and
therefore end up being neither; they feel like bad television but have
the staying power all good television has; they’re ambivalent on the
question of whether they’re “real” or “staged,” and for this reason are
impossible to forget. After all, we tend to remember those experiences
that most wrench us from the known and comforting–often calling these
experiences “sublime”–and the Crispin Glover Project was intended to
show that concept-driven art can create these experiences better than
any other method.

*

Glover
believes, as do a certain strain of metamodernists, that in the
Internet Age the most important civic quality we can all develop is an undirected attentiveness--a
paradoxical state in which we’re ready to believe things and act on
beliefs that are normally outside our experience of the world. If we can
learn to be most attentive in those moments we’re most out of our
comfort zones, we can begin acting in the world in a way that isn’t
bound by the same conventional thought that hasn’t worked out for many
of us in the past. We might therefore call Glover’s apolitical art
“preparatorily political.”

When
Glover ends his second appearance on Letterman by showing the host a
series of art objects that make no sense whatsoever, both Letterman and
the audience are rapt: not because what they’re looking at is garbage,
but because they don’t even know what they’re looking at–and Glover’s
explanations of each object are just plausible-seeming nonsense. If
postmodern deconstruction asks us to so minutely dissect meaning and
performance that there’s literally no end to the levels of precision and
distinction we can produce, Glover’s metamodern art asks us to do
precisely the opposite: accept that there are things we cannot know or
understand, but see also that this "not-knowing" can, paradoxically, be a
powerful preparation for future action.

In
Glover’s third appearance on Letterman’s program, much like during his
second one, he giggles and stutters demonstrably less the moment he’s
asked about his current art projects instead of the The Crispin Glover
Project. In fact, not only does Glover dress “normally” for his 1990
interview with Letterman–continuing his trend of dressing progressively
more conventionally with each appearance–but in fact only stutters or
giggles whenever Letterman asks him about a topic he wishes to avoid.
When speaking of other projects, Glover acts as any other guest might,
and speaks with great clarity and focus. But one thing he doesn’t
do is answer any of Letterman’s questions about the Project; instead,
he deliberately runs out the clock on his segment by telling a story
that superficially might, but also might not, have anything to do with
his first appearance on the program. And once again, Letterman gets
booed on his own show for his abrupt treatment of his guest.

The
above video is worth watching not only for Glover’s continuation of his
performance art project, but also because it marks the debut of “Clowny
Clown Clown,” a Glover song–with accompanying video–that is neither
"understandably bad" to the point it can be made fun of, nor good enough
to admire. Instead, like the rest of the Project, it’s basically
inscrutable. It deconstructs linear narrative into incoherence, but does
so with such a naive commitment to creation and self-expression that it
seems every bit as Modern as it is postmodern. The crowd loves it, and
boos Letterman when he calls Glover “Eraserhead” at the close of the
interview.

Here’s the full music video for “Clowny Clown Clown”:

Listen
to the song without watching the video and you’ll see that, in fact,
it’s just a rather silly but conventional (and in fact linear)
narrative. The lyrics even make mention of “Mr. Farr,” the character
Glover may have “played” during his first Letterman interview. “Thinking
back about those days with the clown,” sings Glover toward the end of
the song, “I get teary-eyed–and snide. I think, deep down, ‘I hated
that clown. But not as much as Mr. Farr.’” The meaning here isn’t hard
to interpret at all, despite the video’s attempts to make it seem
opaque. (A reasonable read would be that Glover is speaking of the three
roles he plays: the “I” is Glover, the “clown” is
Glover-as-performance-artist, and “Mr. Farr” stands in for one of the
many Hollywood acting jobs Glover has taken on. Glover hates not being
able to be himself in public, but he’d rather act the clown–someone
simultaneously midway and "beyond" his actual and acting selves–than
merely be remembered for the characters he’s played on screen.)

*

The coda to the Project is Glover’s last performance art-related appearance on Letterman,
in 1992. Again Glover refuses to justify or explain his first
appearance on the program, or even to tell the host whether he was
wearing a wig on that (by now) infamous night. “Why can’t you just
answer this?” asks an agitated Letterman. “I mean, if it’s a wig, it’s
fine, but if it’s not a wig, it’s fine. Either way.” In fact,
Letterman’s need to know the answer suggests that he can accept either
of two opposite possibilities–a sign of maturation on Letterman’s
part–but that he still can’t accept not knowing whether either of these
possibilities is the “real” answer to his question. “Sure, it is fine,” says Glover, refusing to say more.

