WHERE THE BOYS WERE

Last night the WHC featured a well-paired double feature I couldn't resist: John Cassavetes' Husbands (1970) and Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973). Both films feature a trio of men and the dynamic that evolves amongst them during what could be called 'a bender.' In the Cassavetes film, the fun begins after the funeral for the fourth member of the jolly band, but is prolonged when the three buddies, Harry (Ben Gazzara), Gus (Cassavetes), Archie (Peter Falk) go to London together: Harry because he's just become estranged from his wife, the other two as moral support. In Ashby's film, two 'lifers' in the Navy, 'Badass' Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and 'Mule' Mulhall (Otis Young) are given the detail of escorting young kleptomaniac Meadows (Randy Quaid) to Portsmouith, MA, where he will be incarcerated for eight years.

In other words, the boys in Husbands bond as one of their number is 'sprung' -- first, from life, via death, second, from wedlock via an erratic path of self-indulgence and occasional violence. While the boys in Detail bond while trying to introduce self-indulgence to one of their number who is about to lose all freedoms.

The guys in Husbands are a bit older; settled, married, family men, so the need to let loose is simply a given. We do see Gazzara trying to make amends with his wife -- which features her pulling a kitchen knife on him, and him slapping and man-handling both his wife and mother-in-law -- but otherwise the families are simply in the background as the world forever in the periphery of whatever husbands might be doing at the moment. What makes the film so appealing is the naturalness of the actors -- Falk, Gazzara, and Cassavetes are friends and their interactions seem spontaneous, much of their dialogue at times feeling improvised, the way real friends josh each other, take exception over trivial things like certain verbal or facial expressions, bond affectionately on moments just as fleeting, and generally create a collectivity that unites them against the world, even if, among themselves, there is real doubt and a lot of uncertain longings. Gazzara's Harry is the most 'troubled' -- in the sense of dissatisfied with his life, but also in the sense of having a personality that seems to bristle simply because that's his nature. Falk's Archie is the funniest; his efforts to pick up women, particularly an older, 'madam'-looking woman in a casino in London, would be simply sad if he weren't somehow so likeably incompetent. Then there's Cassavetes' Gus who is fascinatingly mercurial in his interactions; there's the sense that his patience is always being tested, always on edge, which translates into a feeling of his intense attachment to these fellows, despite everything. The film is wise, wry, knowing, affectionate but clear-eyed, showing us the kind of hollow underbelly of the midlingly successful breadwinner of the period without a lot of posturing about it. It feels like spending time with guys you might find drinking in any bar in town at any time. In the end you know them a bit better for having drunk with them and gone to the places they go, and for having seen them 'behind closed doors' with the women they pick up in London, but you don't really know them that well because they really don't know themselves or each other all that well either.

The guys in Last Detail are thrown together by chance and necessity, which gives the film more immediate drama right from the start. Neither Badass or Mule wants to be on the detail, and Meadows is a clueless, pathetic, but goofily likeable klepto who is facing a harsh reprimand simply for trying to rip off a polio collection box. But Nicholson's Badass, noticeably shorter than Mule and the towering, gawky Meadows, as the somewhat stereotypical sailor looking for a good time, is a telling portrait of a man's man, trying to do a decent job of older mate showing the youngun a good time: telling, because Nicholson exposes us to Badass' masculine bragging, his manly charm, his sense of the thrill and allure of violence, his love of drinking, his savvy sense of his place in the world, his generous feelings toward his charge, his pity for the boy mixed with his disgust at the boy's docility toward his fate, and even his schadenfreude at the hapless kid's plight. The moment of insight comes when Badass tells Mule that the kid won't run off because, deep down, he's glad he's going to jail. Out in the world anything that would happen to him would be mostly bad; now, the worst has already happened and that's a relief. The moment of truth comes when Meadows tries to run off in the 11th hour, his growth beyond the pathetic victim Badass read him as, correctly, having occurred under Badass' tutelage.

Both films show us something about the dynamics of male bonding: in Husbands, because these men have families, the bond is based on asserting a hold upon the identity of guys free to do what guys want to do -- drinking, sports, gambling, picking up girls. In Last Detail, the bond is the Navy: it makes Badass and Mule equals, if not friends, and it makes their sympathy with Meadows not personal so much as institutional: he is the uncertain young recruit they might have felt in themselves once upon a time, or at least is a type they have seen before, only now they can try to intervene, to show him what life is all about: getting drunk, going to a party, going to a whorehouse, and so on. The party is the funniest part: there, a number of vaguely counter-cultural early '70s types clash memorably with the working-class bluntness and social allegiances of Badass and Mule. There the greenness of Meadows is to his advantage because he's a type who could be recruited for anything, such as the Hare Krishna chanting he picks up in a New York temple and which acts as his entree to the counter-culture party.

