Flags and Battles
I read newspaper comics and re-read a great novel. I go to the cinema to watch a new picture from a prestige auteur.
Comics and Literature Update
Still reading the final volume of The Complete Far Side by Larson. The percentage of strips that are new to me seems to be growing incrementally as I push into 1993.
I finished re-reading Put Out More Flags by Waugh. I don’t think I understood this book the first time I read it in 2015, so I’m glad I got a grip on it now because it’s worth it. A wry, darkly humorous, lyrical, silly and foreboding novel. Ranks among Waugh’s best along with Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust. Highly recommended, and a pretty quick read.
This entire re-read was triggered, as these things usually are, by the sight of a bartender in Tel Aviv. She reminded me of a passage I’ve always liked in Put Out More Flags in which Waugh describes how:
Everything about this girl was large and soft and round and ample. A dress shop might not have chosen her as a mannequin but she was not a fat girl; a more civilized age would have found her admirably proportioned; Boucher would have painted her half clothed in a flutter of blue and pink draperies, a butterfly hovering over a breast of white and rose.
Put Out More Flags is loose and meandering in terms of plot development, leaping from character to character amidst a social swirl oriented around Waugh’s rakish, charming bounder and calculatingly selfish cad Basil Seal. The book is structured on a roughly one-year timeline between the onset of World War II and what I guess was the beginning of Britain’s serious military involvement on the Continent. Most of Waugh’s small-minded and self-absorbed English characters spend this year either downplaying how bad the War is going to be or ascertaining what they stand to gain from it. Basil Seal is in the second camp, running a modestly profitable scam using some internally displaced children, seducing the married woman described in the above passage, and eventually bullshitting his way into a government job from whence he anonymously ruins the life of his friend Ambrose and then tricks Ambrose into thanking him for it.
Ambrose is both gay and half-Jewish, two traits Waugh might have disliked in real people, since he was a conservative Catholic and is claimed by some to have been an anti-Jewish bigot in his personal life. (Having read all of his novels, offhand I can only recall one instance of antisemitism in his work.) Maybe Waugh conceived of Ambrose this way because he knew such a character in real life, running in creative and artistic circles as Waugh did. On reflection it’s unsurprising that a novelist of Waugh’s unique voice and incredibly high level of skill would find a character like Ambrose too interesting not to be treated as an individual with a point of view worth exploring. Ambrose does come in for a relatively wretched fate, but this is more Basil’s fault for being a liar and a shitty, exploitative false friend than it is Ambrose’s fault for anything other than being a starry-eyed and somewhat naive writer and aesthete. Ambrose appears neither ashamed nor proud of the superficial traits of his identity, and Waugh seems genuinely interested in what these mean for the story of Ambrose and all of the other characters. Ambrose is in the inner circle of richly-drawn and complex main characters and several of Waugh’s finest paragraphs are absorbed with Ambrose’s internal considerations.
I was switching between bound and digital copies of Put Out More Flags, the latter being a more up-to-date edition which includes the short story Basil Seal Rides Again, which was Waugh’s final piece of published fiction and which I had never before read. It finds an aging, overweight Basil off his game as a manipulator, seducer and cheat…until he is forced to tangle with his daughter’s cynical, devious and obnoxious fiance, in whom Basil recognizes an image of the young asshole he himself used to be. Basil takes this insight to its logical conclusion and gamely destroys this opponent by plausibly propagating the lie that this lad in fact is a younger version of Basil, that he is Basil’s illegitimate son and therefore ineligible to marry into Basil’s family and fortune. It’s quite a clever and tidy twist ending, both to the story itself and to the career of one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language.
Film Selection: Timely Time at the Cinema
I treated myself to a 70mm theatrical screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new picture One Battle After Another, featuring a quartet of entangled protagonists played reasonably well by capable actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn and Chase Infiniti. PTA as usual is working as both writer and director here; his movies are always interesting even when they don’t work. This one isn’t close to the greatness of for example Boogie Nights or There Will Be Blood. One Battle After Another, while never boring and with some good qualities in its favor, is Anderson’s second-least-good film after Inherent Vice. And whatever the implications, it can’t go unmentioned that Anderson’s only two not-very-good pictures are both associated with the books of Thomas Pynchon.