The
most telling statement by Glover in the video above is this one: “I
like to leave it…mysterious. Well, here’s the facts: I’m wearing a wig
in the movie [Rubin and Ed], and I look exactly the same in the
movie as I did when I was on the show.” Though Letterman acts as though
his interrogation has yielded fruit, in fact this is yet another
non-answer: Glover merely restates the facts as everyone agrees them to
be, refusing to either deconstruct or synthesize them on anyone else’s
behalf.

*

In
all of this, we have to remember the behavioral oddities of the role
that made Glover famous, and for which he’s still best known today:

If
you’ve watched the video above, you’ve probably noticed the key to The
Crispin Glover Project, which is that, by and large, the entirety of the
Project comprises Glover performing an amplified version of George
McFly in public. For years.

Here, below, is Glover as he actually
is, explaining to two radio hosts what acting as George McFly–and
being remembered almost exclusively for that role–taught him about
propaganda:

Per Glover, Zemeckis was able to convince viewers of Back to the Future II
of a lie–that Glover was in the film, when in fact he was not–simply
by giving them what they expected to see. In response, Glover found a
way to use the very same character Zemeckis was manipulating to give
viewers of David Letterman’s television show something they couldn’t
possibly expect. One might even say that Glover offered America the
opposite–in both form and effect–of propaganda. (He also, in an
interesting historical note, sued Zemeckis for misuse of his image–and
won.)

Now
here’s Joaquin Phoenix stealing Glover’s idea nearly twenty years later
and (in a show of real gall) doing so on the very same television
program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRb_3hCa72Y

And
here’s the most talked about celebrity in America right now, Shia
LaBeouf, wearing exaggeratedly ragged clothing and stealing from Joaquin
Phoenix stealing from Crispin Glover:

It’s
no coincidence that LaBeouf’s seeming point is the same one we might
glean from Glover’s project: that new media destroys, if we permit it
to, both the reality-artifice spectrum and many other polar spectra
besides. Which frees us to free ourselves from these limiting spectra as
well.

Over
the next twenty years, we’ll hear a lot about art that is
simultaneously sincere and ironic and neither, naive and knowing and
neither, optimistic and cynical and neither. While two of the theorists
presently associated with metamodernism, Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den
Akker, originally described such art as “oscillating” between
conditions traditionally associated with Modernism and
postmodernism–for instance, sincerity and irony, respectively–their
view has changed in recent months. Now, they, and other metamodernists,
are more likely to note that metamodern art permits us to inhabit a
“both/and” space rather than merely the “either/or” spaces deeded us by
the “dialectics” of postmodernism.

“Both/and” means transcending
the poles that have been thought to dominate our lives ever since Plato
devised the term "metaxis" to describe this condition of moving
perpetually between opposites. By comparison, “either/or” means that
everything is a zero-sum game and can never be otherwise. On online
discussion boards, for instance, "either/or" dialectics prompt us to
believe that others can only agree with us or oppose us, to understand
us in our entire selves or be deliberately and permanently foreign to
us; there’s no room for partnerships in which not all perspectives are
shared, let alone partnerships in which participants’ goals but not
their values are in common.
If the ultimate ambition of metamodern art, and metamericana generally,
is to help us discover what the “and” in “both/and” could possibly
mean, we must credit Glover with being one of the pioneers in that
historically important search.

Seth Abramson is the author of five poetry collections, including two, Metamericana and DATA,
forthcoming in 2015 and 2016. Currently a doctoral candidate at
University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is also Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, whose next edition will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015.

On A MOST VIOLENT YEAR: When Homes Start to Look Like Their Owners

On A MOST VIOLENT YEAR: When Homes Start to Look Like Their Owners

nullThe places where we live shape us, and we shape the places
where we live to suit our temperaments. This truth is driven home repeatedly by
J.C. Chandor’s newest film, A Most
Violent Year, which has been compared repeatedly to The Godfather but just as easily could be compared to On the Waterfront, Winter’s Bone, or The Truman
Show as a study of the way inhabitants of an environment deal with and
modify their environment. Chandor has foregrounded setting to such an extent
that the two powerful performances at the film’s heart—Oscar Isaac’s as the manager of an oil trucking company, learning how to defend himself against the aggression of his semi-criminal colleagues, and Jessica Chastain’s as his
wife, who already knows and is desperate to teach him—seem to grow naturally
out of the milieu in which we receive them. However, these figures also shape
the settings in which they thrive.

