Banshees and Crosscurrents

A round of Roulette turns up two books I've already written about for this newsletter. More classic newspaper comics. Two movies. I finish reading a great book for the third time.

At the risk of spoiling the ending of this newsletter: I’m going to spoil the ending of The Big Nowhere by Ellroy. That’ll be the last part after the cartoon. Don’t read past the cartoon if you have any interest in reading the book for the first time. Actually, just don’t read past there for any reason at all. I want to have a few paragraphs of this newsletter that no one but me has or ever will read. So just read up until the illustration and then leave it.

Roulette

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor, read in 2021. I wrote about this one back in March of 2021 for my all-O’Connor entry of One Could Argue.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse, read in 2019. I’m devoted to Wodehouse’s “Jeeves and Wooster” stories, having taken the trouble to read every single book in the series. This novel is close to the end of Wodehouse’s run on the series and doesn’t stand out in my memory as a favorite, though it’s impossible to go wrong with any of them.

Wodehouse is the funniest writer I have ever read and the only one who regularly makes me laugh aloud while reading by myself. As I mentioned recently, a gal I went out with a few times a number of years ago gave me a paperback copy of the story collection Very Good, Jeeves! which launched my obsession with Wodehouse.

The Lines Are Drawn: Political Cartoons of the Civil War, edited by Kristen M. Smith, read in 2022. Wow, twice in one round of Roulette I drew titles that I’ve already written about for One Could Argue before. Is that good luck or bad luck? I like the Civil War and I like cartoons so I would be remiss in not having read this book.

Comics Cotillion

I’m still reading old Popeye comics. Popeye has muscled his way closer to Thimble Theater protagonism and is settling into a pattern whereby he punches out some burly bad-news character roughly every half-dozen or a dozen strips.

Picture Polka

Without planning it I did the same thing as last entry: I watched one bad feature film and one documentary about a musical act I dig.

The Banshees of Inisherin, directed by Martin McDonagh, 2022. Significantly overrated period piece of sour dark comedy about a born creative who abruptly and at first explanationlessly ends his close friendship with a guy who has nothing to recommend him except that he’s nice. The former is played by Brendan Gleeson and the latter by Colin Farrell, two highly skilled thespians who performed well together years ago in In Bruges, the only of McDonagh’s films I like.

The scenario is established on an island off the coast of Ireland called Inisherin, close enough to the mainland that the artillery-fire of the Irish Civil War can be heard erupting out of the silence in rolling waves (not unlike the waves that lap at the shore of the island etc. whatever). So the drama that unfolds between these two guys is like a commentary on the War and thereby perhaps on Irishness itself, on the Irish traditions of not talking things out well, of letting unpleasantness metastasize into grudges and of seeing those grudges through to bitterly uncompromising conclusions. In this case Gleeson’s character is reluctant to even take the trouble to explain to Farrell’s character why their friendship is over and this builds to an increasingly macabre and violent exchange that implausibly involves severe self-mutilation, property destruction and involuntary animal slaughter. Besides the predictably great central performances from Gleeson and Farrell, an excellent actor named Kerry Condon steals the show as Farrell’s character’s sister.

In Bruges is a great movie, or at least that’s what I thought the one time I watched it years ago. McDonagh has badly failed to impress me otherwise: Seven Psychopaths is an incoherent metatextual sandbox of an action picture and what I saw of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was among the worst forty-five minutes of a movie I’ve ever watched. That was when I was working at a cool single-screen movie theater in Seattle; I would often get to dip in and check out the shows while I was on the clock. When I was new at the job they were doing a week of Academy Award-nominated films from that year and I thought I would give this one a look. It was one of the dumbest pieces of shit I’ve ever seen and at a certain point I really had to go to the bathroom anyway so I went to whiz and then just went back to work at the concession stand or whatever.

