Bones and Skulls
I play a round of Roulette. I watch six films. I read newspaper comics, historical children's literature and a memoir.
Roulette
This entry’s three random drawings from my complete reading list.
The Burial At Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone by Seamus Heaney, read in 2020. In tragedy the moral structure of the universe is arranged in such a way that the protagonist’s efforts are doomed to frustrate their own ends. Which is fucked up, and Sophocles was great at exploring just how fucked up.
The conflict is between Theban monarch Creon and his exiled niece Antigone who wishes to bury the body of her brother who died fighting on the wrong side of the civil war for control of the city. (This ties back into Sophocles’s earlier tragedy Oedipus the King.) Creon has ordered that the dead brother’s corpse must be left to be dishonored by buzzards and shit, which represents Creon’s harsh but willful determination to make a public statement that will help restore order after the bloodshed and psychic upheaval of the war. He sees it as a responsibility he must shoulder as a ruler.
Antigone is willing to defy the law and the symbolic needs of the state to not let this personal insult stand. The centerpiece of the play is a confrontation between these two flawed, human, royal personages, neither of whom is wrong. Antigone is defined by her unbreakable will to do what she sees as right and Creon by his responsibility to rule decisively and make the tough calls. They both have a reasonable point and neither is weak enough to back down, at least not in the ways they think. Sophocles’s insight here is to arrange them in direct conflict with one another, demonstrating that tradeoffs are inevitable and that doomed to tragic outcomes are the hardliners who can’t understand that we will sometimes find values of equal importance to be irreconcilable.
Interview with History by Oriana Fallaci, read in 2014. This was the first prose book I read that year. I found it in a box somewhere and thought “This is the journo Hitchens mentioned in that one address of his I’ve listened to a few times, the woman he said Henry Kissinger said it was the worst mistake of his life to agree to be interviewed by.” That interview with Kissinger is included here, as is one with Arafat, Fallaci’s introduction to which might be the first time I ever saw mention of the Arafat gay rumors. The book closes on a stirring interview with the Greek resistance fighter and torture-victim Alexandros Panagoulis, with whom you can observe Fallaci falling in love in the book’s last line. They were an item from then until Panagoulis’s death.
Even while he gave credence to several of her premises, Hitch was skeptical of some of the troubling language Fallaci used to criticize Islam after the turn of the century. Interview with History, published in 1976, is from a much earlier point in her career.
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, read in 2020. During the early days of the pandemic a friend mailed me a copy of this book and then I watched the movie for the first time since I was a teenager. The movie is garbage. The book is alright, didn’t especially blow my skirt up. One Highsmith line item on the reading list will do.
Picture Patrol
The Heiress, directed by William Wyler, 1949. A fine film with an absolutely outstanding central performance by Olivia de Havilland. I can’t really say much about what makes The Heiress and de Havilland’s acting in it so praiseworthy unless I give away the whole game, so let me stop you here and say this: if you are in a position to watch The Heiress without any idea what you are settling in for, as I was when I put it on, then you should do that and not read the next two paragraphs. I am now going to divulge crucial specifics that will ruin your ability to be disarmed by The Heiress, which is a diabolically disarming movie that deserves to be experienced on its own terms.
What makes this movie so interesting, besides how well-crafted it is overall, is how jarringly and irrevocably it switches tone at the end of the second act when de Havilland’s protagonist gets her heart crushingly and humiliatingly broken by Montgomery Clift’s character. We are led right in step with the painfully awkward and naive heiress protagonist to believe that Clift’s character really does love her in spite, and not because, of the sum she stands to inherit as the only child of a widely-respected physician in mid-nineteenth century New York City. The father character is speaking out of both sides of his mouth, constantly expressing his wish that his daughter would mature and get a worthwhile man interested in her while simultaneously fretting that any such potential husband material would only want her for her inheritance. He’s correct on both counts but his myopia in how to reconcile this conflict within himself makes it his daughter’s problem, which in turn makes him complicit in ruining her young life beyond recovery.
The fulcrum of the picture is de Havilland’s deft depiction of the heiress’s permanent alteration of character after the suitor we have been lulled into loving as much as she did is revealed, as per the father’s suspicions, to be a bounder who really was in it for the money all along (and who who humiliates her by leaving town without a word after she has already given up the keys to the kingdom to be with him). De Havilland is good at playing her as girlish, awkward and introverted, but it isn’t until her radical shift from hopeful ingenue to jaded loner that one understands just what de Havilland is doing onscreen here, of just how much Wyler had to trust that his lead performer could embody both versions of the same individual convincingly in order for the whole point of the enterprise to land as effectively as it does. The film presents itself tonally and structurally as a romantic melodrama which will have a happy ending, setting us up to have our hearts broken along with the heiress and our spines chilled when the ending asserts that the changes within her are irrevocable. None of which would have hung together so well if de Havilland hadn’t been able to pull off this acting feat.
