Melting Botox

A round of Roulette. I continue reading a novel. I watch two films.

Roulette

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson, read in 2018. Ferguson is a brilliant, charismatic and occasionally gratingly smug conservative historian. I remember in an introduction or first chapter of this book he describes being at a party, looking around seeing like a former mayor of New York, a former Secretary of Whatever, three titans of industry and an award-winning someone-or-other and such types. Right from the start Ferguson wants you to know the networks of power in which he himself circulates.

But he’s earned his position through scholarship and he’s got the intellectual goods. This book, a meditation on network theory as a lens through which to interpret history, politics and warfare, is a dense, thoroughly-annotated and deeply informative read. The only problem really is that Ferguson’s grasp jostles his reach: the rate of fact per page is so high that Fergie struggles to balance economy with pellucidation. His skill is in riffing on all of the many subjects about which he knows an impressive amount, but a directional momentum, if not an outright narrative, always seems perched out on Niall’s horizon somewhere.

That’s not to say I didn’t learn a ton from this book, which I did. My pet takeaway was when Ferguson was talking about Paul Revere, a figure whom I knew only as he of the Revolutionary Midnight Ride. If I remember right part of Ferguson’s point is that Revere as a Freemason, master silversmith and member of craftsmen’s guilds was uniquely situated as a key node in the underground Revolutionary network — that he had, as Ferguson quotes another historian as having said, “the best Rolodex” in pre-Revolutionary America. Fascinating way to think about history indeed.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling, read in 2013. This is one of a series of very popular novels about children at a school that teaches them how to be wizards. When I was new to California I started dating a gal who loved these books and we read the first four of them out loud together. (She read American Tabloid by Ellroy aloud with me in return.) The relationship didn’t last; it amounted to a short-lived involvement that wasn’t the right thing for us to remain in but looking back I was not as much of gentleman about the whole thing as I would have liked. Anyway when it ended I didn’t care enough about the Harry Potter series to finish reading it and so never did. I did recently listen to the excellent podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, which I recommend everyone try no matter what you know or think about Rowling, her reputation or her work.

Just Help! How to Build a Better World by Sonia Sotomayor, read in 2022. See a previous entry where I got really angry with myself about having most unprofessionally neglected to get this book into the newsletter sooner. I’m glad it’s coming up in Roulette again. I need to be periodically scourged for my writerly sins. Scourge me, Sonia.

Bringing Up Bushnell

I’m about halfway through Jeremy P. Bushnell’s latest novel Relentless Melt and the plot has thickened substantially. Basically there are six threads we’re aware of at this point and they are gradually being interwoven:

• The mysterious Zeb is in fact the protagonist’s brother who disappeared from her life into a career as a criminal, which is why she ended up donning his suit, impersonating a lad and deciding to enroll in a night course as a detective.

• The protagonist Artie and her friend Theodore witness an attempted abduction of a woman to whom Artie finds herself sexually attracted, though at this point in the book she hasn’t found the words to articulate those feelings, this being Boston in 1909.

• The would-be abductor is an imposing, frightening, knife-brandishing figure who may be responsible for at least one other abduction: the adolescent daughter of Winchell, Artie’s detective teacher.

• This may also tie in to Gannett, Theodore’s magic teacher. He had a young daughter as well and she also seems to be missing (or dead?). Perhaps she grew into the woman for whom Artie nurses distant feelings. Gannett seems to be sizing Artie up as a replacement stage assistant, though I get the impression he has some larger mission in mind for her.

• All of this must somehow connect to another, more oblique mystery that Theodore brought to Artie’s attention prior to the attempted abduction. It involves what may or may not have been a scream of distress heard on the Boston Common. Theodore led Artie to a groundskeeper named Flann (a nod to Flann O’Brien and some kind of narrative signpost?). This line of inquiry had led them earlier to a Portuguese park-dweller who heard the scream but can’t comment upon it except to give Artie a human tooth, the significance of which we don’t yet know.