One of the bad components that the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri mess has in common with The Banshees of Inisherin, but which I don’t remember at all as part of In Bruges, is McDonagh’s incredibly lazy ear for dialogue. Almost all of the dialogue in The Banshees of Inisherin feels like a repetitive and expository first draft for something more polished, interesting and convincing. It’s as if McDonagh was trying to get his characters to tell him what his movie was about by circling around the same dull phrases and themes, which isn’t necessarily a bad way to write if you have the imagination to let individual characters speak in distinctive voices. But all of the characters in this picture sound like superficially different versions of the same narrative voice, leaving it up to the actors to try their best to make anything out of them.

Philosophically there are interesting issues at the heart of this drama: how do we determine the value of our short time alive in this world? Is it more important and virtuous to be creative at the expense of being nice or to be nice at the expense of being creative? Should these values be treated with this zero-sum approach? And can two people differently aligned with these competing values still be friends?

The movie takes unjust pride in asking but not answering these questions and can’t manage to do much of dramatic interest along the way. There is some decent mise-en-scène and very good acting to be observed here.

This Much I Know to Be True, directed by Andrew Dominik, 2022. Dominik has made two documentaries now about the musician Nick Cave and they both have a strangely narcoleptic effect on me, which isn’t to say that they are boring. They just make me kinda tired because they are bright, elaborate, noisy and raucous and also regularly lapse into song-length musical sequences with sparkling effects, gyrating bodies and flashing lights.

Dominik likes to make the making of the documentary part of the documentary, to let parts of the filmmaking process show up in the filmmaking process, to make sure that the viewer knows that she’s watching a choreographed and staged production and to further make it clear that Dominik knows that she knows. Cave is a great songwriter and performer and This Much I Know to Be True covers the production of one pool of music-writing material that fed into two excellent projects: the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record Ghosteen and the record Carnage that was credited as a collaboration between Cave and his right-hand bandmate and foil Warren Ellis.

Unpretentious, relatively short and stylistically grandiose music documentary that takes only a few and far-between beats to catch its breath and let its subjects orate, particularly in one arresting shot of Cave discussing writing for his website that is framed and lit to look like a Polaroid photograph. Recommended, perhaps even more so for those unfamiliar with Cave’s work if only because I would be curious to know what such people made of this fine picture and of Cave, Ellis, Dominik and their hangers-on without any prior context or expectations.

Literature Limbo

Here go the vicious and uncompromising spoilers for The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy, which I just last night finished re-re-reading. Stop now if you have intention to read the book. Which you should, because it’s fucking outstanding.

The second book in the L.A. Quartet finds Ellroy arrived at his fully mature style. His early standalone noir novels were all written in the first person; with the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy Ellroy was compelled to switch to third-person narration so he could alternate focus roughly each chapter from Lloyd to the killers and back again.

In The Black Dahlia the first-person narration from Bucky’s point of view worked very well, permitting the roguish boxer/detective to cast himself in counterpoint to his partner Lee and their ghostly murder-victim siren the Dahlia. But in following up The Black Dahlia with the significantly more ambitious and ultimately slightly superior novel The Big Nowhere, Ellroy utilized for the first time what I previously dubbed his “tripartite narrative structure” whereby three noirish tough-guys get roughly equal attention from the omniscient narrator who constantly switches focus from one to the other (until they start to work together). In this case these three characters are Sheriff’s Department Detective Deputy Danny Upshaw, LAPD Lieutenant Mal Considine and ex-cop and Howard Hughes fixer/bagman Buzz Meeks.

Here are the rules for this Ellrovian structure as it is first instantiated in The Big Nowhere and continues to play out in later books:

• The three protagonists will either be strangers or, if any two of them know one another, alienated to some greater or lesser extent. The unfolding story will gradually draw them together into a unified narrative thread.

• The protagonists will all be male and will all work in law enforcement, crime or some ambiguous zone where those sectors overlap. (Blood’s a Rover tinkered with this structure by cracking and finally shattering the triumvirate, introducing a female protagonist very late in the going and radically altering the direction of a deeply strange and brutally dark novel.) They will be flawed, complicated individuals.