Charade, directed by Stanley Donen, 1963. For more than twenty years I’ve been listening to the Fantômas record The Director’s Cut which closes with an unhinged art-metal cover of the Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer song that was originally written for this movie. Now I’ve finally gotten round to seeing the movie itself.
I don’t feel like getting much into the details of Charade because the film is exhausting. It’s a deeply goofy and implausible faux-caper about a dead man’s missing fortune and the peril in which it places his charming, elegant Parisian wife (Audrey Hepburn, seamlessly inhabiting the kind of role that no one did better than her).
Charade isn’t exactly bad. Its length-to-silliness ratio is just too high for it to stay entertaining. There are a ton of individual things in it to admire, most saliently the chic and stylish Sixties-abstract opening credits design, Hepburn’s poised acting work and some to-die-for period outfits that she and Cary Grant get to wear. That eerie and enchanting theme song is too good for the middling movie that surrounds it; its full potential was realized by Fantômas nearly forty years after the tune was written. Put it on now while you finish reading this.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper, 1974. Arguably this is overall the best movie I watched for this entry. Naturally I’ve been hearing about it for years but it was great to finally experience it and see that it still possesses the power to shock, horrify and overwhelm. With The Texas Chain Saw Massacre you feel like you’re in the palm of a master storyteller from the jump.
The particulars are widely known: a group of good-looking young people stumble onto a remote Texas property where they’re massacred by a family of psychotic cannibals dominated by the hulking, chainsaw-wielding butcher called Leatherface who wears a mask of human skin. As with one of its indirect successors Cannibal Holocaust, this is all loosely framed as reportage rather than fiction, a choice which smooths the cheap look of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre into a vérité aesthetic. Hooper knows where to point a camera for how long and how to frame and light an image, especially a lo-fi one, to manipulate the feelings of the viewer.
He also blasts his way in, says what he has to say and peels out without letting his exhilerating film overstay its welcome for a second. When sole survivor Sally finally and fully escapes we see her blood-splattered face as she cackles and screams aloud with existential relief, after which the whole film screeches to black on a closing image of Leatherface watching her escape and waving his chainsaw in the golden light of a Texas dawn. A lesser filmmaker might have lacked Hooper’s instinct to know that after what Sally as a protagonist and us as viewers have just been subjected to, there’s simply nothing else to be said.
Worth noting is the absolute drop-dead physical beauty of Sally played by Marilyn Burns and her friend Pam played by Teri McMinn. I couldn’t very well not notice this because they are quite legitimately two of the prettiest female film actors I have ever seen perform alongside one another, which had an affect on me that must have been intentional on the filmmakers’ part: I wasn’t just frightened or unsettled but was also kinda offended to see forms of such breathlessly exquisite perfection tortured, abused and mutilated. The moral meaning of this juxtaposition hides more depth than dismissive high-brow critics might want to attribute to a slasher film: this gang of young people are mostly decent, guiltless and attractive, which makes the horror show in which they become chattel not just grisly but upsetting on a personal level. Which makes me cackle along with Sally when she narrowly gets away with her life, her good looks and nothing else.
Speaking of female Seventies actors with intoxicating physical beauty: the Sally Field of Smokey and the Bandit, directed by Hal Needham, 1977.
Smokey and the Bandit is a joyful, ebullient, irreverent and child-like escapade that is largely about an implacably cool Burt Reynolds driving around in a great-looking black sports car with Field bopping in the passenger seat wearing tight jeans and being charming.
The story, if I understood it, is roughly that Reynolds as the Bandit and his pal the Snowman, played by country music performer Jerry Reed who also wrote the original songs for the movie, accept a wager to transport a truck full of contraband Coors from Texas to Georgia in a short period of time, Snowman driving the truck and Bandit running interference in a Trans Am. I wasn’t one hundred percent exactly clear why the wealthy goofballs who challenge the Bandit to the wager were doing this at all and I thought I heard something about the Bandit and the Snowman having to make the trip and also come back within the allotted timeframe. Which they don’t do, so either I misunderstood or the movie just wasn’t concerned with making perfect sense, or both.
But that’s part of the point. I gather this picture was intended primarily for folks who were at the drive-in for a night of 1977 summer fun and would have given Smokey and the Bandit considerably less attention and scrutiny than I did watching it on a library DVD in 2023. Everything and everyone in Smokey and the Bandit is organized along a hamster wheel of mindless fun — charisma, snappy dialogue, overstated performances, good songs, low stakes, fast cars and elaborately-staged crash stunts in which nothing is hurt but the pride of the lawman antagonist played by a fulminating, scenery-chewing Jackie Gleason. To get a sense of the stakes consider that the Bandit is basically invincible — he can outmaneuver and outrun anyone with nary a whisker out of place, beds Field’s character without trying and speaks exclusively in cool-as-ice wisecracks. He is beyond all failure, care or consequence.