The first sight we have of Abel shows him running, nimbly,
though a modest suburban New Jersey neighborhood. The setting is appropriate
for a character like his: contained, inwardly manicured, almost frustratingly
righteous and plodding when it comes to the moral shorthand those around him
employ for survival’s sake. There is something bleak about these streets,
comfortable as they might seem; there’s a notable lack of other people in
Abel’s surroundings, a visible emptiness, that suits the story, and suits also
the story he is writing with his actions here. After he makes the first payment
on his business, huddled in a cold-seeming trailer, his partner, played with
memorable paleness by Albert Brooks, encourages Abel to take a look around his
future headquarters, and so he does: down by the river, facing Manhattan from
the Jersey side, perhaps picturesque in one sense but at this moment, in the
middle of winter, standing behind oil tanks, it seems less like a view of
dreamland than a reminder of what obstructions lie ahead. The buildings are all
the same color, they’re all huge, and they’re all a long way off. When we see
Abel’s house for the first time, its sleekness is impressive but its coldness
is telling. The impression it makes is not that Abel is cold—for he isn’t. As
confidently portrayed here by Isaac, he’s a warm person, almost warm to a
fault, naïve in his trust of ethics, good faith, honesty, and the people in his employ. The house suggests,
though, the high-flown way he believes a man of his stature should live: high ceilings, pristine
surfaces, vast spaces, off-white walls, the perfect kitchen, the perfect
library. But it’s a borrowed idea of perfection. When we meet one of his
associates, played here with semi-beefy malevolence by Alessandro Nivola, it
appears that they share this same notion of coldness, the appearance of
perfection, as an aesthetic. The colleague has a racquetball court built into
his house, pinging opulence at us with the force of the ball itself. When the
two share a drink and discuss a loan which could push Abel into career
adulthood, they sit in a space-age interior, resembling something out of an
advertisement rather than a place where anyone might live. This is fitting,
though, because the people Chandor is filming here place little stock in homes,
in domesticity; for them life is work, and work is life. Work, further, is all about the rewards you reap, and the rewards you reap are, in essence, your life.

Chandor is smart about this dichotomy, though. When we see
the home of one of Abel’s employees, a vulnerable man who, after being beaten
up by the thugs whose aggression against Abel’s drivers propels the story, shoots his aggressors and then flees, the apartment’s modesty and hominess, with its inexpensive furniture, its drawn shades, and its
lived-in quality stand in stark contrast to the other interiors we’ve seen. It’s
clear hat the employee isn’t suffering under the same preconceived notions Abel
suffers under—but when he meets a sad fate, we wonder if such illusions might
have helped him. In an interview, Oscar Isaac
recounted how Chandor had stressed the importance of the suits Abel wears in
the film, and how their presence might dictate the character’s behavior, and in
fact his entire world view. This is a profound truth, when all is said and
done: outer trappings can shape the person to which they are attached, in
greater or lesser degrees. It’s the direction that shaping takes that makes all
the difference.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

An Effete New World: Why We Need THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

An Effete New World: Why We Need THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

nullWes Anderson is more or less at a midpoint of his career:
well past being the hip newcomer, he has established a trademark style that has
both earned him a devoted following and attracted a host of critics.  The latter found much to dislike about his
most recent film, The Grand Budapest
Hotel, which is as lush and eccentric a celebration of style as anything
Anderson has yet created.  The opening
scene might be read as depicting both sides of the Anderson divide: into a
deliciously bleak European cemetery walks a hipster girl who might represent
Anderson’s ideal fan—quiet, bookish, nattily dressed, with a beret and a
quaintly retro smattering of badges on her lapel.   Outside the cemetery stands a disaffected
boy, who’d rather stand alone in the cold than pay homage to the anonymous
“Author” whose memorial lies within.

Later, the film’s protagonist, M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes),
praises his protégé’s new fiancée, Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), and when he learns
that she also feels fondly about him, replies: “That’s a good sign, you know.
It means she ‘gets it.’  That’s
important.”  With Anderson, it’s clear that
plenty of critics don’t “get it.”  Stephanie
Zacharek of The Village Voice
complains: “This meticulously appointed dollhouse of a movie just went on and
on, making me want to smash many miniature plates of plaster food in frustration,”
while David Thomson condemns it as “an avalanche of sickening sweetness … a
remorseless succession of pretty frames with frosted colors.”  What is implied by these criticisms is that viewers have to make a choice between prettiness and seriousness, between frivolity
and politics.  But maybe there’s another
choice—maybe prettiness is political.

