Monsters, Heroes, Grifters and Ordinary People

Careening through a cavalcade of books and pictures from different eras, genres and formats.

No deep dives or ambitious agendas this entry – just some loose threads and catching up. After a career-spanning assay of Flannery O’Connor’s work, I’ve been ricocheting through books across varying genres and formats: bizarre newspaper comics from 1957, influential underground comics from the Eighties and Nineties, five children’s books, two recent non-fiction books on third-rail cultural issues and an excellent new comics collection by a close friend and colleague.

I read a slim book about walking called Walking by Henry David Thoreau, which in 1862 was a magazine essay, which in 1851 was a public lecture, which I only learned of when I found a copy of the book in a Little Free Library while out on a walk in 2021. Little Free Libraries also coughed up an “Authoritative Text Edition of a Great Play” by Oscar Wilde, a writer I’ve been assigned in school and have been meaning to get around to actually reading ever since, and the novella Seize the Day by the great writer Saul Bellow which I read for the first time in about fifteen years and which cut much deeper this time around. I’ve evidently matured, or deteriorated, into an ability to empathize more acutely with Bellow’s desperate, pathetic and screwed-up protagonist, and while I had a harder time relating to the characters in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the biographical essay about the author helped me feel an inspiring sense of connection to the fascinating character of Wilde himself.

I’ve been all over the shop with movies as well. Shin Godzilla from 2016, directed by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, was recommended to me by the aforementioned cartoonist friend. I’ve never been particularly into Godzilla films or the kaiju genre, but I dug this weird, subversive Japanese reboot. It’s constructed around a running gimmick where almost nothing of substance can get done to deal with Godzilla’s novel threat to Tokyo because of the suffocating rituals of blame-shifting and finger-pointing that the bloated government has to perform before any decisions are made; the heroes who rise to meet the challenge turn out to be, in the movie’s lingo, the “lone wolves, nerds, troublemakers, outcasts, academic heretics and general pains-in-the-bureaucracy.” (From my limited understanding, some of the conceptualization of the original Gojira/Godzilla character was rooted in postwar nuclear paranoia in response to the atomic bomb attacks on Japan, whereas Shin Godzilla is the first Japanese Godzilla film to be released after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which appears to be the basis for this contemporary critique of opacity and inaction on the part of the Japanese government.) The monster effects in this movie are strange and affecting, managing to pay tribute to the old-fashioned style of an actor in a rubber suit marauding atop a model Tokyo while coming as close to suspending the twenty-first-century viewer’s fine-tuned sense of disbelief as any other movie that traffics in the dark art of CGI. Maybe the future of savvy creature effects is in having the good sense to price in the worst features of both the old and new schools and see if they somehow cancel one another out. If you want to get a sense of what I’m trying to describe, check out Shin Godzilla and see if you agree that the effects borrow something from both the old and new Godzilla movies and end up working better than either.

The Grifters from 1990, directed by Stephen Frears, is a lousy picture with an outsized reputation. For some reason this self-satisfied movie is apparently very well-regarded and people claim to have enjoyed it, but it’s beyond me how anyone really could. The inscrutable and meandering story seems constantly on the verge of a plot turn that will kick the proceedings into gear, any gear at all. The relationships between the three main characters are weighted with a stillborn implication of tension and suspicion that goes out of its way to avoid ending up anywhere interesting, even when the protagonists finally, thankfully start trying to kill one another off. The performances are from three capable movie stars who have all done good work elsewhere, but only Annette Bening finds anything interesting to do with her character (which she does, and that’s above and beyond looking good in her nude scene).

Bill & Ted Face the Music from 2020, directed by Dean Parisot, is one I’ve really been looking forward to catching up on, having been a fan of the science fiction buddy adventure comedy Bill & Ted series since I was a little kid. The previous film, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, was one of the movies I obsessively watched and rewatched on VHS in preadolescence, and while Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a lot of fun, Bogus Journey is stranger and more off-kilter, and sometimes even kinda grotesque and unsettling. It’s also surprisingly literate, with a story based heavily around an extended parody of Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal. Anyway, this third film Bill & Ted Face the Music is a perfectly serviceable offering to satisfy fans and entertain newcomers. The person with whom I was watching had never seen the previous films and was moved to open tears at the ending, and I can’t say my eyes were altogether dry. The first two movies’ sense of freewheeling anarchy has been dampened down a bit in the newest film and a few gags drag on too long, but the storytelling is sprightly and refreshingly unselfconscious, the performers game and the dénouement rewarding for those of us who have been waiting nearly thirty years for it. Movies like this are for tough times like these.