The story has the barest hint of an all-is-lost moment where it looks for a few seconds like the Bandit and the Snowman are going to fail to win the bet because they are reminded of the existence of helicopters. But then they win anyway and everyone in the movie and in the theater and in my apartment cheers for them. This is a good, dumb, fun, well-made movie; if I’d happened to be one of those kids who grew up on it I’m sure I would possess the deep and abiding affection for it that a lot of people half a generation older than me seem to carry around.
Broadcast News, directed by James L. Brooks, 1987. Broadcast News is the next film Brooks made after Terms of Endearment and it marks a vast improvement.
One of the keys to Brooks’s cinematic worldview is that people have deeply ingrained personalities but that they must be willing to yield and grow if they are to make the tough calls about what really matters to them in life. Where Terms of Endearment tried (and for me failed) to situate this consideration in a story about the push and pull between an overbearing mother and her independent-minded daughter, Broadcast News does it more interestingly and rewardingly with a coequal triumvirate of talented, driven professionals in the television news business.
See above re Sophocles: Brooks understands that to make engrossing and involving drama, he needs for himself and the viewer to be able to empathize with characters who have competing values but each have a valid point. William Hurt plays a great-looking and charismatic anchorman named Tom who possesses a natural rapport with the camera but knows he can’t get his career to the next level if he can’t widen the base of his knowledge. Albert Brooks plays an ingenious field reporter named Aaron who knows the issues inside and out but doesn’t fit in to the evolving commercialism and sensationalism of the industry. Holly Hunter is outstanding playing Jane, the tough and principled producer who has to mediate between them and get a news program onto the air without surrendering to progress by compromising journalistic integrity.
Everyone disagrees and everyone is right. (One sees how James L. Brooks was one of the key creative voices in developing The Simpsons.) JLB does an absolutely bang-up job of interweaving this approach not only into the philosophical moorings of the film but into the interpersonal relationships of the characters. Aaron and Jane are best friends who know there is something powerful between them that doesn’t quite make sense as guy/gal love. Aaron and Tom are rivalrous colleagues who repeatedly set aside their differences to try to help one another shore up the weak parts of their respective skill sets. Jane and Tom have a passionate attraction which in a lesser film they would have consummated but which here is obstructed by the fact that they are too far apart in their goals and ethical standards to get or stay together, romantically or professionally. The film plays all of these goals and interests off one another for heartfelt and plausible laughs and finally comes to the clear-eyed conclusion that these three all have to go their separate ways, too-smart casualties of a changing media landscape.
This is a great movie and well worth a watch. I just really, really wish JLB had excised the twee, smug, time-wasting prologue. David Mamet once wrote something about almost any film being able to be improved by having the first ten minutes taken out. Apparently he was talking directly to James L. Brooks about Broadcast News.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2008. First time watching this since I saw it in the theater.
People love to shit on two particular scenes — the one where Harrison Ford as Indy escapes a nuclear bomb test by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator and riding a mushroom cloud over the horizon, and the one where Shia LeBeouf’s character swings on vines like a monkey. Call me crazy but I just don’t bristle at these moments the way a lot of critics seem to; both are relatively quick beats in much longer and pretty fun sequences, and as to the ludicrous complaint that they are “implausible” — if you can suspend your disbelief about just about everything else in the previous three films, like the power of Yahweh coming down out of the sky to fry the brains out of everyone who doesn’t shut their eyes, or of Sean Connery playing Harrison Ford’s father despite an age difference of only twelve years between them, then I have an Android’s Dungeon to sell you.
What’s frustrating is actually nearly the direct inversion of that usual complaint. This movie is almost kinda pretty good overall, which makes it far more frustrating that several choices of great significance cripple it. These are:
The ending. The ending is really bad, starting with the whole sequence in the Kingdom which is supposed to bring everything together but is really boring to look at it and a banal recapitulation of the beats from similar sequences in previous films. And then the coda depicts Indy marrying Marion Ravenwood, which — look, I’m a huge fan of Marion; there’s no other character I’m aware of like her and I’ve been in love with her in Raiders of the Lost Ark since I was six and I’m delighted that Karen Allen came back to play her, but no one wants to see Indy (or Marion) get married, and no one wants to see an Indiana Jones picture end with a wedding between any two people at all.
The presence of plagiarist, professional asshole and disingenuous mountebank LaBeouf, playing Indy’s sidekick who turns out to be his son by Marion. LaBeouf sucks and I hate him and therefore I wish he wasn’t in the movie. If they had to have Indy’s sidekick be a greaser motorcyclist who turns out to be his and Marion’s son, which they didn’t, I wish they would have cast a non-shithead in the part. There are plenty of ‘em out there.
