Prisoners and Outlaws
A round of Roulette. I enjoy a great film. I start reading a novel. I read lots of comics in different formats.
Roulette
Scrambled Eggs Super! by Dr. Seuss, read in 2016. Looking over the complete reading list I see that I read seven Dr. Seuss books in 2016. Scrambled Eggs Super! was the last one.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling, read in 2013. The gal I was dating at the time was a devoted Harry Potter fan, so I consented to reading the books aloud together. We made it through four of them before the end of that relationship. I wasn’t interested enough to finish reading the series on my own. The film adaptation of this particular Harry Potter book is the only one of the film series I’ve ever seen, because I had a chance to see it in a theater for free during its initial run.
Safari Honeymoon by Jesse Jacobs, read in 2015. Jacobs is an outstanding cartoonist, though this peculiar short graphic novel is of more interest for its clever imaginary biology and trippy layout and sequencing than its coldly alienating and threadbare narrative. This is probably quite literally by design, since Jacobs is a masterful designer and the story of Safari Honeymoon seems to be little more than a device over which to drape his outstanding cartoon artwork. This book is quite interesting and certainly well-drawn.
Film Selection: A Great Picture from a Legendary Filmmaker
I’m prepared to argue that Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon is his best non-documentary work since Goodfellas. It is certainly among the finest films he’s made. It ties together most of his signature themes - early cinema, organized crime, explosions of violence, Catholic guilt and repression, tinges of psychedelia, popular music and the friction at points of cultural tension or change - into a kindling tapestry that is most surprising in how uncomplicated and straightforward it is. Scorsese has earned a right to exercise a liberal final cut and he seems intent on utilizing it to make his pictures as long as he wants, to deploy these imposing run-times to build stories using a contemplative tone and patient determination. Killers of the Flower Moon perfects this model with a narrative that blooms gradually, sours into a spreading sense of dread and concludes with a fourth-wall-scraping coda reflecting on Scorsese’s own career, on the sins and potential of American media systems and on big swaths of American history itself.
It’s based on a nonfiction book from 2017 by someone named David Grann. The story has to do with a period of time in the first few years of the 1920s when apparently the Osage Nation of Oklahoma held a tremendous amount of oil wealth, leading to a lot of Osage people who owned properties and fancy things, and a lot of non-Osage people who conspired to gain access to and steal from them. The film seems to obliquely comment upon the racist traditions of silent film and Golden Age Hollywood depictions of American Indians by reorienting and factualizing them: exploring a historic time and place where the American Indians held economic power and the white Americans infiltrated their society with nefarious intentions to fleece and murder the Osage people.
It’s clear from the start that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, a morally-pliable and none-too-bright veteran of the Great War, is being drawn into this web by his conniving uncle played by Robert De Niro, an established white land baron and phony friend to the Osage who has gone as far as to learn their language and customs. This turns out to involve cajoling DiCaprio’s character into marrying a prominent Osage woman played by Lily Gladstone and participating in a series of murders designed to make sure that all of her family’s oil money can be transferred out of Osage control. All of this is established early on in the film; there is no mystery about what’s happening. What creates suspense is the desire to learn the details of how it will unfold and who will pay what kind of price for these horrors.
DiCaprio fits into his part and does some of his finest acting to date. De Niro demonstrates that he will still show up and do serious and challenging film work; this role is both a bit out of his usual line and also wholly successful. Gladstone is an actor I had never heard of before she started getting all of her richly-deserved awards buzz for her stellar acting in this movie. Her character is positioned in a troika of shifting fealty and mistrust with DiCaprio’s, who loves and denigrates her in an equal measure that deeply confuses and ultimately undoes him, and De Niro’s, who is bad to the core and misrepresents himself charismatically enough to seem jovial and trustworthy on the surface. When DiCaprio’s character marries Gladstone’s she is clad in a dress made from an American flag: the filmmakers allow for a symbolic impression that the greedy white Oklahomans are conspiring against and killing off both the ancient and traditional native America as well as the conceptualization of it that the budding silent film medium, rapacious oil industry and centuries of murderous westward expansion have projected onto the landscape and its people. (There is even a pointed allusion to Fox News, to media as inflammatory political catalyst, woven directly into a period-appropriate newsreel sequence.)
