Filth and Desperation
I play a round of Roulette. I finish reading a collection of newspaper comics, attend a pornographic film festival, watch two feature films and read a very good book.
We’re having a rough couple of weeks over here at One Could Argue headquarters. Sleepwalking through a too-easy day job at a poorly-run company, processing a difficult experience from half a lifetime ago which seems to be affecting me anew in ways I hadn’t anticipated and possibly acquiring a mild bout of a seasonal emotional disorder from the dour weather San Francisco has been experiencing for the last few weeks. And the confluence of a few other emotional annoyances that happened to converge around the end of my first year at this particular frustrating job and of my first year in this particular decent-enough living space.
Because I’m a sensation-seeking and highly extroverted person, loneliness and restlessness can be strongly triggered by factors that might seem relatively mild to more resilient and more depression-accustomed people. I’m not prone to depression so it catches me off guard when a proper one sets in and diminishes my interest in my favorite things like cartooning, running, walking, reading and watching movies.
Trying to be as sociable as I can. Woke up this morning in anticipation of one good friend driving south across the Golden Gate Bridge for a day visit before meeting another friend for a round of drinks later this evening. As I write this paragraph I’m forcing myself to choke down a cup of coffee, listen to Haydn string quartets and file this overdue update on my books and movies diet. Being creative feels like more trouble than it’s worth sometimes but it’ll probably help, and I feel much more like writing than drawing or collaging. If that feeling persists I can anticipate getting One Could Argue entries out with a renewed regularity, which sounds like fun to me.
Roulette
Starting off with this entry’s three randomized selections from my complete reading list from 2011 to present.
The Complete Peanuts 1981 to 1982 by Charles M. Schulz, read in 2019. I’ve mentioned a number of times that I spent several years reading every single Peanuts daily strip, all fifty years’ worth, in chronological order. Apparently in 2019 while living in Seattle I was in the early Eighties. Don’t remember the contents of this era in the strip offhand.
Wilson by Daniel Clowes, read in 2012. A clever, snarky, extremely well-drawn experimental graphic novel by the great cartoonist Clowes. If I remember right it’s basically snippets, I think presented achronologically, from the life of a snotty asshole named Wilson, broken up into narrative chunks each the length of an individual newspaper comic strip and drawn in radically different styles that might reflect something about the content of each episode. Clowes has the cartooning chops as both writer and artist to pull off this peculiar exercise and I don’t begrudge him for showing off, though I recall being unmoved enough to ultimately think of Wilson as just that: a master cratfsman doing a dazzling and rather sterile technical drill. Maybe I’ll give it another look some time and see if I missed the point.
Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey, read in 2016. The moment this came up my memory snapped back to an image of walking through Boston, which was the reason I ended up sitting down and reading this book not long after.
In 2016 I went to Vermont for my pal Sean’s wedding. Since I had to fly in and out of Boston I booked three days at a hostel there and decided to make a small vacation out of it. I literally didn’t get on a wheeled vehicle of any kind for those three days, just walk walk walked all over, including out to Cambridge and back. These many miles-long walks included traipsing through Boston Public Garden and stumbling upon Nancy Schön’s sculpture Make Way for Ducklings, which recreates in three dimensions an image from Robert McCloskey’s famous 1941 children’s book of the same name. This stuck in my mind and made me realize that I may never have given Make Way for Ducklings a proper reading and so I did at some point not long after returning to San Francisco (this was before I relocated to Seattle in 2017). I can tell that this was not long at all after visiting Boston because Make Way for Ducklings falls only eight entries on the list after An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger, which I vividly remember was the book I brought with me to read on that particular trip to Boston and Vermont. I don’t think of either An Elemental Thing or Make Way for Ducklings with any particular fondness but now they both make me think of Boston and vice versa.
