Burgess and MacLean

Three movies, three books and three comics.

Richard Linklater’s 2016 film Everybody Wants Some!! was a holdover from the previous baseball-themed entry that I didn’t get around to watching until after the entry had been filed. It’s a somewhat formless, implausibly fanciful meander through three days in the life of college baseball players in Texas in 1980 that failed to register my enthusiasm or scorn. It’s well-crafted, cartoonishly unrealistic and smugly satisfied with its own fixation on atmosphere and emotion over narrative or character. The characters have nicknames and quirks that mostly felt like in-jokes I couldn’t decipher. Some professor could use parts of this movie for a class on film editing or something like that.

While finishing up the other baseball-related stuff for the last entry, I was also reading, for unrelated reasons, Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book The Quest for Cosmic Justice, in which the legendarily knowledgeable and plain-spoken scholar, economist and polemicist ties together several long-form essays to argue convincingly that a misguided obsession with an impossible-to-achieve utopian state of flawless justice does far more harm than good in the imperfect universe that we fallible creatures inhabit and usually does much more to frustrate our vague and lofty goals than to realize them. Sowell is usually thought of as a conservative due largely to his reasoned and well-informed hostility to Marxist economic theory and emphasis on process and evidence over feeling or ideology. He’s an interesting figure with some well-articulated heterodox views and I’ve been meaning to check out one of his many books for a while, but the trick was in finding one that was both reasonably-lengthed and thematically accessible to a layman like myself. The Quest for Cosmic Justice fit the bill and gave me an excellent sense of Sowell’s point of view on important subjects that have grown much more inflammatory in the intervening decades and can still be illucidated by Sowell’s reasonable thinking and eloquent writing. Because it should prove both interesting and stimulating to any open-minded reader, I would recommend this book to anyone who does or doesn’t agree with Sowell’s arguments.

The cosmic battle between good and evil shows up as a theme in the next prose book I read, or in fact re-read. Anthony Burgess’s 1966 novel Tremor of Intent is a witty, clever and bizarre espionage story which from what I can discern is a parody of the self-serious works of John le Carré and Ian Fleming that subverts them by exposing philosophical depths to the Cold War that Burgess evidently felt that his genre-writer contemporaries had overlooked. Burgess’s protagonist, the gluttonous and sex-obsessed spy Hillier, flatly states that the Cold War is “a pale reflection” of “a tougher and more interesting game” between “what are known as good and evil” in which “one’s opponent wasn’t on the other side of a conventional net or line.” When Hillier’s interlocutor posits that he doesn’t “have to play” the game, Hillier says “If we don’t play it, what else are we going to play?” and ultimately concludes that it’s the “neutrals” who are the real villains, those who, in the words of T.S. Eliot that form one of the book’s epigraphs, “are not men enough to be damned”. (The idea of espionage as grand Manichean battle was recapitulated, or perhaps stolen, by Norman Mailer in his good final novel The Castle in the Forest.) And this is leaving out the parts about competitive eating, a mind-altering pseudo-spiritual sexual encounter, meditations on metaphysics and martyrdom, several exciting scenes of violent action and an alphabetical listing of famous ships. Tremor of Intent is a really good, strange novel and seems to me like the kind of book that only a unique, eccentric polymath like Burgess could have produced.

In the comics domain, I read Gary Panter’s latest coffee-table book Crashpad, a psychedelic hippy-trippy funny-animal caper involving LSD hallucinations, clashing cultures and a UFO abduction. Panter’s typical aggressive mark-making and eye-gougingly vibrant compositional style are deployed to illustrate story and dialogue that are written with a jangly, slapdash, intentionally un-proofread feel. The gorgeous final splash-panel of a tripped-out canine cowboy puts a novel spin on the punchline to this shaggiest of shaggy-dog stories. A coda comprises some errata where Panter lists books he likes and muses about the spirit of the Sixties. I’ve read or viewed much of Panter’s work as a brilliant and influential cartoonist, designer, illustrator and gallery artist whose style and interests span a number of strange and diverse genres and subjects, and this is one of his most lighthearted and accessible productions. I’ve also made headway on two collections from Panter’s regular publisher Fantagraphics, one of the complete run of an obscure, self-referential conceptual newspaper strip from the early Sixties called Sam’s Strip by Mort Walker (of Beetle Bailey fame) and Jerry Dumas, and another of World War II propaganda comics by various American artists called Cartoons for Victory. No big surprise – the cartoons in Cartoons for Victory are overfull with unselfconsciously excellent craftsmanship and the kind of buoyant optimism and can-do spirit that won the war, and the book packages them handsomely and provides engaging scholarly context and history to flesh out their meaning and significance.