• No more than two and not less than one of the triumvirate of protagonists will survive to the last page of the book.

• Some kind of serial killer and/or serial rapist subplot will comprise a major narrative component(s) of the larger story and will eventually become intertwined with the bigger-picture issues of politics, organized crime and institutional corruption.

• Towards the end of the novel one of the protagonists will unearth and confront a character who can explicate the whole dirty business of how the killer/rapist/co-conspirators came to be the monster/s he or they are. (Blood’s a Rover did use this device but turned it rather interestingly on its head.) This sequence will comprise a story-within-a-story and answer any lingering unanswered questions about just what the fuck is going on. It will also serve as a metaphor for the moral bankruptcy of the commingling institutional forces with which the protagonists are struggling. (American Tabloid makes stunningly elegant use of the tripartite structure but goes light on the serial monstrosity angle and foregoes altogether the lengthy explication sequence.)

The Big Nowhere is the innovator and model for this structure and it blew Ellroy’s aesthetic and narrative concepts wide wide wide open onto a bigger, crueler and more ambitious storytelling canvas than anything he had attempted before. Basically the L.A. native Ellroy perceives through the novel that the Los Angeles of 1950 represented a time and place where these varyingly corrupted and interdependent institutional forces — Hollywood, organized crime, the homosexual underground, anticommunist paranoia, politics, law enforcement, jazz culture and anti-Mexican racist bigotry — formed a unique web for criminals, killers, cynics and broken idealists to get caught up in.

As I said above, in all of the tripartite novels at least one of the three protagonists will perish. In The Big Nowhere it’s Danny Upshaw and Mal Considine who don’t make it to the end. Reformed car thief and forensics prodigy Upshaw spends the bulk of The Big Nowhere stalking and occasionally being stalked by a horrifyingly visceral serial killer who targets homosexual men, eviscerates their bodies with what turn out to be dentures made from wolverine teeth and sexually abuses their corpses. Upshaw is under thirty years of age, handsome, brilliant, driven, ambitious and principled — but he also cuts some major corners in developing his investigation and has a talent for bad luck. Both of these, along with his own burgeoning realization that he is a self-closeted gay man, ultimately compel him to grab a kitchen knife and slice his own throat “ear to ear, down to the windpipe in one clean stroke.”

Mal Considine is arguably the most traditionally noirish of the three protagonists — an LAPD lieutenant with a morally messy background as a wartime MP who witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald. (The postwar detective who had his life changed by witnessing the death camps and may or may not have crossed the line by murdering captured SS men is on the verge of becoming a cliché at this point; did Ellroy invent it here?) Considine also gets a background as a teenaged peeper and burglar, something James Ellroy himself claims to have done a lot of as a fucked-up kid with a murdered mother and degenerate father. The Lieutenant is being groomed for a captaincy and gets invited by DA’s Criminal Division head Ellis Loew and the sociopathic and downright evil rogue policeman Dudley Smith into an investigation of “Red Crosscurrents”: communist infiltration into a Hollywood union labor dispute which aligns the interests of the film studios, the LAPD and the gangster outfit of Mickey Cohen. Cohen was a real-life Los Angeles mob boss; Smith, Loew and Cohen all show up as recurring supporting characters in later Ellroy books, and it is my understanding that in some of the newest Ellroy novels which I haven’t yet read Smith takes center stage as a protagonist. Considine eventually gets his captaincy and grows wearily dismissive of the entire phony Red-chasing crusade. That story thread ends up dovetailing with Upshaw and the wolverine killer Coleman, putting Considine and his former personal enemy Buzz Meeks on the trail of the killer, who ultimately blows Considine’s face off with a handgun before Meeks does the same to Coleman in turn.

