Deep Waters

I ruminate on the parameters for this newsletter. I watch two science fiction pictures. I read more from Virgil and Jansson. A round of Roulette.

A holdover from the last entry for which I should have found an appropriate slot is a 2008 four-minute animated film called HA’Aki by a Canadian animator named Iriz Pääbo. It’s a mildly psychedelic psuedo-abstraction that appears to use real NHL footage as a template for an animation aesthetic that probably looked far less dated and unsophisticated in 2008 than it does today. The Kanopy streaming platform where I found HA’Aki has many interesting short films from widely divergent eras, genres and formats and I have written about some of them in the pages of this newsletter before.

But I find myself nursing troublesome questions about whether I ever should have. Surely a thirty-four-minute Chaplin production counts as a “short film,” as should a five-minute oddball narrative movie from 1909, and my hypothesis is that HA’Aki does as well. But precisely what is it that makes HA’Aki a “short film” worthy of inclusion in this newsletter in differentiation to other self-contained or partially self-contained odds and ends I watch from time to time but which don’t appear to merit inclusion? Like an artsy piece of abstract musical animation brought to my attention by a cousin in Russia? Clusters of deeply strange short experimental works by Stan Brakhage which I’ve vaguely intended to write about if and when I ever finish the DVD sets that bundle them? Or perhaps a Betty Boop or three, which I count as among the greatest bits of filmed entertainment ever created but which intuition and tradition tell us should get categorized not as “short films” but as “cartoons”?

This is all another way of saying that I don’t appear to have as firm a definition of what counts as a “short film,” and therefore merits inclusion in my reading-and-watching newsletter, as I thought or hoped I did. These are deep waters, Jeeves.

Comics Cellar

On from the third to the fourth volume of Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip. The Moomin family have traveled back in time to the Old West and seperately to the Rococo period in the eighteenth century, rich environments which demonstrate that at this point in her career Jansson’s drawing technique was getting better by the strip and her storytelling more ambitious and freewheeling.

Picture Portico

Without planning to, I watched two science fiction movies that both involve issues of identity, millenarian societal breakdown and people putting weird sci-fi gizmos on their heads.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022. Action/adventure/science fiction/family dramedy in which a passing and generic interest in quantum mechanics and the multiverse serve as a metaphor for contemporary alienation, loneliness, career disappointment, family disjuncture and immigration from China to the USA. And associated other themes and subjects of that sort, crammed in so tightly that some of them can’t get a coherent airing.

On the surface this movie has a lot going for it — serviceable (or in the case of the central performance by Michelle Yeoh, quite strong) acting, stridently cool visuals, modest chunks of respectable fight choreography. But the tone is cloying and smug, the story can’t decide how seriously to take itself and the self-consciously hyperactive editing gets nauseating and eventually boring. It’s one thing for a movie to seem pleased with itself if it’s got the goods; it’s fatally hubristic if its self-confidence is as misplaced as it is here. This one is wildly over-hyped and ultimately worth a miss.

Strange Days, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 1995. Until the last forty-five minutes when Strange Days fumbles its momentum and fails to stick the landing, it’s an interesting and entertaining cyberpunk social commentary/murder mystery thriller, conceived of by James Cameron (who even if he’s batting less than five hundred at actually making good movies is still one of the greatest Big Idea guys in the history of the business) and executed by a director who is as good with actors as she is with stunts and action.

Strange Days takes place in the then-not-too-distant future of New Year’s Eve 1999 in an imaginary version of Los Angeles where people can record and replay their own qualia and anyone with money to spend on a black market can relive someone else’s first-person experiences. The moral implication that the film unearths is that real life in its messy and unsatisfying unpredictability is curdled by nihilism when virtual experience renders subjective individual consciousness nearly obsolete.

This insight feels more trenchant now than it did in 1995 (or 1999) and several of the points that Cameron, Bigelow et al sketch out about the threat of institutional collapse and the addictive nature of virtual experiences appear quite prescient in retrospect. The movie’s moral considerations and high level of technical facility are intertwined in a series of enthralling first-person long-takes showcasing the protagonist’s frequent submersion into the vicious and harrowing virtual reality nightmare of other people’s regrets and transgressions.

This movie is also a confection for acting aficionados: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Tom Sizemore, Juliette Lewis, Vincent D’Onofrio, Michael Wincott, William Fichtner, Richard Edson, Glenn Plummer and others are well-deployed at all levels of billing prominence and perform impressively across the board.

The whodunnit component of Strange Days is the weakest pole in this impressive tent; you can solve the murder ahead of time through process of elimination if you think it through. Once you learn that you’re right, the movie unravels into a succession of cliches and a gift-wrapped denoument that is out of key with the excellent first two acts.

Roulette

Randomized selections from my complete reading list of 2011 to the present:

The Complete Peanuts 1959 to 1960 by Charles M. Schulz, read in 2017. Over the course of several years I read all fifty years’ worth of every single Peanuts newspaper strip in chronological order out of the excellently-packaged series of books published by Fantagraphics. Whoopi Goldberg wrote the introduction for this volume.

Dr. Seuss's Book of Animals by Dr. Seuss, read in 2021. I’ve loved Dr. Seuss’s work all my life but had never encountered this one before. I already don’t remember much about it so I just put it on hold with the library.