One of the film’s harshest critics, Kyle Smith for the New York Post, actually seems to get it
just right when he notes that: “The most Wes Anderson-y moment … is the
arrival, at a prison security desk, of foodstuffs meant for the inmates. A loaf
of bread? Violently stabbed. A sausage? Sliced to bits. Then comes an
enchanting little pastry, a frail folly of icing and butter. To check it for
the hidden and forbidden would be to destroy it. So the guards (unseen,
unremarked upon) simply pass it through untouched. It contains, of course, digging tools with
which our heroes will break out of prison.”  Those who love Anderson’s films
would likely agree with this interpretation: some things are too precious to be destroyed, and that’s exactly what this film
is about.

So what’s so wrong, exactly, with a couple of toughened
prison guards refraining from destroying a preciously decorated pastry?  If such a response is considered too
implausible, this says more about our ideas of beauty, and of how men respond
to it, than it does about Anderson’s particular brand of beauty.  What Anderson offers us in this film is an
idea of masculinity and of culture that finds strength in making and preserving
beautiful things rather than destroying them. 
It’s no surprise this idea would be a hard sell in some quarters of
American cinema.  Whether it’s blowing
things up at the Cineplex, or remorselessly tackling topical issues at the Art
House, Americans seem bent on seeking darkness and violence rather than life
and color. 

Contrary to popular opinion, Anderson does not shy
away from violence: it’s there, even in his effete protagonist, M. Gustave.
When his protégé, Zero (Tony Revolori), visits him in prison, he finds his face
horribly bruised.  We first assume that
the perfume-wearing concierge has been beaten (or worse), but instead, he
explains: “What happened, my dear Zero, is I beat the living shit out of a
snivelling, little runt called Pinky Bandinski who had the gall to question my
virility—because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from penny dreadfuls,
it’s that, when you find yourself in a place like this, you must never be a
candy-ass. You’ve got to prove yourself from Day One. You’ve got to win their respect.”  But after he spits out a mouthful of blood
into his coffee mug, he adds, “He’s actually become a dear friend.”  There is violence in this world, the film
tells us, but also grace, manners, and wit.

The character of M. Gustave, in what is surely
Ralph Fiennes’ finest performance in many years, represents the Anderson ethos:
among men dressed in black, he is the purple-clad servant of beauty.  The concierge glides through his pink hotel
like the spirit of a lost world, one where color, form, and pleasing scents are
more important than money and power. 
True, the hotel where he works is the exclusive dwelling place of old
Europe’s one percent, but Anderson’s heroes are those who make that world, the
concierges, the lobby boys, the baker’s assistant.  They sustain a beautiful illusion while all
around them Europe is giving way to the brutalities of war.  In one crucial scene, Gustave and Zero are
saved by a police officer (Edward Norton), who remembers the concierge’s
kindness to him when he “was a lonely little boy.”  After he leaves, Gustave turns to Zero and says:
“You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse
that was once known as humanity. Indeed, that’s what we provide in our own
modest, humble, insignificant,” and at this point Gustave seems to recognize
he’s getting on a soap box and concludes, “Oh, fuck it.” 

This is a key Anderson moment, and in some ways a key (or
crossed key) to the film itself: there’s a message here, something important to
be said, but by all means let’s not be boring about it.  The mannered delivery of his characters, the
stylized sets, and the meticulous mise en
scene are not substitutes for ideas: they are the ideas.  When Gustave steps off the soap box here, he’s
not evading making a statement—he’s letting the medium itself make that
statement.  And at the risk of being
ponderous where Anderson’s characters are elegantly restrained, the statement
might be something like this: meet violence with grace, austerity with color,
meanness with beauty. 

If the response of financial experts and governments to hard
times is to impose austerity measures, we might at least avoid imposing them on
our films.  In America, in particular, we
are uncomfortable with beauty.  We equate
it with frivolity, with weakness.  In M.
Gustave, the film presents us with a kind of stand-in for the director himself,
clad in vivid colors and fussing over every beautiful detail.  Though the villains in the film call Gustave
a “fruit” and a “fucking faggot,” he represents a model of behavior that
reconciles qualities traditionally designated male or female.  Confronted by bullies, he responds with
manners and wit, and though he gets knocked around quite a bit, he never loses
his impeccable color sense, or his moral sense. 
For Anderson, these two sensibilities are inextricably entwined.  They may also be of another era. 