Comics Cupboard
I made fairly quick work of The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland Volume II: 1907-1908. The last times I read McCay’s books were before 2011 so I am gratified to have his name now show up at least once on the complete reading list, being one of my favorite cartoonists as he is. Little Nemo in Slumberland remains easily one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of newspaper comics and everyone should try reading at least a few pages of it (only in print; reading a full-page strip like this on a screen wouldn’t do justice to McCay’s genius with layout, design and narrative). Those who don’t share my obsessive hangups about not considering a book to have been “read” if they haven’t absorbed every single word and image don’t have to invest the time to study the strip too closely, but I’m afraid I must insist that literally every single person currently or imminently alive takes at least a passing glance at a few pages of Little Nemo in Slumberland in print and indulge in McCay’s gleefully unmanacled whimsy and masterful design skills. I promise I’ll be your best friend if you do, every single one of you.
Picture Pantry
HUMP! Film Festival, directed by various directors, 2023. Through a circuitious happenstance, a paid-for ticket came into my possession for the local screening of the writer Dan Savage’s film festival program HUMP!, “the indie porn festival for everybody,” in which amateur filmmakers submit their own pornographic and/or erotic short films. (Years ago I saw Savage give a short speaking engagement and have also shaken hands with him once on a different occasion, but haven’t read his column for years and have never read any of his books.) Apparently the shorts are permitted to be as sexually graphic and explicit as their creators want, and indeed a number of the entries were pretty out-there.
But I’m an open-minded fellow and I took pride in not averting my gaze for even a second, even when the sex acts being performed were very much not to my taste and were even, in a few moments, downright unsettling to the more prudish part of my psyche. I don’t go to the cinema much at all anymore so it was nice to have an excuse to go out to a packed house and experience such a viscerally and sexually stimulating assemblage of material amidst the collective heaves, sighs, groans and laughs of several hundred other consenting adults.
What was most interesting was how infrequently the films that were genuinely bonerfying to me overlapped with the ones that were the most creative, engaging or funny. I’ll just cite the two that were my favorites and that cut pretty hard in both directions.
Screen Play was my favorite entry overall, probably the most arousing and second-funniest short film. It involves two comely twenty-something women, each sporting a bountiful set of titties, convening for a flirtatious night in of televesion-watching and taking turns being propelled into rapturous Seventies-themed fantasies about one another by whatever they happen to come across on different channels. The punchline is that they finally settle on a channel that catapults them into a joint fantasy — a charming, lovely and sexy conclusion to a well-structured and gamely-acted short piece.
Get Ready with Betty was my second-favorite and was a counter-example, an entry that did nothing for me erotically but that I loved in every other way because it was screamingly hilarious and joyfully subversive. Drag queen Betty Wetter does a parody of a Youtube makeup tutorial where almost all of the makeup is applied by having makeup-encrusted dicks, real ones, smudged and smooshed against her face while she delivers caustic, incisive and mildly bitchy social commentary, for example about how a certain makeup application look might be ideal for “your cousin’s first wedding.”
Annoyingly the HUMP! website has a list of the full lineup but doesn’t give individual credits and I didn’t have the presence of mind to jot them down while trying to concentrate on the presentation. It does seem from some poking around further online that Betty Wetter is something of a well-known Seattle drag character performed by one Scotty Cayton, who deserves credit for how great Get Ready with Betty is.
Nope, directed by Jordan Peele, 2022. This is Peele’s third film as writer/producer/director and he hews to the same formula: well-cast and slickly-filmed sci-fi/horror films that feature black protagonists and promulgate some subtle social comment aimed at the intersections of race, politics and American culture. Get Out from 2017 was a claustrophobic, slow-burn suspense mystery about the fetishization of black American aesthetics and experiences by effete white mainstream liberals; 2019’s Us was a funhouse nightmare about the slippery nature of identity and the scariness of asking deep questions about who we really are, which on a substrate level was actually about the shock of the 2016 American Presidential election.