Meeks is a former bad-guy policeman who showed up as a minor character in The Black Dahlia; 1950 finds him working as a security boss for studio executive and industrialist Howard Hughes and then getting drawn as a hired hand into the Loew/Smith/Considine investigation. (Before his death Upshaw gets hired on by Considine as well.) Meeks also dabbles in muscle work for Mickey Cohen and falls in love with Mickey’s moll behind Mickey’s back, setting himself on a portion of borrowed time from very early on in the novel. As the last protagonist standing it is Meeks who gets the whole story of Coleman in the explication sequence. Then in a thrilling and stirring final chapter of the novel, when he has a contract out on his life and no allies left to stand alongside, Meeks heists a colossal drug-deal/gangster peace-summit between Cohen and his rival Jack Dragna, overseen by the profoundly corrupt Dudley Smith himself.

Meeks gets away with the money, the drugs and his life and heads out for the Big Nowhere over the horizon. So technically he survives to the end of The Big Nowhere. But in a violent prologue to the next novel L.A. Confidential, which is almost more of an epilogue to The Big Nowhere, Dudley Smith tracks down and slaughters Meeks and collects the heroin. (At least that’s how I remember it from the previous two times I read L.A. Confidential; watch this space for an update soon.)

The last person to give Upshaw a nudge he needs to kill himself is the diabolical Smith, and that peculiar scene involves Smith giving Upshaw a parting smooch on the lips. I wonder if this retroactively becomes some allusion to Smith being revealed as bisexual in the newer books he inhabits? I genuinely don’t know and it occurred to me that that would be quite an Ellrovian touch — I could see Smith secretly cultivating an aggressive, toppish bisexual streak if only because he tends to want a bite out of every apple he can get his rotten hands on. Since all we know about Smith’s personal life from Clandestine, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz is that he has a conservative setup with a wife and multiple daughters, I could see Ellroy using the younger version of Smith about whom he apparently writes in the “Second L.A. Quartet” to explore a more nuanced sexual persona. I have absolutely no idea if I’m anywhere close to being right about that.

The writing style in The Big Nowhere is really outstanding structurally, poetically and prosaically. At this point in his career Ellroy had found his footing and knew how to make a big, hearty, complicated but still-followable novel with prose that bops, weaves and marauds across the page, compelling the reader to have to know what happens next. Interestingly I also observed on this reading how many subtle touches are laid in early on, for example that Upshaw and killer Coleman meet face to face almost by accident near the beginning of Upshaw’s investigation, brushing knees in a jazz club conversation and both becoming sexually aroused, though only the killer and Ellroy, and neither Upshaw nor the reader, understands at that point the full scope of what is transpiring. The entire book has the clear feeling of having been meticulously laid out in full detail from the grandiose themes down to the mundane specifics. This author works overtime to make these stories more or less plausible, entirely convincing and utterly engrossing.

If I were casting period-appropriate actors to play the three protagonists in my brain-picture reel of The Big Nowhere, I would cast Montgomery Clift as Upshaw. Not just because Clift himself was a closeted and conflicted homosexual but also because he would have been the right age in 1950 and possessed the devastatingly good looks that a decent Upshaw calls for. A 1950 Humphrey Bogart would have to play a character ten years his junior to pull off a good Mal Considine but I think between his skill as a screen presence and the incomparably good work of my imaginary makeup and wardrobe departments he could pull it off. Meanwhile James Cagney in 1950, right around when he settled into his stockier and more vicious but still bullyingly charismatic persona in White Heat, would be my ideal Buzz Meeks. As soon as I get some funding and distribution secured I hope to go back in time, hustle an in with Clift’s, Bogie’s and Cagney’s people and produce a film version of The Big Nowhere in the year in which it was set and thirty-eight years before the novel was published.

Failing that, I will shortly be proceeding on to my third reading of the even bigger, badder, longer and more grandiose and ambitious next novel L.A. Confidential. Possibly with one or two shorter non-Ellroy books squeezed in first to rinse the blood, semen, corruption and wolverine teeth off my palate.