The film is ultimately an elegy, but perhaps one to a time
that never existed except in the imagination. 
The anonymous author who narrates the film asks the now-aged Zero
Moustafa what The Grand Budapest, that “costly, unprofitable, doomed hotel,”
means to him: “Is it simply your last connection to that—vanished world?  His [M. Gustave’s] world, if you will?”  But he disagrees: “To be frank, I think his
world had vanished long before he entered it—but, I will say: he certainly
sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” 
And this, Anderson’s work suggests, is really the point of making
films.  Isn’t it, darling?

Claire Hero is the author of Dollyland (Tarpaulin Sky), Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press), and two other chapbooks: afterpastures (Caketrain) and Cabinet (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Handsome and elsewhere. She lives in upstate New York.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

KICKING TELEVISION: Not So Christmas Special

KICKING TELEVISION: Not So Christmas Special

nullDecember is the worst time of
year for television connoisseurs, and has been since Philo Farnsworth first
slapped the magic box for better reception. December television’s doldrums are
not the result of obtrusive college football or unexpected repeats. They’re not
the fault of lackluster scheduling or Chuck Lorre. No, December television
disappoints because of the relentless and superfluous inundation of
Christmas specials.

I don’t hate Christmas. I don’t
bah humbug my way to January. I Yuletide as much as the next fella. I like
nogs. But when it comes to television, a medium for escapism, I’ve never
understood programmers’ desire to fill our early winter hours with saccharine
and sanctimonious Christmas fare. Isn’t that what the mall is for? Besides the
annual marathons of A Charlie Brown
Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed
Reindeer, and Dr. Seuss’ How the
Grinch Stole Christmas, each and every network show feels the need to get
in the holiday spirit by adding a special episode to its commitment. This
week’s NCIS: New Orleans features a
special Christmas naval murder. Jon Cryer will make Yuletide log double
entendres. Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake will wear bad sweaters. It’ll all
be awful.

Television, at its best,
celebrates the medium itself while discussing broader issues or
providing introspective views on societal complexities. Shows of the past few years that have
garnered the most critical attention (True
Detective, Breaking Bad, Mad Men et al.) have done so because
they understand television as an art form, not simply a vehicle to pay Tim
Allen’s mortgage. TV should be a reflection of society, and occasionally an
indictment of it. Christmas is an opportunity for television to explore our
faults which are most evident during the festive season: greed, consumerism,
falsity, obesity, or wearing red and green at the same time. A true and
interesting use of the medium would be to hold it up as a mirror and reflect
upon not just the virtues of giving but our exercises in withholding, and to
use it as a mode to discuss more than just reindeer discrimination.

I spent last week on the couch
with some kind of virus that was a cross between Ebola and a Jägermeister
hangover. Armed with a remote control and 300+ channels, I set off to waste
away my days and nights in a semi-medicated haze. But, being December, instead
I was drowned in a digital sea of holiday noise. Several channels only played Elf on a loop. Another showed 24-hour Burl
Ives. Ellen, The View, and Good Morning, Tulsa,
were all adorned in pine and tinsel and myrrh. None of these shows dared to ask
about the hypocrisy of Christmas, or questioned its virtue. Adults spoke openly
of Santa, sometimes to Santa. I’m not arguing for an anti-Christmas campaign
from NBC, but perhaps some use of television to address Christmas in an
interesting manner could’ve saved me from my feverish dreams.

I know this all seems very
Scrooge-ish. My sister would certainly disagree with my feelings. From the time we were very
young, she has reveled in the majesty of the holiday special. From Frosty the Snowman to a Friends Christmas to the eight days of The Mentalist Hanukkah, my elder sibling
has spent each December raising eggnog to every Holiday-themed broadcast her
digital cable package provides. And she’s passed this on to her children,
perpetuating a disappointing affliction. My nephew Finn, all of eight years
old, now holds up Elf not only as a
Christmas favourite, but an arbiter of truth. Some chestnuts from my sister’s
wee chestnut:

Did you know it’s a fact that elf babies are smaller than human
babies?

Did you know it’s a fact that Santa’s sled is powered by Christmas
spirit?

Did you
know it’s a fact that every year Santa picks a new reindeer to lead the sled so
they don’t get too tired?

So not only does Christmas
programming perpetuate cultural deception and reinforce a superficial need
for things, but it’s also spreading playground lies. Everybody knows that
Santa’s sled is powered by candy canes and gin.

