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Nocturnal Admissions

By D.K. Holm

Tuesday August 9, 2005

[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]

In 1887, the then 25-year-old John Jay Chapman, whom Edmund Wilson would later call the "best writer on literature of his generation," and a man who between 1898 and 1933 wrote some 30 books on the arts, literature, and racial equality, stuck his hand in a fire as a form of self-generated penance for an act that apparently filled him with remorse. He had physically attacked a man who had insulted his then girlfriend, a woman named Minna Timmins. His hand, as it turns out, was burned beyond healing, and it was later amputated.

Chapman's partial self-immolation is one of the stranger episodes in the annals of American literature. It ranks up there with such unexpected incidents as Upton Sinclair running for governor of California and Nabokov wanting to write Burma Shave ads.

There is a somewhat similar scene in Miranda July's almost universally praised feature film directorial debut, ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW. Richard Swersey (John Hawkes), a sad sack shoe salesman who is breaking up with his African-American wife, sets his hand on fire during his moving out day. We later piece together that he committed this weird act in order to make the day memorable for his two sons (sort of the way that Anne's mother slaps her on the day she first menstruates in Diane Kurys's PEPPERMINT SODA, while explaining that Anne will now always remember the moment). The scene is important to July. His burning extremity plays under the film's credits, a kind of initial coming forth of July's oddball aesthetic.

I bring up the John Jay Chapman hand-torching moment not because I think July is citing Chapman's action in her film, but because she is so obviously not doing so. In fact, there is nothing in the film that refers to anything outside of the film's characters. The film inhabits a world free of literary references, of film references. It is a dry, small, austere world in which the only real thing that modern audiences might recognize that links up the characters and the incidents is the Internet.

I don't think that ME AND YOU is necessarily a bad film. It's just the most overrated film this year, although at the rate it's going it may possibly end up the most overrated film in the annals of cinema. ME AND YOU has an 82 per cent "approval" rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and everyone from Roger Ebert to the Las Vegas daily has creamed their or its jeans over July's fragile enterprise. In addition, the film has garnered no less than two major awards so far, the Sundance Special Jury prize, and four awards at this year's Cannes. July's hagiographic press began with a typically incomprehensible exegesis of her early film work in FILM COMMENT a few years ago, written by someone who obviously wanted to fuck her — not that there is really anything wrong with that as a motivation for personality profiles, but it set the tone for all subsequent coverage. Since then journos have fallen all over each other to position July as the much-needed next great woman artist. As I mentioned in my memoir from a few weeks ago of "working" with July I fully expect her to mount the stage of the Kodak theater next February to accept the Oscar for best original screenplay.

But does it truly merit this onslaught of unabashed hosannas? I don't think so. It's one of those films OREGONIAN reviewer Shawn Levy calls "web of life" movies, where everyone ultimately turns out to be connected, as in PLAYING BY HEART (a.k.a., DANCING TO ARCHITECTURE) and the recent CRASH. ME AND YOU is a good first effort, I suppose. But its much-praised wry view of life is in my view mechanically, willfully twisted. The resultant film is one bereft of the richness one finds in films by people who have read books, seen other films, know music other than pop, and like painting and architecture and dance. It's in most ways a typical American movie: dumb.

July is a former performance artist (who apparently hates that label), which means that ME AND YOU is an examination of self-absorption by one who is self-absorbed. Performance "art" is something of a racket, an art form that exists solely because major institutions fund it. Unless it is a one-man show by Eric Bogosian, this peculiarly American art form cannot sustain enough of an audience to thrive on its own. Performance art is perforce the playground of narcissists, who put forward thinly veiled versions of themselves as martyrish paragons of insight and small observations. I guess fans of the art form think that performance pieces make for riveting comments on society at large, but to me instead they consist of the minor annoyances the artist has been dwelling on between grant applications. There is nothing in July's film, with its Neil LaButish title, that hasn't been done better by other indie types such as the Sprecher sisters. And comparisons of July to Todd Solondz are, I think, misleading, as Solondz is a self-loathing misanthrope, while July has a large ball of sentimental mush at her center.