What both films manage is avoiding the 'bittersweet' tag that often lands on such efforts to present both the harshness and the affection of such interactions. Both are better than that in refusing the kinds of moves toward ersatz emotional catharsis (aka sappiness) that have become de rigeur in American movies in the Spielberg era. In that sense, both films kindle a nostalgia for '70s indies: both Cassavetes and Ashby were outsiders to the Hollywood system, treating its execs with disdain and avoiding the kinds of 'improvements' that would spell bigger box office. And that fact also creates a bond between a certain audience and these aging boys.

SCIENCE / ENTERTAINMENT / ART

There's been more talk about the humanities again recently, this time in a NYTimes article called 'In Tough Times, The Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,' fueled by a book by Anthony T. Kronman, a law professor at Yale, called Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (catchy title). There was also a review in the Sunday Book section of Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, which tries to find scientific corroboration of insights found in fiction -- in the case of Proust, insights about how memory works. That review contained a mention of E. O. Wilson's 'biopoetics' that seeks to understand the evolutionary value of literature. The upshot is that the humanities are having to justify themselves in the 'cost effective' world of economists or in the adaptive world of biologists, while also coming to grips with the fact that, surprise, humanists really aren't well adapted to market-driven rationales. And so, like dinosaurs, they're coming to seem a species that shall eventually perish.

But I also watched the Academy Awards Sunday night and the tension between movies that strive to be 'art' or to have 'a message' vs. movies that simply seek to entertain was already on my mind. Clearly, the latter get the box office, and are best adapted to the fiercely competitive economies that demand the constant headcount -- or show of hands -- of the box office. Show of hands, how many saw film X, vs. film blockbuster? The answer is obvious. And of course it extends to books -- how many have read, of their own volition, a classic vs. an entertaining page-turner? And of course there are headcounts for every discipline or field of study, how many students graduate with a degree in the humanities, how many graduate students still strive for excellence in the field?

The writing was on the wall a long time ago on this one. And unlike religion, which can sustain itself against such reliance on the money talks, rational findings of our econo-scientistic worldview, the humanities are supposed to be part of 'education,' and 'education' is supposed to help students to live in the modern world, which comes increasingly to mean, survive in whatever human endeavor is best bankrolled. Law and medicine have always been growth industries. And business majors . . . and economics . . . and lab work. And it goes further: 'Languages,' at least, was able to sustain itself as a field because it was important to understand how language affects our culture, and how language determines our worldview, and, just on a practical level, to learn languages for the sake of communication. But even there the humanities have lost ground. Does anyone need to read the poetry of a given language to understand how to speak that language, how to make deals in that language? Yes, it helps to appreciate nuance in the use of words, but how relevant is the history of the language, how necessary is familiarity with the most distinguished -- which is to say idiosyncratic, inspired, woefully underpaid -- users of that language?

Many great writers, let's face it, were horribly ill-adapted not just to the modern world with its scientistic worldview, but were even poorly adapted to 'the world of letters.' And the success of those adept at producing their product -- whether Stephen King or John Updike -- no matter how different their readerships might be, no matter how different their aims in what they write, adds up to the valuing of a hold on a certain niche, which is to say 'a market.' I mention Updike because of a piece today by Roger Cohen which, while touting 'the inner life,' is an odd blend of callous indifference, casual curiosity, and critical judgment, the latter on Ian McEwan and on McEwan's comment on the recently deceased Updike. Cohen is trying to think about what really good writing does for us, but he's looking in the wrong places: McEwan and Updike are both symptoms, examples of the kind of 'lack' that our letters have long upheld as the best we have. They are, as writers, well-adapted to readers who don't really read. They entertain us with a process that is 'like' what reading literature should be.

So when D. T. Max writes in his review of Lehrer's book on Proust and science, that E. O. Wilson would like 'to wire a reader with Madame Bovary on a gurney to see what parts of his brain light up when Emma Bovary has sex with Rodolphe and which when she commits suicide,' this notion misses the point. We could read all sorts of things which feature adultery and suicide, even 'creative non-fiction.' But what 'lights up' when we actually enter a fiction? What lights up when we encounter a truly unique and challenging use of language? What does it mean to be inside Flaubert's prose, or James', or Proust's? What goes dark when you just can't find that cerebral connection any more, at any price?