At this point I know what you’re
thinking. It could be, perhaps, that my shoes are too tight. It could be my
head isn’t screwed on just right. And the most likely reason of all may be that
my heart is two sizes too small. Hell, even as I write this, I want to slap me
with a bowl full of jelly. But I have such an affection for television, and an
appreciation for it at its best, that it pains me to see the medium wasted. To
me, the Christmas special is like a discarded canvas, an empty page, or a Foo
Fighters album. It’s a discarded opportunity to have done something
interesting. We’ve got more than enough Christmas programming in our collective
DVR to last an infinity of lifetimes. Is it asking TV too much to give us
something new and provocative in our stocking?

I like Christmas. I like
drinking on a Tuesday afternoon wearing Santa caps. I like staff holidays. I
like getting my sock and underwear supplies replenished. I like being Canadian
and knowing what Boxing Day is. I like gravy, and figgy pudding, and drunk
relatives. I like seeing my family and friends. I like the look in my niece and
nephews eyes on Christmas morning, a look of belief and innocence that we all
lost somewhere along the way. And I like the distant sound of caroling, a
church choir on Christmas Eve, and a fresh Clementine in the bottom of my
stocking. I like snowflakes lit by a winter moon. I like the promise of a year
ending, and the hope of a new calendar. But I don’t see the dichotomy of these
affections in Christmas specials. Instead I see the capitalization of a
holiday, the bastardization of spirit, and another wasted canvas.

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

On Paul Thomas Anderson’s INHERENT VICE: Between the Pavement and the Beach Lies the Shadow

On Paul Thomas Anderson’s INHERENT VICE: Between the Pavement and the Beach Lies the Shadow

null

Doc (Joaquin Phoenix), the hero of Inherent Vice,
is a hippie but not a radical. He just wants to get stoned, laid and
left alone. However, his job as a private eye, as well as his
involvement with some women he’s dated, involves him in 1970s politics. I expected Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, adapted
by the director from Thomas Pynchon’s most accessible novel, to be a
stoner goof, and I wondered if it would have any more present-day relevance
than Cheech & Chong’s Up In Smoke, even if it comes from a
far more literate sensibility. On the other hand, even stoner goofs play
to a political climate in which four U.S. states have legalized
marijuana.  There’s more than a little melancholy beneath Doc’s
euphoria, brought out by Phoenix’s performance. The cultural idealism
around drugs was running low by the time Inherent Vice is set,
and it’s largely dead now. Those who advocate legalizing marijuana argue that
it’s a healthier alternative to alcohol, with fewer social costs, not
that a cultural revolution would come about if beer drinkers switched to
vaporizing kush. 
Like most of Pynchon’s work, Inherent Vice is soaked in conspiracy theories. This isn’t new for him: The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow
pioneered countercultural paranoia when the counterculture was still
fresh. Pynchon’s fascination seemed skeptical yet open-minded. In the
late ‘60s and early ‘70s, conspiracy theories were mostly the property
of leftists. Now, some individuals argue that Barack Obama isn’t really a U.S.
citizen, venting thinly concealed racism. I’m sure Pynchon would hate to
think he helped pave the way for birthers and truthers. For example, the website vigilantcitizen.com,
which mostly analyzes music videos for their supposed hidden messages,
seems to simultaneously come from a far-left and far-right position: it
vociferously attacks the CIA, yet almost all the singers and rappers it
denounces as Illuminati pawns are black and/or female. Thom Andersen
was right to point out the conservative potential of conspiracy theories
in Los Angeles Plays Itself, yet conspiracies do happen, as in
COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secret plot to undermine radical American politics
in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Inherent Vice refers to it by name, and alludes to other programs as well. 
Oddly,
Josh Brolin, who plays straight-laced, flat-topped cop “Bigfoot”
Bjornsen, has more chemistry with Phoenix than any of the women in the
cast. This may be due to the nature of his character: picture Jack Webb
gone to seed, clearly envious of hippies’ freedom even as he verbally
bashes them. (In one of the film’s more bizarre scenes, he finally tries
pot.) In
a weirdly homoerotic touch, he’s often seen with a chocolate banana in
his mouth. The film is extremely well-cast. Even small roles are played
by actors like Michael Kenneth Williams and Martin Donovan. Yet it has a
tendency to relegate women to the level of sex objects. In handing the voice-over to
indie folk singer Joanna Newsom, Anderson seems aware of this problem,
but she sounds like an archetypal “hippie chick”—one imagines Joni
Mitchell fulfilling a similar role in an early ‘70s Robert Altman film. 
The
few times Anderson uses master shots, he gets some beautiful, painterly
vistas of the Southern California landscape. But he seems to shy away
from them in favor of a tighter style, favoring close-ups, putting the
focus on performance. The acting holds up, but the writing doesn’t
translate from novel to screen, even though much of it is taken directly
from Pynchon. Pynchon’s deliberate use of dated slang dampens the script’s wit—in fact, much of the film’s humor feels more theoretical than real. A
key passage about the co-opting of the counterculture is thrown away as
voice-over during a party scene at a rock band’s house. Even though Inherent Vice
is Pynchon’s simplest novel, the problems of Anderson’s screenplay
suggest the dangers of adapting such a complicated writer. The film
plays like a stoner’s version of Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, with a coherent narrative getting lost in clouds of pot smoke. To some extent, that’s the point—Inherent Vice’s characters have only one foot in reality. But it doesn’t make for articulate filmmaking. 