The story of this new film is a commingling of disparate components:
Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which I have meant to read and never gotten around to, is from what I understand concerned with a former left-wing underground revolutionary in the Seventies mold who is hiding out from the law and his own conscience by secluding himself in Northern California and frying his mind with drugs. One Battle After Another is “inspired by” Vineland, and that basic outline is all here in the PTA film with DiCaprio’s character filling in this role.
Infiniti’s character is his teenaged daughter (though it turns out she may really be the biological daughter of Penn’s character), and she represents the setting of the film in a not-too-distant future in which our current real-world Presidential administration, or a pseudo-comical facsimile thereof, has used the issue of undocumented immigration as a way of herding political and social undesirables into prison camps and to share power with right-wing paramilitary elements. Penn’s character Lockjaw is a self-deluding macho military man who…
…had a sexual relationship with Taylor’s character during a time when she and DiCaprio’s character were romantically involved and operated in the same underground leftist cell, the “French 75.” Her character becomes sexually excited by fear, action and violence; her loyalties get muddled because she is attracted to both men for different reasons. She is a sexy and confident black woman; she and Lockjaw hate themselves for getting aroused by one another, her because of politics and him because he’s a racist. (A kooky and consequential subplot involves his character trying to advance his career by ingratiating himself into a secret and powerful cabal of snide country club white supremacists.)
So the movie unfolds as an action/political thriller/suspense drama with a wacky, screwball tone which becomes laugh-aloud funny at several points, set against the discordant mixing of this Seventies-style radical revolutionary mindset with a vaguely-alternate-reality/near-future America in which this current right-wing postliberal movement has completed its mission to make our country shittier and more authoritarian and cronyist and corrupt. And probably just to make the story work better, this is all fantastically and unrealistically set in a universe in which the internet, smartphones and social media appear for all practical purposes not to exist.
In some ways this movie appears frighteningly prescient about the bleak direction in which our country seems to be heading, especially with military and paramilitary elements being deployed as policing forces on our American streets, not to mention the immoral and ineffectual ways the feds are engaging with the problem of undocumented immigration. On the other hand, when left-wing political violence in the real-life contemporary USA has very recently been spiraling horribly out of control in the form of targeted assassinations and antisemitic pogroms, One Battle After Another has cringily poor timing in attempting to rhapsodize left-wing political terrorism.
This vamping brew of ideas does not hold together: this movie is less than the sum of its parts. It’s still an entertaining ride, even if the destination at which it arrives is unsatisfactory. The acting is mostly good; DiCaprio is particularly well-cast and looks to be having a great time playing off of a smoldering Benicio del Toro as his daughter’s sensei, a character who is operating as an underground revolutionary in a manner more practical and moral than the French 75. He serves as an Obi-Wan Kenobi figure to DiCaprio’s character Bob.
I suspect that the original 1977 Star Wars movie is a hidden-in-plain-sight narrative influence on the writing and filming of One Battle After Another, including in a fascinating (but hard to follow) climactic car chase sequence in which Anderson and his visual team use a hilly stretch of desert highway to create wild compositions in which cars move in and out of the frame in strange two-dimensional undulations. This unity of motion, visualization, focus and Infiniti’s character incorporating the terrain into the chase to outwit her tormentors somewhat recalls the final Death Star run at the end of the first Star Wars movie. The Lockjaw character also has a certain amount of overlap with a Darth Vader archetype.
PTA’s latest is interesting and has things going for it, including good performances, peculiar ideas, really funny moments and attractive cinematography. Not as flawed as Inherent Vice, but I’m not going to make the mistake I made with that one with this one, of taking the trouble for one viewing after another to figure out what I missed. Onto other business.