The overly confident use of CGI, something I have complained about before in the pages of this newsletter. Traditionally Spielberg is perhaps the best in the world at integrating practical effects with computer effects but in this movie they often clash garishly, especially in the aforementioned denouement in the Kingdom. Maybe the updated technology just looks too out of place next to the Indy aesthetic we got used to in the Eighties and Nineties when CGI wasn’t an option.
Otherwise there’s a lot to like here. Until that fall-down ending, the plotting and pacing are buoyant. Aging the film’s setting along with Harrison Ford was a good call and the filmmakers have a lot of fun situating Indy in the Cold War Fifties, commenting with a light touch on postwar conformity, Red Scare paranoia and nuclear dread. And while their presence alone can’t save faulty writing, some of the best film actors of the era showed up for this — Ray Winstone, Cate Blanchett, Jim Broadbent and The Coolest Man Who Has Ever Lived, a fella you might know as one Sir John Hurt.
Comics Charge
I finished Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Four. It was the last 2022 book I added to the complete reading list. I got my hands on Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Five but that will take me through the extant collections of the Moomin newspaper strip, at least while it was still being written and drawn by Tove Jansson herself. I suspect after this volume it will be time to switch to a different classic newspaper cartoonist and there is one name, a true titan of the field, ahead of the others on my short list. Watch this space.
Literature Lodgement
Three new additions to the complete reading list as of this entry. I read two children’s books about my favorite historical subject, both of which I found in a Little Free Library and both of which gave decently informative and concise explications of their respective subjects: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and Fort Sumter, both written by someone named Brendan January for something called the “Cornerstones of Freedom” series. Damned if those Cornerstone boys don’t put out some mighty fine Civil War children’s books, ones that take a straightly informative and scholarly approach and don’t try to make anything cute or moralistic from the origins of that thrilling and terrible period in our country’s violent and shambolic history.
I also read Life’s Work: A Memoir by David Milch, creator and principal writer of Deadwood, which I have mentioned before is my favorite television series ever unless the first eight seasons of The Simpsons count as a discrete show. Milch is getting old and his mind is being ravaged by dementia, something he addresses in the sobering opening lines of his book: “I’m on a boat sailing to some island where I don’t know anybody. A boat someone is operating, and we aren’t in touch.”
Of course I couldn’t wait to get to the parts about Deadwood. But before and after that there are other interesting parts about a wildly diverse array of people and things, for example Milch’s friendship with his mentor Robert Penn Warren when both men worked together at Yale, or how Milch’s gambling addiction lost him tens of millions at the racetrack, and some out-there meditations on consciousness, forgiveness, community and aesthetics in an explanation of what he was trying to explore with his famously indecipherable post-Deadwood HBO outing John from Cincinnati, which I never got around to watching all of.
Milch’s writing style, in his television work and here, careens wildly between comically baroque and acrobatically profane. Life’s Work is heavy and sometimes almost unbearably sad but also amiable and fun, even while I was left unsure what to do with some of the author’s stranger and more garrulous longueurs. “Maybe I’m wrong. Shoot me. So many different manifestations of the choice to act as if. I make no claim to certainty on any ground. I make my only claim to worthiness on the ground of will and choice. I will act as if my being is worthy and thereby purchase its worth. It’s shifty ground. He’s got a microphone and he’s doing a show. You know Johnny Carson can slide into this. That character is haunted by exactly the same questions.” Much of the book is possessed of these hard bop rhythms and smash-and-grab references. Perhaps these sections, like Milch’s finest hours on Deadwood, would reward repeated engagement.
The hardest to read and most important part of the book for me actually came fairly early on where Milch disclosed something I didn’t know about him but which in retrospect has its emotional fingerprints all over Deadwood — that his best friend from youth, a kid called Judgy with whom Milch got into a lot of fun trouble as teenagers, died in a car accident soon after both boys had shipped off to their respective universities. This precise scenario happened when my best friend and I were nineteen and I never suspected that it was something that me and one of my favorite writers have in common. This past summer marked two decades that I’ve been processing my feelings about that part of my life and the too-short life of my buddy. Milch writes of his own experience here, which I can tell you from mine is correct, that it was “a crossing of the river, eradicating everything you felt was impervious to change so you would be different for the rest of your life, and you realized with that seeping into you what it had meant to have been a child, what it was going to mean for life to be different forever.” And crucially: “There was a pervasive sense of inauthenticity, that the fact on its own terms wasn’t available to understanding,” that “death was the organizing principle, and that truth either shaped your behavior or marked you as one who acts by turning away.”
This guy has been through and done a lot of fascinating and deeply crazy shit in his life, so depending on what your circumstances are, maybe there are other parts of the book that will resonate as profoundly with you as that part did with me.
But if you’ve never watched Deadwood, by all means make that your first point of supplication.