In
the film’s press kit, Anderson asks, “Do we still have that sense of a
lost American promise that can be reclaimed?” For all its attempts at
humor and its characters’ hedonism, Inherent Vice is pretty
bummed-out: critic Howard Hampton described it as mapping “the
Manson-Nixon line.” However, I think New German Cinema and the ‘70s
films of Jean Eustache and Jacques Rivette did a better job of exploring
the hopes and failures of the counterculture. Part of the problem may
be that Anderson was born in 1970 and is depicting the dreams of his
parents’ generation. Films like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore and Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating
offered reports from the front. From the perspective of 2014, it’s easy
to say that the hippies lost or, at best, some of their values won in a
roundabout way decades later, as the sexual revolution led to same-sex
marriage. To return to the Situationist slogan “(Under the pavement, the
beach!”) used as the epigraph to Pynchon’s novel, the distance between
the pavement and the beach seems further and further away.  Making a
movie that simulates the experience of watching film noir on pot
brownies seems somewhat beside the point, even if it has its pleasures.

Steven Erickson is a writer and
filmmaker based in New York. He has published in newspapers and websites
across America, including The Village Voice, Gay City News, The Atlantic, Salon, indieWIRE, The Nashville Scene, Studio Daily and many others. His most recent film is the 2009 short Squawk.

METAMERICANA: Gorillaz’ PLASTIC BEACH Is Our A HARD DAY’S NIGHT

METAMERICANA: Gorillaz’ PLASTIC BEACH Is Our A HARD DAY’S NIGHT

Fifty
years ago, at the height of Beatlemania, The Beatles released a
black-and-white film depicting their lives as rockstars in 1964. The
Oscar-nominated A Hard Day’s Night
took a quartet whose superstardom was positively cartoonish and
depicted it in gritty terms, delivering a clear message: The Beatles were now fame’s prisoners. As the band once put it in helping A Hard Day’s Night
scriptwriter Alun Owen encapsulate their experience in the public eye,
“our lives are a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a
room.” Owen’s film depicted the Fab Four trying to
escape—unsuccessfully—from those geographic and spiritual
restrictions.

Now
it’s 2014, and we’ve come entirely round the bend: the gritty realities
of rock stardom have been so carefully detailed in decades of tour
documentaries and biopics that bands now long to fictionalize themselves
the way The Beatles finally did in Yellow Submarine (1968). But where Yellow Submarine
was an animated musical fantasy with comic overtones, popular culture
today allows for the intervention of comic fantasy only where the
cynicism of the music industry is implicitly acknowledged. In other
words, in the 2010s we get the alternately dark and sublime Plastic Beach,
a fan-constructed musical fantasy (published online just over a year
ago) that takes animation clips released in conjunction with the
Gorillaz album Plastic Beach
(2010) and orders them sequentially to create the album the "band"
itself likely intended. As of last month, well over 4 million people
have viewed Plastic Beach
on YouTube, and that number seems certain to climb much, much higher as
the film’s value as a High Art/Low Art hybrid is more widely
appreciated.

It’s only appropriate that this generation’s A Hard Day’s Night
be partly a piece of fan fiction–even if its component parts are all
band-produced. In a world of remixes, mash-ups, photoshopping,
virality, and spinoff memes, each of us can participate in our
collective culture-making project much more than sixties Beatles
fanatics ever could. And it’s only appropriate that it be Gorillaz
who come in for this sort of cinematic treatment, as from the start
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett (the real-world duo behind the four
animated bandmates comprising Gorillaz) have been exploring how
conspicuously aestheticized realities often channel our contemporary
reality more clearly than gritty realism.