I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. With books outlawed, book lovers committed entire volumes to memory. One assumes that if you couldn't remember the book word for word, you could still retell 'what happens.' But what no one can retell or recapture is 'what happens' when you are actually reading the book. The problem that literature, as education, faces is that such lit courses are just a dodge: an excuse to make students read books. Show of hands: how many students who took the course did 'all the reading'? But why should they? our unbookish culture of 'light' readers continues to ask. And there's no real answer to that question, other than a curiosity about the world 'inside' books, which comes to seem more and more a copout on or escape from 'the real world' -- the one science explains to us and whose necessities require negotiable skills in fields essentially comprised of scientific modes of discourse. And in that world, what we flock to is entertainment, with the few -- mostly practitioners of some form of art or humanities -- paying lip service to and sometimes dedicating their lives to something more. Something I like to call 'the supreme fiction,' in honor of an insurance company executive who wrote 'let Be be finale of seem / the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.'

IN DREAMS

'In dreams begin responsibilities' is the title of a story written by Delmore Schwartz and published in a volume of that name in 1938. I read the story a long time ago and have nothing to say about it now, and yet I can’t type the words 'in dreams' and not think of the writer who I will always think of as 'Delmore' because of John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, and Lou Reed.

He came to a bad end, didn’t he. Indeed, and perhaps that’s why he’s lurking somewhere in the background even now. The man who, in Lowell’s poem, changed Wordsworth’s 'poets in their youth begin in gladness, thereof in the end come despondency and sadness' to end with 'madness,' and then -- followed suit.

But the ostensible point of this post is that I might not be mad enough, even yet. One reason, among others perhaps, that my blogging has languished somewhat of late (I seem to hear Hamlet saying, 'I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth') is that 'the things of this world' -- let’s call it prosaic reality -- have become things I care not much about. So, for instance, the state of the academy, à la Stanley Fish, or the state of the economy, à la Paul Krugman, or the state of Hollywood, à la Carpetbagger, or even the state of Joaquin Phoenix, à la Gawker, diverting as those questions might be, haven’t been taxing my mental lobes enough to crank out 'copy.'

And why not? Because of dreams. Fittingly, this week’s assignments in Daily Themes, for the first time in the many years (8?) that I’ve been involved with the course, are to write about a dream, to write a dream for a character, to write with 'dream logic.' I say fittingly because, fitfully, I’ve become a bit dissatisfied with my own waking reality quite a bit of late -- which extends, dear reader, to my own belabored prose. From which we get 'prosaic' reality, literally, in the first place. And what has inspired such low libidinal urges toward what we in -- we have to come up with another substance, it should be clear by now that whatever those towers are made of, 'ivory' is not the material -- academia like to call 'expository prose'? Well, besides my own cruel fiction’s requirement of exposition, it is, you guessed it, poetry! Oh, and film.

Recently I’ve read Marie Étienne’s Le roi des cents cavaliers (2002) (King of a Hundred Horsemen in the English rendering by Marilyn Hacker, 2008), and Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life (2007) and some achingly familiar but often disenfranchised area of my brain was coaxed back to what feels like posthumous existence by re-acquaintance with the 'dream state' of poetry which, while having everything to do with the modern world (particularly Harvey), makes no attempt to name it as such, to produce exposition, in other words.

Harvey’s volume does come at times to seem something of a 'one-trick pony' -- I’m thinking of the almost-not-quite abecedarian poems in the sections called 'The Future of Terror' and 'The Terror of the Future' -- but it’s still quite a nice trick. And other poems, for instance those delineating the existence of 'Robo-Boy,' were quite charming. I think I’m well-disposed toward this poetry because it studiously avoids doing all the things that tend to bore me about poetry -- the increasingly prosaic variety, particularly. Then there’s Étienne who is simply a joy to behold, in French at least, because, even when exposing, er, expositing, er, positing or expounding, Étienne’s prose line (and these are poems often written in 'prose') is so succinct, so attentive to its aural associations, so emphatically particular that 'the dream' is all in the ears. The poems induce an almost surreal dream state simply by virtue of how it sounds to say simply things like: 'Derrière les volets clos, la lumière extérieure.'

And as to 'the dream' on film: somewhere in, what Joyce in his great dream work calls, 'the bacbuccus of the mind' (in this case my mind, but, collectivists, who can say for sure?) are percolating thoughts ('fish got in the percolator'?) of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), and to some extent Blue Velvet (1986), which I watched again recently. Suffice to say that a journey through Inland Empire left me for a week or so rather dissatisfied with the heavy 'reality effect' proceeding apace in my own W in P. I’ve coped with that with what coping mechanisms were at my disposal, but I want to take this opportunity, such as it is, to again express wonderment of an enterprise that can make nightmares take on reality in Normalville, U.S.A., as in Blue Velvet, but can also disengage from how things normally look and act, not only in ‘the real world’ but also in the ‘fictive world’ of that real world provided us by standard-issue cinema -- even such cinema as purports to provide us entry into a ‘fantasy world.’