Nope is the weakest of the three films, possibly because in its grandiose ambition it splinters and divides Peele’s narrative and moral focus too much. After watching it I texted a friend to remark that Nope is about the Lovecraftian sublime, about staring directly into the eye of that which is frighteningly, overwhelmingly, horrifyingly inconceivable. My friend responded that the film was in fact about approximately five different things, and he’s not at all wrong.
These themes, which Peele and his collaborators finally fail to fully synthesize, could be said to include the history of black contributions to the film industry, sibling discord in a fractured family, standing your ground in the face of primal animalism, the cruelty of an entertainment business that turns people and creatures into sideshow freaks and a Sontag-like meditation on the moral implications of photography itself. There’s a ton of interesting stuff going on here and all of it is well-performed, particularly by the excellent actor Daniel Kaluuya with whom Peele worked on Get Out and someone great I can’t remember ever seeing before named Keke Palmer who plays Kaluuya’s character’s temperamentally-opposed sister and does it fantastically well. Michael Wincott, whom I previously cited for doing good work in Strange Days, does a fine supporting turn here and manages to root a parody of a pretentious-but-ingenious director of photography character in his stirringly gravelly voice.
Ultimately I stand by my assertion that at its distilled essence, Nope finds Peele casting about for a way to make a movie about confronting that which is inconceivably scary and sublime. (The title refers to this directly, to what one might reflexively utter when coming into first contact with something so humbling and frightening.) Kaluuya’s character finally has to find the strength to stare down this most arresting of fears without flinching or backing down, while Palmer’s character finds the resilience and ingenuity to capture a photograph of it. I’ve seen far worse films by other directors and slightly better ones by Peele.
The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor, 1940. This is the second Cukor film I’ve seen that stars Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn and overall the better of the two. The Philadelphia Story is a very good movie that doesn’t live up to its reputation as a masterpiece but I liked it. It’s lighthearted domestic comedy/melodrama about a hard-to-please, rich, elegant, strong-willed young woman named Tracy played by Hepburn, a member of an old-money Philadelphia family whose (the family’s) various infidelities and divorces provide fodder for the local tabloid newspaper. She is in between marriages and finds herself torn between her new fiancee played by John Howard, her ex-husband played by Grant and a clever writer for said tabloid played by James Stewart. All of these men have incorrect approaches to their love and resentment towards Tracy, who is admittedly flawed in her impossibly high standards for herself and others but who wants above all to be accepted and loved as a human being for all of those good and bad characteristics that are inexorably intertwined within her. Realizing she doesn’t belong with Howard’s character, that she’s capable of being loved by someone as bright and interesting as Stewart’s and that she can’t deny the old chemistry between herself and Grant’s helps her come to a realization about what really matters to her in life and that it has nothing at all to do with what other people think of her.
The strangest thing about watching The Philadelphia Story was that it came recommended as the favorite movie of someone I’ve been getting to know recently but in some ways still don’t understand especially well. Bizarrely enough, this picture felt very nearly like a Rosetta Stone for a fascinating, tough-to-please and sometimes inscrutable individual; the over-arching sensation with which I came away from this picture is that I can’t remember ever feeling so strongly that watching someone’s favorite movie explained some profound things to me about who the individual is deep down and why the movie is so important to her. Much to process and ponder and I need more time to sift through it and see what I can figure out, about this person and myself and about The Philadelphia Story as a fine work of cinema.
Literature Larder
In the previous two entries I talked over re-reading the first two novels in James Ellroy’s flawed but diverting Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy as bound in his collected volume L.A. Noir. I finally finished the final Hopkins outing in the book, the 1986 novel Suicide Hill, and I have some shit to say. So buckle up, cats ‘n kittens.
I was surprised and pleased on this reading of Suicide Hill to find that it is not just head-and-shoulders above the first two Lloyd Hopkins stories in terms of overall quality, but that it actually ranks as among the better of Ellroy’s novels from throughout his career. For someone just getting into Ellroy, I might even recommend disregarding the first two books in the Hopkins Trilogy and reading Suicide Hill as a standalone piece.