• As I correctly projected in the previous entry, what I’ve taken to calling Jez’s “realist magicalism” becomes more developed as Relentless Melt melts along. Artie’s self-improvement hobby is criminal investigation but Theodore’s is studying magic with the aforementioned Gannett; however in this fictional universe magic is both real and unremarkable. It’s a craft you can learn like any other and like any other it appears inscrutable to an outsider but can be developed as a skill set through careful study and practice. From what we know in this world magicians like Gannett are talented stage performers as in our own but what’s behind their tricks isn’t the art of illusion, it’s the mastery of a very real magical force that everyone knows exists in the world but that is hard to get good at. Theodore is making modest progress at it, as he also is at photography, which is sure to develop as a key theme in the story. (The book’s title comes from one of its three epigraphs, a Susan Sontag quotation about the nature of photography’s relationship to the “relentless melt” of time. There has also been a suggestion that with enough control over the right kind of magic characters in this universe can stop and restart time itself.)

So that’s what we currently know of this melt and its relentlessness. More thoughts coming when I finish the book and find out just what’s going on!

Film Selections: War and Principles

To Have and Have Not, directed by Howard Hawks, 1944. The poll I offered in the previous entry indicated that this was the film I was to watch next. This is interesting: a straight-ahead Casablanca imitator that departs from its progenitor in several noteworthy ways.

What they have in common: both star Humphrey Bogart as an outwardly cynical, amoral, profit-motivated, solitary, capable and tough man who lives and operates in a backwater of a World War II theater (Morroco in Casablanca and Martinique in To Have and Have Not). Both stories involve these two different Bogart characters getting dragged against their judgement into the operations of the underground French Resistance, at first nominally for selfish reasons but ultimately because it’s the right thing to do.

The first key difference, besides the setting, is that in To Have and Have Not the romantic interest, played by Bogart’s soon-to-be real-life wife Lauren Bacall, is not a part of the story that ties in to the War and the Resistance movement as is the case in Casablanca. She is a troubled and homeless sojourner and the connection that develops between the two characters in the film is based on a smoldering attraction that draws Bacall’s character closer to the Resistance instead of what happened in Casablanca where the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend dragged him into the center of everything and forced him to choose between true love and the anti-fascist cause.

The other big difference is the amount of action and the protagonist’s direct involvement in it. This film was marketed with Ernest Hemingway’s name on it for having been based on a novel he wrote and besides a fascination with drinking and fishing it also has a healthy injection of Hemingwayan violence that fills up a narrative space reserved for memory and heartache in Casablanca. There is a lively and well-edited exchange of automatic gunfire in a nightclub and later Bogart’s character brandishes a shotgun on a boat as part of the smuggling job he accepts on behalf of the Resistance. There’s also a really cool sequence near the end that involves him sneaking his hand into a desk drawer and neutralizing a Gestapo thug with a well-placed shot through the desk.

What’s rather curious is that this final deskbound outburst represents what in a film with a more conventional structure would be the beginning of the third act. But To Have and Have Not is effectively missing a third act altogether. This is more peculiar and interesting than bad; the moment when Bogart’s character finally gets the upper hand over the bad guys, seizes control of the situation and determines to flee Martinique and become directly involved in the Resistance by helping his clients rescue a mysterious Resistance leader from an island penal colony should be the transition into a relatively short third act where the band of good guys enter into even greater danger on the open water. After making it to Devil’s Island they could rescue the Resistance leader, perhaps without the audience even seeing his face, and maybe Bogart’s character is forced to stay behind on Devil’s Island to hold off the bad guys so that the leader can get back into the global fight against totalitarianism. Or maybe the Resistance leader gets mortally wounded and, recognizing the bravery and capability that he perceives in Bogart’s protagonist, anoints him as his successor and the film closes on the protagonist now fully committed to the cause with Bacall’s character ready to follow him and fight by his side. (Has anyone read the book? Is any of this in the territory of what actually happens?)