That's the most surprisingly thing about July's film: How conventional it is. How sit-comy and cozy and pro-romance and ultimately happy it is. So what observations does July make about contemporary society? What appears to have driven her to make this film? When next we see Richard he is in the shoe store explaining to his co-worker why he set fire to his hand. Then July, as the WASPy sounding Christine Jesperson comes in, escorting an old man whom she drives around as part of her day job (Elder Cab). It is imperative in Indie films, especially those perhaps influenced by Altman and Raymond Carver, that someone have an odd lower-class service job, one that requires the donning of a red vest. Jesperson (just a person?) immediately fixates on Richard, and more or less becomes a stalker (stalking is the extreme psychological behavior that indie films like, and can "surprise" you by endorsing). In her "real" life, Jesperson is a performance artist, more or less exploiting the experiences and possessions of her clients in the rest home to flesh out her pieces. Come to think of it, that's pretty much what performance artists do.

Everything about this main line of the film is pretty mundane. The weird, indie crowd-pleasing material comes in the form of the film's attitude towards young people. July seems to view them as innocent, wise, and corrupt. One little girl is already collecting her trousseau. Two other teen girls are flirting with the neighborhood "pervert" (Richard's co-worker), before they decide to practice fellatio on Richard's oldest son. Meanwhile, Richard's youngest son has entered into an on-line flirtation with a woman, whom he agrees to meet on a bench in a park.

According to the rules of indie "web of life" films, the woman the little kid meets must be another character whose identity "surprises" us. In this case it is the art curator for a local museum to whom Jesperson has been trying to give tapes of her performances. This hard, severe person turns out to be "lonely" and "horny" enough to engage in online dating (this is particularly funny — or maybe just weird — if you are a resident of Portland and know about the once-prominent real life person this character is based upon).

July's indie audience cred is enhanced by the dangerously weird attitude the film evinces toward children. A hint of July's (to me, willed) twistedness comes by viewing NEST OF TENS, a short film July made a few years ago. On the one hand it is a "biting satire" of empty-souled yuppies yearning for something different; on the other it is a Lynchian succession of "shocking" images of kids exhibiting bizarre sexual behavior.

What unites the mushy romantic sit-com story of the film (cunningly selected to appeal to festival prejudices) with the faux Bunuelian child sexuality is obviousness. The film is willing to go a certain distance in teasing the viewer with the idea of child-adult sex, but pulls back well short of conventional, middlebrow boundaries. Still, grant-giving viewers can thrill to the raciness and "edginess" of it all. Points in both layers of the film, the child sex layer and the sit-com layer, are made with thudding explicitness. For example, when we first see Richard he is staring out a window looking at a bird on a branch. Then his wife interrupts his reverie in order to (eventually) hand him something he needs to take to his new apartment with him: a large framed photograph of a bird. I suppose that would be a Kafkaesque enough point to make, but director July instructs Hawkes to look at the picture, look outside at the bird again, then look at his wife, with an imploring "can't you see the irony of this" expression on his face. All though the film July underscores the modest little points she wants to make, as if the audience were flat out dumb. Instead, in my lone dissenting view of ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW, it's the movie that's dumb.

Media Notes From All Over

The new issues of VANITY FAIR and PREMIERE arrive and they contain dueling movie lists. VF's lengthy list is its recommendations for the top 50 greatest films of all time. PREMIERE's list concerns the 20 most overrated films of all time (with a tentative question mark in the article's title). Naturally, there is some overlap. However both lists get at the heart of what is wrong with most film writing these days.

What I'm referring to here is the current obsession with "making of" material about films on the one hand, and on the other, the kind of fatuous non-productive arguments that people make for or against movies everywhere on the web.

VANITY FAIR's insert qualifies under the first rubric. It's not exactly clear who wrote it from the insert itself. I couldn't find any identification of authorship in the whole issue. Thus, this ad-laden 16-page addition to the magazine comes across very much like an advertising insert, such as the vacation pages found in the NEW YORKER.

I'm not exactly sure who the intended recipient of this insert is meant to be but it should fit easily into the hip pocket of retirees who are seeking to break in their first NetFlix account. The contents of the list, which overlap both with the PREMIERE magazine list and with the AFI 100 greatest films and every other stupid, redundant movie list that has appeared since the rise of the video store, contain no criticism: this insert knows the credits of everything but the value of nothing. Yet there are subtle criticisms embedded din some of the listings. More about that in a second.