It won’t do to say here that Plastic Beach
was largely meant to be watched by citizens of Colorado, Washington,
Oregon, and Alaska—states whose voters recently made possible watching
this film in a state of benign intoxication—but it is important to note that Plastic Beach
is a “happening” more so than a linear narrative. There’s
unquestionably a well-storyboarded storyline at work (in fact, you can
read the whole thing here), and that narrative self-consciously echoes A Hard Day’s Night, as the
four fictional members of “Gorillaz” flee the trials and villains of
the civilized world to cut a new album on an island composed of
congealed first-world trash. However, the larger throughline here is that the
best music today is at once silly and skin-deep and raw and urgently
political. Plastic Beach
is therefore half archetypal “musical fantasy” and half a politically
committed statement about institutionalized violence and environmental
degradation.

It
certainly doesn’t start out that way. It starts (following a brief 3D
fly-by of the Gorillaz studio on “Plastic Beach”) with a hilarious
homage to Yellow Submarine: Snoop Dogg dressed like a fifth Beatle from the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
standing before an animated yellow submarine lifted straight from the
Beatles’ 1968 film. Snoop Dogg deserves credit for delivering here an
acting performance so inscrutable that after forty views of the clip you
still won’t know if he’s taking himself seriously or not.

What’s
for certain is that the lyrics of the Snoop Dogg/Gorillaz collaboration
“Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach” belie the light-heartedness
of the attached visuals. “The revolution will be televised,” says Snoop Dogg, reversing the famous proclamation of seminal rapper Gil Scott-Heron, “and
the pollution from the ocean.” After urging “kids [to] gather around”
and hear his message, Snoop tells them, “I need your focus; I know it
seems like the world is so hopeless. It’s like Wonderland!” Which is a
pretty good summary of the Plastic Beach of the film, Plastic Beach the
album and film, and Gorillaz themselves: a Wonderland of
hopelessness that entices and even genuinely pleases with its fictions
even as it obscures its dark realities. We’d call the whole thing
cynical if it wasn’t so earnest about its political commitments. We’d
call it morose if Albarn and Hewlett weren’t so clearly having the time
of their lives animating the four fictional members of Gorillaz.

The
members of the band are distinct and memorable. There’s 2D (lead
vocals, keyboard, and melodica), a kindhearted and hapless waster whose
naive immersion in this cartoonish Limbo suggests a sort of everyman
Millennial. There’s Murdoc Niccals (bass and drum machine), a likely
Satan-worshipper whose nihilism and oily creepiness implies an
unthinkable penchant for violence just beneath the surface. There’s Noodle
(guitar, keyboard, and backing vocals), a Japanese girl whose tweener
otherworldliness seems simultaneously born of innocence and a possibly
alien consciousness. And there’s Russel Hobbs (drums and percussion), intended
by his creators to be hip-hop made flesh—so much so that this kind,
protective older brother-like figure can actually channel the ghosts of
former hip-hop superstars and inflate his own size to Iron Giant-like
proportions.

There’s no point in detailing all the shenanigans these four get into in Plastic Beach,
except to say that they involve machine guns, warplanes, Snoop Dogg,
cruise ships, giant manatees, ghosts, a pirate ship, a fleet of
submarines, a giant, a killer-robot version of Noodle, Bruce Willis,
sportscars, a terrorist organization known only as “The Black Cloud,”
and a devilishly well-conceived, gas mask-wearing, black-cloaked villain
named “The Boogieman.” What brings it all together, however, is first
and foremost the music—hip-hop soaked in a pop-tart reduction—and also
its political message, which (briefly summarized) is, “Stop killing each other and the planet, assholes!”
Plastic Beach is, at its heart, a rhetoric-conscious seduction. If A Hard Day’s Night asked us to wake up to the dark recesses of popular culture, Plastic Beach
is the allure of popular culture challenging us to “just like that,
wake up!” (lyrics from “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach”). Although we’re drowning in a 24/7/365 Wonderland of manmade stimuli, this very immersion can allow us to see our current dilemmas
with new eyes.  Albarn and Hewlett understand that living in the present
cultural moment is like having to force yourself awake–daily–from a
dream that’s 50% sublime and 50% a nightmare. Is a dream like that
better classified as entirely nightmarish, or is it somehow worth
inhabiting in the moment and worth remembering clearly later on? The
answer is: both. And that makes the interaction of the dream state and the
reality we find in Plastic Beach an existential question whose resolution is of dire importance to us all.

Seth Abramson is the author of five poetry collections, including two, Metamericana and DATA,
forthcoming in 2015 and 2016. Currently a doctoral candidate at
University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is also Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, whose next edition will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015.