Perhaps the oddly truncated ending is just Hemingway overplaying his hand with his habit of not letting his stories go on one word longer than they absolutely have to. Or maybe it also derives in part from the influence of William Faulkner, who co-wrote the script. (Yes, this Casablanca knockoff has Hemingway AND Faulkner’s names on it.) In any case this film is not great but it is quite good and briskly entertaining, not least of all because of the electrifying screen presence of the impossibly stylish and sexy Bacall.

John Wick: Chapter 4, directed by Chad Stahelski, 2023. When you stop and think about it, what really are the John Wick films? I cooked up a theory while watching this nearly three-hours-long Botox/Gun Kata festival and probable franchise denouement.

To wit, I think these films effectively instantiate a novel subgenre of action film, one where hardcore, unrelenting, ultraviolent movie action is blended with the classic tropes of high fantasy. There are qualities of mysticism, ceremony, fortune, divine intervention, demigodliness and occasionally something like magic that give these films a unique flavor that owes little to previous gunfight-n-car-chase actioners, but perhaps does have precedent in wizards-n-warriors epics. And also definitely in video games.

In fact I couldn’t help but observe throughout John Wick: Chapter 4, much more so than in its predecessor John Wick: Perineum (pretty sure I’m remembering that title right), how much of it is composed to look like a video game. I guess this is just where market forces and the peregrinations of modern culture are leading the action film genre, helping it and first-person-shooter games to converge aesthetically upon one another. This seems to be directly referenced in a recurring gag in Chapter 4 in which John Wick repeatedly (and repeatedly, and repeatedly) gets thrown onto hard surfaces from heights that would instantly kill a human being in real life: like in a video game, he always has an extra life handy (until the story suddenly, whimsically and mercurially requires him to be fallible in a normal, human way).

This movie isn’t boring; the action is pretty consistent throughout and the signature maximalist fight choreography hasn’t outworn its welcome, even if it feels almost completely divorced from any moral stakes at this point. And in the interstitial non-action parts the set designs, pseudo-abstract lighting choices and most especially the costumes are fairly beautiful. When you get down to it, the point of this film really is to be something that can be put on in the background and tuned in and out of at will without ever having missed too much to appreciate what you’re looking at. It’s mostly flash with little thunder and it never makes any claim to the contrary.

An actor named Shamier Anderson is poorly cast as one of Wick’s rotating coterie of assassin frenemies; the guy just has no onscreen charisma. The same can’t be said of the other major ally/antagonist, a blind assassin played by someone named Donnie Yen, a cartoonishly brilliant performer of hand-to-hand fight choreography who plays the character as a mild-mannered, middle-aged square who somehow also feels palpably threatening and lethal. Probably the most interesting character is a bizarre golden-toothed creature played by one Scott Adkins, a fat but very fast-moving and hard-fighting crime boss with garish taste in haberdashery and a delicious caricature of a German accent. Subtlety is unknown in the John Wick universe and there is no reason to change that in what appears to be the final chapter (before any spinoffs start spinning off).

The only other thing to mention is that some time in between the previous film and this one, Keanu Reeves had a notable amount of cosmetic surgical work done on his face. I first noticed this when I watched The Matrix Resurrections but I wonder if John Wick: Chapter 4 was produced closer in time to when he had the work done because it really seems to have affected his performance more in this film; he seems really stiff and talks remarkably slowly throughout. I think what happened is that he had the work done (I doubt he really needed it but he and his branding team evidently felt differently and it’s his face to do with what he wants) and that it made it harder for him to talk and emote at his previous pace so they adjusted his acting style and tried to make John Wick seem broken-down and exhausted, which Keanu himself rather does. Regrettably this hindered my enjoyment of this picture because it just made Keanu Reeves even more boring to watch act than he usually is. He has grown a lot into being much less of a bad actor than the unskilled performer people made so much fun of in the Nineties, and this feels uncomfortably close to a regression toward the Keanu mean.