It is a given that, if a movie is included among its pages, that ipso facto said film is a masterpiece that demands immediate use of your Blockbuster card. As can be seen from the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY listing, the insert runs the title, the credits, its Oscar score if any, and an anecdote about the film's making. I'd never heard this Kubrick anecdote before, but on the other hand nowhere does the insert cite sources for its tales, a very irritating habit that gives Hollywood lore the sanctity of received knowledge.

I'm of two minds about "making of" anecdotes as found in bios and on DVDs. Certainly I've had my fill of empty, tired tales after six years of DVDs (I came late to the format). Sometimes aspects of how a film was made can be interesting. Some DVD anecdotes are funny (Peter Ustinov on the making of SPARTACUS), but for the most part movie anecdotes are bland tales ("So Stanley sent me the script. And I read the script and thought …"), told the same way over and over again. And dwelling on the mechanics of filmmaking frees the filmmaker from having to address intentions, meaning, ideas, apparently an anathema to American directors and writers.

The anonymous scribe of the VF insert does come up with some interesting anecdotes. I just wonder where they came from. There is no list of citations. And he does manage to imply criticism of some of the films, by relaying anecdotes that cut the movie down to size. For example, there seems to be an anti-Kubrick bias. In the booklets two films by the Kube both "anecdotes" make him sound like an obsessive madman. But I've read several Kubrick books (though not all of them) and have never encountered the story that he was afraid real aliens would thwart production of 2001.

The PREMIERE article has at least the novelty of debate, however debased it is in the enactment. All the logical fallacies pop up here. NASHVILLE'S song "I'm Easy" is "laughable" to one person, but good to another because it "cracked BILLBOARD's Top 20." 2001 is "painfully slow and often achingly obvious" to one person (to which the reader might respond, "prove, please"), while to another it is "dazzlingly ambitious" (also unproven). MONSTER'S BALL's "sweat stains and exposed breasts weren't enough to transform Halle Berry into an actress worthy of Oscar," while a rejoinder asserts that "the last time I checked, the Academy isn't exactly in the habit of handing Oscars to African-American actresses for their performances, 'worthy' or otherwise." In the interest of providing fast hits of bile and their tepid rejoinders, the writers are invited to speak with all the clarity, passion, and gravitas of a talkback forum.

To the detractor, MONSTER'S BALL is a melodrama; for its defender the film is a tragedy. Well, only one of them can be right. In fact, I believe that in any dispute between two people over the aesthetic value of a movie, one person is correct and the other is wrong. MB is either a melodrama or it isn't (and if it is, what's wrong with that?). It is either a tragedy or it isn't. What PREMIERE fails to do here is give its readers any guidance. Why doesn't it take a stand on the merits of MB, if they are going to take the trouble to run this story? Instead, they slip into the "on the one hand" syndrome, too fearful to devote the time and space to really prove that MB is overrated. Instead, the magazine settles for thinly reasoned, bombastic "balance."

Here is the breakdown. Peter Herbst, the editor in chief of PREMIERE, hates 2001, AMERICAN BEAUTY, and JULES AND JIM, and likes GOOD WILL HUNTING; Howard Karren, a contributing editor, hates GONE WITH THE WIND, but likes 2001, Fantasia; associate editor Brooke Houser hates A BEAUTIFUL MIND, MONSTER'S BALL, likes JULES AND JIM; Fred Schruers, a senior editor, hates WIZARD OF OZ, likes A BEAUTIFUL MIND, FORREST GUMP; Cristy Lytol, an editorial assistant, hates FIELD OF DREAMS, likes AMERICAN BEAUTY; Rachel Clarke, a deputy editor, hates AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, likes THE RED SHOES; Linda Liang, an associate photo editor, likes AMERICAN IN PARIS; Tom Roston, a senior editor, hates CHARIOTS OF FIRE and NASHVILLE; Tim Swanson, west coast bureau chief, hates EASY RIDER, likes CLERKS; Ann Donohue, a news editor, hates FANATSIA likes CHARIOTS OF FIRE, Kelly Borgeson, copy chief, hates CHICAGO; Jessica Letkemann, hates CLERKS, likes CHICAGO; Sara Brady, copy associate, hates FOREST GUMP, likes GONE WITH THE WIND; Jason Matloff, research editor, hates THE RED SHOES, likes FIELDS OF DREAMS; Ryan Devlin, editorial assistant, hates GOOD WILL HUNTING, MYSTIC RIVER, likes MONSTER'S BALL; Kathy Heintzelman, executive editor, hates MOONSTRUCK, and likes NASHVILLE; Nicole Perri, former online editor, likes MOONSTRUCK; managing editor Chris Cronis likes MYSTIC RIVER; David Schlow, deputy art director, likes WIZARD OF OZ. Their bantering back and forth is like a low-grade version of the Fox News network. And I also ask myself, do I want to trust a mainstream movie magazine edited by a guy who thinks 2001 is overrated?