There’s a subgenre of World War II movies about ragtag bands of commandos going behind enemy lines to pull off near-impossible missions, a niche narrow and deep enough to have earned a feature-length tribute from Quentin Tarantino in 2009 with the metatextual pastiche Inglourious Basterds. A writer named Alistair MacLean conceived the ideas for and/or wrote the screenplays of several of the most salient exhibits in this milieu, including The Guns of Navarone from 1961 and Where Eagles Dare from 1968. It seems that the Sixties was a period in film history when the still-fresh recollections of the War were beginning to fade into nostalgia at the precise moment when the contours of the prototypical modern action movie were being outlined, resulting in a number of these World War II adventure films with small, character-driven casts and ambitious set-pieces that emphasize man-to-man (or man-to-platoon) fighting in place of grittier, less fantastical conceptions of combat. Where Eagles Dare is a decent two-and-a-half hours at the movies, with dated, over-written plotting and dialogue but lots of well-staged scenes of action and violence with a healthy lust for copious bloodshed and an intimate, oppressive use of space. The premise involves characters ably played by Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood leading an elite commando unit on what appears to be a POW extraction but turns out to be an espionage operation to root out the names of German double agents working in the ranks of British intelligence. The confusing details become unimportant once our heroes have nothing left to escape with but their lives and the information for which they risked them, at which point the objective becomes to see out how much damage they can do to Nazi manpower and materiel on their way out. If you are the type who can forgive the narrative whirlpools and also wants to see Clint Eastwood in character as an OSS assassin slaughtering hordes of Nazi soldiers, which personally I am, this is serviceable matinee fare with some gripping moments of suspense and a cathartically high bad-guy body count.

After re-reading Tremor of Intent, I read an edition of Oedipus the King by the ancient Greek playwrite Sophocles that I found in a Little Free Library. It’s a fascinating, unsettling and astounding piece of drama concerned with some of the oldest and deepest themes of storytelling, including the nature of free will and determinism, a question of whether a desire to do justice can ever be a truly selfless impulse, and the failure to see that the evil one determines to root out and eradicate is hiding in plain sight within one’s self. And there’s sex, murder, suicide and a guy gouging out his own eyes. It’s an engrossing, harrowing, thought-provoking and beautifully-structured nightmare of a play that provides a useful roadmap for most of the drama of the intervening two and a half millenia. I like checking in on foundational classics because they are usually engaging, affecting and seriously, violently fucked up, and this one is certainly all three. Also you can read it in a few hours and have it back in the Little Free Library by dinnertime.

I hadn’t planned to watch and didn’t want to like Eric André’s Netflix prank movie Bad Trip because I’ve always found his persona, in character and out, to be annoying and off-putting. But the movie is generally pretty darn funny, mostly for the unscripted reactions the filmmakers and performers illicit from the oblivious, well-intentioned bystanders who get caught on André’s candid camera, and more than anything for the great supporting performances from the supremely skilled improv actors Tiffany Haddish and Lil Rel Howery. Like André’s other work, this picture isn’t meant as anything loftier than late-night cinematic junk food for the intoxicated, and I can’t not find the guy grating and unlikeable. But this is the kind of thing you think you’ll glance at before bed and find yourself staying up late to watch in one sitting. I wouldn’t pay to see Bad Trip in a theatre, but no one’s offering me that option anyway, and these days we need all the laughs we can get, wherever they are to be found.