All of the visual components are wonderful to behold. Expert camera work, a few of Scorsese’s signature ambitious long takes, stirring compositions, exquisite costume and set designs, tasteful and unobtrusive use of CGI and a rich, complex and varied use of color. The cast sprawls into lots of small characters, Osage townspeople, outlaws, lawmen and others, and the performances are universally good. The original score by Scorsese’s longtime pal Robbie Robertson, who died right after finishing work on this film and to whom the completed production is dedicated, is supremely cool and original, some of the most striking film music I’ve encountered. (There is also lots of nondiegetic usage of some of my favorites in early American recorded music from sources such as the Bristol Sessions.)
From the trailer I thought this was going to be some banal collage of There Will Be Blood and Boardwalk Empire. But I can’t come up with anything I disliked about this movie. I’m very impressed with how it balances ambitious scope, claustrophobic intimacy, historical significance, good storytelling and beautiful sounds and images, many of them inviting complex and challenging interpretations. The best new picture I’ve seen in quite some time.
Back to Ellroy
I’m reading James Ellroy’s 2021 novel Widespread Panic and having a good time, much better than with the portentous and lumbering This Storm. Ellroy has one of the book’s imaginary femmes fatales claiming personal responsibility for the real-life 1946 King David Hotel bombing catastrophe by the terrorist group Irgun. The book’s narrator/protagonist, a fictionalized version of sleazeball PI and scandalmonger Fred Otash, is trying to marry off the ex-Irgun broad as a beard for Rock Hudson. He also hobnobs with James Dean, babysits Liberace’s pet leopard and participates in a threesome with Elizabeth Taylor. Ellroy is having a high time with this one and so am I.
Horror and Imprisonment
I’m still reading Peanuts and Popeye most days. I also read two graphic novels and a graphic biography.
Tender is the first graphic novel by an old acquaintance of mine named Beth Hetland. The back cover eloquently says that Tender “tears down the wall of a genre - body horror - so often identified with male creators” and that it “uses horrific tropes to confront women’s societal expectations of self-sacrifice despite those traditional roles often coming at the expense of female sexuality and empowerment.” It does all that through episodic, non-linear riffing on the personal growth and emotional deterioration of its protagonist Carolanne, a pleasant young woman with some complex and questionable traits that grow and overtake her as she sacrifices increasingly distressing parts of herself to manage the demands placed upon her by ambition, commitment and pregnancy. Hetland draws the entire piece in a deceptively cartoony and sweet-natured style while maintaining an enveloping sense of space and light and a technician’s trained hand for perspective and architecture. Time of day is evocatively conveyed through use of color and becomes an important story motif, especially as a disaffected Carolanne stands in the same spot while the shadows grow menacingly longer and during vivid nightmare sequences that presage the Twilight Zone-worthy ending that messes with your mind and isn’t easily shaken off. Highly recommended.
Fatcop is a lengthy and expansive new graphic novel from the eminent cartoonist Johnny Ryan. I’m generally a great admirer of his work but the schtick is wearing a bit thin in this tossed-off crime/horror farce. It has his signature components of garishly old-timey goofball cartoon stylization and a no-holds-barred determination to disgust, insult and offend. But Fatcop suffers from a feeling like Ryan wasn’t interested in his own work enough to take it anywhere novel. He has also exhibited a much finer sense of layout, composition and contrast in earlier work. Not highly recommended, especially if you can instead get your hands on Prison Pit or Angry Youth Comix.
Lastly I was intrigued to learn of the existence of a graphic biography of Natan Sharansky entitled Natan Sharansky: Freedom Fighter for Soviet Jews by Blake Hoena and Daniele Dickmann. It’s a succinct and informative telling of Sharanksy’s life from childhood Soviet chess prodigy to Refusenik leader to his years locked up and tortured in the gulag system to his eventual successful emigration to Israel and renown as an advocate for liberalism and democracy. The 2021 book is handsomely drawn and colored in a realistic style that enlivens the subject and explains who Sharansky is for readers new to the topics of the Refusenik movement and of Soviet Jews fleeing persecution to join Israeli society. As someone with an American aunt who was involved in advocating for the Refuseniks and distant relatives who have recently fled Russia for Israel, Sharansky has recently become a figure of increasing interest to me. I may take a crack at reading one or more of his books.