On the other hand, this issue of PREMIERE has a nice, frank, and charmingly trusting interview from Jody Foster, who has apparently consented to help promote her forthcoming movie, FLIGHT PLAN. It's matched by an equally frank interview with Matt Damon earlier in the paper. If I had a criticism (I always have a criticism) it would be that both interviews are geared to much to career issues, like every star appearance on the TONIGHT SHOW, and not enough to choices, technique, motivations, or philosophy.

Occasionally I "read scripts" for a film biz person and give my "advice" on it in re this person's job, not for remuneration but because I like to read scripts, and especially like to read scripts before everyone else. I've probably read around 100, everything from THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON to THE WEDDING PLANNER (which was much better in its original version, called MARRY ME, JANE). One thing I've noticed, especially among the ultimately unproduced scripts, is the preponderance of passive heroes. In one script, a rock musician suffers the break up of his Los Angeles band, returns to his east coast home town and whiles away the summer going to a party, seeing old friends, and dating a girl. The protagonist does nothing. He is lazy, passive, yet angry. He does nothing; things sort of happen to him. The writer has obviously invested all his emotion in this central character, but yet invites us to like a selfish, tired, lazy person. I read many scripts like this. GARDEN STATE is the nearest realized example, and I'm surprised that it got made, since (if you take away the great cast) it suffers from all of the same sins as the bad one about the passive rock star.

Thus I was gratified to read confirmation of my intuition that passivity in a protagonist was a bad thing in the American publication of Alexander Mackendrick's ON FILMMAKING (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 291 pages, $16, ISBN 0 571 21125 9), edited posthumously by Paul Cronin. In the sixth chapter, Cronin includes a list of the precepts and sentiments that Mackendrick wrote on note cards and affixed to his office walls. On page 41 is the slogan, PASSIVITY is a capital crime in drama." Mackendrick knew it, most critics know it, audiences definitely know it, and yet script after script is churned out by Hollywood hopefuls with a passive central character.

The writer of that rock star script might gain a lot by reading Mackendrick's fascinating and informative book. It is compiled from class handouts that the director turned teacher wrote for his California Institute of the Arts students from around 1969 to his death in 1993. Mackendrick did a little bit of everything in the movie industry when he was a helmer at Ealing Studios in the 1950s (directing THE LADYKILLERS among other films) and before film he worked as an ad man and an animator. He was apparently cautious about using his own films, such as THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, a work rising in reputation with every year, but the list of films he does analyze or offer up as examples makes a comparable if not far better list than the lists generated by commercial entities trying to promote DVD rentals. Some of the films may come as a surprise. One is Delmer Daves's 3:10 TO YUMA, from a novel by Elmore Leonard, which Mackendrick praised for its "simplicity and economy" and dialogue that has "immediate purpose and effect." This last revelation proves to be double interesting, because one of Mackendrick's students, James Mangold, later used YUMA as inspiration for his film COP LAND, one of the best films of the 1990s.

In all, there are 28 handouts reprinted in the book, many illustrated with Mackendrick's own charming sketches of movie frame compositions or set layouts. Mackendrick kept these handouts out of circulation during his lifetime, partially because he believed in the CalArts philosophy of providing students with information or guidance only when they required or requested it. Hence the book is a treasure trove of insight into moviemaking that only students and insiders were privy to. For example, Mackendrick has a whole essay about "crossing the axis" (page 235), which I complained about not understanding in my review of five Suzuki films a while ago. Now I do. In fact, if some youngster only had two books on his shelf, both Mackendrick's ON FILMMAKING and Kristin Thompson's STORYTELLING IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD, I think he would be well enough stocked to embark on a filmmaking career.

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