What so positively recommends this one and distinguishes Suicide Hill from Blood On the Moon and Because the Night? First, for ease of use by the reader, Suicide Hill is plotted much more maturely and conscientiously than the overwrought first two novels. It’s consistently well-paced and well-written throughout, which makes it easier and more interesting to follow. Ellroy had the good sense to reign in the grandiloquent scope from the earlier Hopkins stories and to write one that is far more realistic and plausible, a constraint that seems to have forced him to unearth grit, grime and blood in places much closer to home for the average working-stiff reader (and/or amateur literary critic). That Suicide Hill feels more intimate and realistic makes the fictional chain reaction of bloodshed that unfolds across L.A. in the book all the more frightening for its believability.
To what does this bloodshed and believability pertain? The answer to that is the most significant innovation that makes Suicide Hill Hopkins’s finest adventure. In all three Lloyd Hopkins books the point is that the brilliant, rule-bending, unconventional, dislikable and roguish homicide detective Hopkins has something profound in common with the mastermind villain he is stalking and that the policeman’s and killer’s pathologies are explored side by side until they make contact and Hopkins annihilates the antagonist at a significant personal cost to himself. (Incidentally, part of this cost to Hopkins at the end of Because the Night proved wrong my wager that Hopkins’s love interest Linda would suffer a gruesome fate. The death she undergoes at the end of Because the Night is not a literal death but a moral one in Hopkins’s eyes, which constitutes the cost to him in the form of his realization that now they cannot be together as he had hoped.)
In Blood On the Moon what unites Lloyd and the serial killer is a shared taste for violence and an obsession with women. In Because the Night what unites Lloyd and the doctor/cult leader is uncommonly high intelligence and a preternatural ability to read people’s inner selves. These are cool conceits but they are sometimes prohibitively lofty and while reading those novels I often felt like Ellroy’s accelerating reach was exceeding his still-developing grasp.
Suicide Hill locates Lloyd Hopkins’s commonality with his enemy in sheer, running-on-empty, nothing-left-to-lose desperation. Convict and car thief Duane Rice, a tough young man who carries nothing unncessary on his body, mind or person, is completely focused on winning back the woman he loves and bankrolling her music career as a pathway to a better life; he will do anything to accomplish this goal and ends up co-opting a plan for a multi-bank heist and recruiting the overeager lowlife Garcia brothers to help him. Rice runs on balls, intuition, skill and bravado, none of which is enough to contain the overflow of hostility and desperation and the penchant for bloodletting that causes his plans to spin into a widening spiral of mass homicide.
Meanwhile Hopkins is in danger of being maneuvered out of the LAPD because he’s bent too many rules over the course of the previous two books and over his twenty-year career. He’s also spent two years trying to get his estranged wife and three daughters back into his home and life, so Suicide Hill finds him teetering on a personal precipice, in danger of losing the only things that ever gave his troubled life meaning. The question in Suicide Hill becomes not who between Hopkins and his antagonist is tougher, smarter or more vicious but who is more desperate and finally more resilient, more unbendingly failure-resistant. This makes the story grittier and more frightening; once Rice’s sociopathic desperation is unleashed and the bodies start to pile up, the reader is imbued with a reasonable dread of how plausibly bad things really might get if Hopkins can’t intuit and detect his way to the bottom of what’s going on.
Besides being by far the best written from paragraph to paragraph, Suicide Hill also wraps up the trilogy on a note of pseudo-Christian redemption and emotional resolution that offers a fitting point of narrative disembarkation for Lloyd Hopkins and his rivals, friends and family. After the pseudo-slog of getting through the first two Hopkins books, it was a delight to enjoy Suicide Hill as much as I did. 1986 was the year Ellroy put out Killer on the Road and Suicide Hill, by far the two best novels of his early period, and in the very next year he published The Black Dahlia and entered his masterful middle period with the L.A. Quartet. Much more about those books will be coming up soon in future entries.