So, getting back to Delmore’s dreams (recall, the protagonist in his story was 'at the movies' in a dream, watching a movie about his parents) -- what kind of responsibilities begin in them? Is it a responsibility to ‘the world’ as it really is? Or to the dreamer as the self or subjectivity ‘exposed’ by exposition of what goes on in that bacbuccus (the ruckus in the bacbuccus, let's call it)? Or to the reader (if we transpose such dreams into prose or film or poem)? Like those Three Witchy Women at the start of The Magic Flute (which I just saw for the first time on Valentine’s Day -- talk about dream logic!), I’ll say 'nein, nein, nein.' It’s a responsibility only to the dream itself. To the ‘dream logic,’ if your rational cranium must have it so, herr professor, but what that logic makes manifest is what you must follow through the eye of the needle, down the rabbit hole, there and back again, and wherever it lead you, because such method, madness enough in itself, is the only way to arrive -- 'O phoenix cruelprints' -- finally at something, as the aging kids in the gingerbread tower like to say, ‘wholly other.’ Utter!

A candy-colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
--Roy Orbison, "In Dreams" (1963)

CINEMAGIC

Recent viewings: on Saturday at WHC, two films by the silent film master Erich von Stroheim, Foolish Wives (1922) and The Wedding March (1928), then on Sunday, instead of the Super Bowl, I finally sat down with David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006), which was "filmed" in digital video.

And what went through my mind, wonderingly, as I watched the completely silent Foolish Wives (not even a score since that would've made the film play at a faster speed) was admiration for the ability to tell a story without words. There were the title cards, certainly, both as narration and as dialogue -- the narration titles were often rather amusing in their disjointed scene-setting -- but much of the fascination of the film derived solely from the act of watching. And what I admired was that von Stroheim had such a complete grasp of his medium that he was able to keep us focused on whatever scene was before us.

I realized that much of that fascination had to do with watching "dumb show." In other words, just as when we observe people at a distance in real life, we have to interpret what's going on solely by what we see. So we have to remain attentive so as not to miss something. And von Stroheim has an easy, superb naturalness in his way of keeping our attention on what he wants to show us. But it's a method that has to know exactly how every scene should be shot and how played. Top it off with the fact that Stroheim was himself the male lead in both films: in one film, heartless; in the other, forced to become heartless. In both cases, the story of how that plays out is faultless in its pacing, its sets, its grasp of how to communicate with the audience.

Von Stroheim is known as the man who made Greed, a 21 reel film that would've taken about eight to nine hours to watch. All but two hours' worth was destroyed by the studio. Would it be possible to make a fully watchable film at that length? I can believe von Stroheim did it, and it suggests possibilities of a film that would truly feel like a novel in its plots and subplots and diversity.

Watching Inland Empire after the von Stroheim films convinced me that might in fact be an idea worth pursuing. Shooting in digital video rather than film means no one can destroy the stock, no one has to pay for processing, so one can be as prolix as one likes. This could be a great danger in creating a sprawling, pointless opus which, no doubt, some find Inland Empire to be. But what this kind of license -- the film runs to 179 minutes -- requires, for justification, is no less a compelling grasp of the medium than von Stroheim shows.

Lynch is a master at delineating his own dream world universe. Inland Empire shows possibilities for what an "art film" can be once we no longer have the driving logic of narrative continuity to buttress what we're seeing. Lynch has often strayed into this realm, but his movies have tended to downplay the possible breaks with narrative norms in favor of "a story." Inland Empire instead creates "a world." Rather than try to follow narrative progress, we follow narrative juxtaposition. This bit of the world set against this other bit of the world. There is great beauty, humor, drama, and a very unsettling, almost metaphysical suspense, as though at any moment the very borders of sanity were being skirted.

But what makes Inland Empire work is the same thing that makes Foolish Wives work: a complete grasp of how to portray action, how to make it live on the screen, how to create and sustain our interest in watching by constantly giving us something interesting to watch. Von Stroheim tells a story one could easily recap; Lynch tells a story that one can only sum up, scene by scene. But both rely entirely on what the eye registers in watching. The effect is always in excess of what a description of the scene would provide. And that, my friends, is cinemagic.