Less of a natural go-to is the serious, downbeat Ordinary People, released in 1980 and marking Robert Redford’s first outing as a director. I’ve put off watching this well-regarded movie for years because I’ve never been able to conceive of a good reason to invest two hours in a beige, schmaltzy drama about an upper middle class suburban family navigating the rocky aftermath of a teenaged son’s accidental death and his brother’s guilt-impelled attempt at suicide, but it turns out there are at least two. The first reason is admiration for exquisite craftsmanship, which is certainly to be found in the subtle, modest and hyper-realistic mise-en-scène but is on most prominent display in the thoughtful, economical writing and meticulous casting and acting which work in concert to bring every character to life as a believable, soulfully-inhabited individual. This includes those who only have a few scenes or lines, though the most impressive performance is the masterful one delivered by Timothy Hutton as the distressed son, backed by sturdy turns from Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland as his parents. In making the leap from movie star to prestige director, Redford stacked the deck in his favor by picking an unambitious project and populating it with ace technicians and collaborators. The second reason to watch this movie snapped into focus for me about ten minutes in: these themes and topics might seem bland for modern tastes, but as the title flatly suggests, this choice of subject matter must have actually been quite unexpected and might even have felt downright subversive in 1980, coming as it did at the end of the so-called “decade under the influence,” the American film renaissance of the Seventies. This was the feted period in Hollywood history when the old-guard studio authorities temporarily surrendered control to the first generation of filmmakers who had grown up watching, re-watching and obsessing over film and were desperate to pursue experimental approaches and strange, dark themes and subjects. Redford came to prominence in this era and was one of the performers who simultaneously thrived as a marquee idol and amassed a substantial bounty of artistic credibility through participation in interesting, radical and creative new directions in cinema, but with his first directing gig he evidently anticipated the Reagan-era cultural shift that was just around the corner and chose to do what few of his peers had done in the previous decade: make a good, conventional, believable film about ordinary people. (For comparison, in the same year as Ordinary People, two of the best directors of the Seventies submitted Raging Bull and Heaven’s Gate – ambitious, distressing, violent, beautiful pictures about decidedly non-ordinary people in quite extraordinary circumstances.) To make this attempt at all, let alone to do it so well, is a fascinating choice which works brilliantly precisely because everyone involved is treating the endeavor with sincerity, seriousness and professionalism.

The aforementioned cartoonist friend who recommended Shin Godzilla also did storyboard work on the Netflix animated musical feature film Arlo the Alligator Boy, a 2021 release directed by Ryan Crego. With much respect to Crego and my pal and everyone else on the team responsible for the film’s warm, lush, inviting look, this movie fell flat for me because of a banal and mildly nonsensical story and also because the music, which makes up a significant part of the ninety minutes it takes to get through the picture, was not in the least to my taste. An inoffensive confection with some great design, pretty colors and good animation.

I’ll close this entry out with a round of Roulette and mention three randomly-selected books from my reading list of the past decade.

Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn, the Deluxe Edition by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, read in 2015. This was the beginning of a fun new Batman continuity in the DC comics multiverse. Dick Grayson, who formerly fought crime as Batman’s sidekick Robin, has stepped into Batman’s famous cape and cowl in Bruce Wayne’s absence while the role of Robin is now being occupied by Bruce’s son Damian Wayne. (Damian is the offspring of Bruce and the villainess Talia al Ghul, on whom I nursed a massive childhood crush as she was incarnated on television in Batman: The Animated Series.) Morrison is a writer famous for playing metatextual games with the superhero comics genre and Quitely is a well-respected artist with a clean, confident look that recapitulates old-fashioned action comics design into something that feels thrillingly fresh and alive. You can really feel their fun, open-minded outlook and sincere good faith in this collection.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, read in 2011. I mentioned in an earlier entry that this was the third book I read in 2011. In late 2010 I read Paul Theroux’s excellent travel memoir The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas, in which Theroux documents traveling mostly by train from Massachusetts to Argentina, reading several books along his travels. He mentions reading and enjoying Pym and I decided to check it out because I had previously only ever read Poe’s short stories and a few of his poems. Pym is a novel with a meandering, episodic structure that stays deeply engrossing throughout with relentlessly, imaginatively bone-chilling and horrifying ongoing turns in the plot. It’s about a young man who sets out to work at sea and is befallen by one frightening and disastrous scenario after another. It’s bleak, grim and fantastically well-written; Theroux steered me right. It’s been a while and I gotta read this one again some time.

Wilson by Daniel Clowes, read in 2012. Clowes, a living master of the graphic novel form, did something interesting here back in 2010 where he told an ongoing long-form story about a single protagonist but broke it up into individual newspaper-style strips and frequently switched the look and tone from one strip to another. It would feel like showing off if not for the fact that Clowes is one of those genius draughtsmen who can easily switch styles convincingly, and the unusual structure gives a unique pulse to the story of a smug, narcissistic, deeply unlikable protagonist’s personal mistakes and wastes of his life. As he regularly does, Clowes made a worthwhile and novel contribution to the comics form with this book, which was later turned into a movie that I haven’t seen which received mixed notices.