Duck On a Bike by David Shannon, read in 2016. And I don’t remember anything at all about this book, though I know from context that it’s a children’s book. I was reading a lot of children’s books around that time while volunteering as an adult literacy tutor, so this may have been something I read with my learner or may have been something I read on my own for fun. I don’t want this newsletter to get too recursive and self-referential so I’m going to decline to place a hold on and re-read Duck On a Bike. Whatever it is, I’ll just have to let the mystery be.

Literature Lawn

After enjoying Frann Preston-Gannon’s illustration work in the previous entry I sought out more of her books through the public library and found another one that also involves dinosaurs. Dinosaur Farm is a lovely and charming children’s book from 2013 that is wholly Preston-Gannon’s product as both writer and illustrator. (I didn’t realize until checking the complete reading list that I actually read Dinosaur Farm back in 2016, so this was my second reading, though it might as well have been my first.) At the end the farmer protagonist ends up snuggled up in bed after a hard day’s work with all of his dinosaur livestock invading his bedroom and clustering peacefully around him until they all slumber soundly together. If I had a Strange Days VR set with this farmer’s memories I would put it on this instant.

Meanwhile in The Aeneid Virgil keeps starting out each new Book of the poem with an engaging narrative set piece and then chucking a wrench in the works that tilts the story toward some strange new angle and unfurls unexpected outcomes.

In Book IV I knew that after the thrill of the ceremonial hunt and conquest in the cave Aeneas was going to return to adventuring and questing at the expense of Dido’s feelings but I didn’t know that this was going to be prompted by a clash of influences between competing deities, nor of the final outcome for poor Dido. Mercury is dispatched to give Aeneas a kick in the ass and get him on his way once more while Rumor counter-maneuvers and hips Dido that Aeneas is fixing to leave. This makes Dido verbally attack Aeneas before he can get a word of explanation in, which in turn makes him realize there is no point arguing and that the least bad thing he can do is just regretfully walk out on her. Which in turn causes Dido to throw herself on Aeneas’s sword, which I was ignorant enough of literary history not to anticipate. Unfortunate and heart-broken Dido amounts to collateral damage in an epic hero’s quest, the acknowledgement of which causes the gods to take it easy on her in the afterlife (more on that below).

In Book V, when Aeneas and his company take a break in a friendly kingdom where Aeneas’s father Anchises was buried earlier in their travels and hold funeral games to honor Anchises’s memory, I had no inkling of the Book’s sharp turn from glee and excitement to grievous destruction and then finally to pathos so stirring it made me exclaim aloud (I exhaled and said “holy shit” or some such as I closed the book and went back to work).

The early part of Book V is taken up with a detailed and buoyantly comic description of the games. The turn comes when Aeneas’s peskily persistent divine antagonist Juno sends another goddess Iris to initiate a chain reaction of events which results in Aeneas’s company of wandering refugees losing a significant number of their ships to fire.

Since they can no longer travel onwards together, some of them have to give up the journey and permanently settle in the kingdom of Acestes. This sobering end to the funeral games is a strong indicator that it’s time to get going yet again, so Aeneas’s divine mother Venus has a word with the sea god Neptune to watch over the passage of her son and his people. Neptune agrees at the cost of the sacrifice of just one human life, and Virgil closes out Book V by painting a lovely, poignant and affecting portrait of the decent and faithful pilot Palinurus staying awake to man the ship’s tiller until the god of Sleep perches on the stern and coaxes Palinurus to overwhelming drowsiness and to fall over the ship’s side to his death. Aeneas instinctively wakes up and steps in to guide the ship and, apparently misunderstanding the situation, closes out Book V by commenting “Alas, too trustful in the calm of sea and sky, o Palinurus, on an unknown shore, you will be lying naked.” (Holy shit.)

Book VI comprises a fascinating and harrowing journey by Aeneas to the underworld to have a conversation with his father. (As an aside, after reading this Book I begin to see quite clearly why Dante cast the author of The Aeneid as his personal guide through Hell in the first part of the Divine Comedy.) Aeneas is going to the underworld to check in with Anchises but again things take a turn and the Book ends up somewhere very different from where it started: first Aeneas runs into other people he knew while they were still alive (including Palinurus and Dido!), and then fascinatingly is greeted with a vision of gestating souls who are in between the death of their previous hosts and the birth of their new ones, retiring in the underworld until they forget enough to be born again, who will one day populate the bodies of the descendants of Aeneas and his Trojan refugees and comprise the great Roman Empire that will flow from Aeneas’s bloodline, an Empire for which Virgil was, among the many other interesting things in The Aeneid, writing sympathetic PR.

And he was good at it. The fascinating turn in Book VI gives it a structure with Aeneas looking past (toward his heritage in the symbol of his father, friends he’s lost along the way in the form of Palinurus and mistakes he’s made in the person of Dido) and then toward the future at the souls waiting to be born, making Book VI a hinge point for writer, reader and protagonist and a strengthening of Aeneas’s resolve to see his commitment through and accomplish his mission linking the downfall of Troy to the rise of Rome. In addition to being a great guide for multiple underworlds, Virgil sure could write. The Aeneid is getting really good.