Songs, Stories and Truths

I read four children's books. I watch three movies. I read a comics collection and three nonfiction books.

Since filing the last entry I’ve read four children’s books based on songs:

• The President Sang Amazing Grace: A Book About Finding Grace After Unspeakable Tragedy, words by Zoe Mulford, artwork by Jeff Scher, adapted from the short film of the song performed by Joan Baez.

• Forever Young by Bob Dylan, illustrated by Paul Rogers. This is part of a series of children’s books illustrating Dylan songs, most of which are quite good.

• Singing in the Rain, based on the song by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, pictures by Tim Hopgood.

• Moon River, based on the song by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini, pictures by Tim Hopgood. I love this song and reading this illustrated version twice in the same week has had it drifting dreamily through my head for days.

I watched the 2005 Rob Schneider gross-out comedy Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, the direction of which is suspiciously credited to someone named, or working as, Mike Bigelow. It’s one of those movies one hopes will be so-bad-it’s-good but instead is merely bad. I could posit a sort of bad-movie sine wave, whereby if something fails to be so-bad-it’s-good while still managing to be a huge piece of shit, it makes it even worse than either being so-bad-it’s-good or being plainly bad, which makes it utterly valueless as an entertainment experience, which in itself is something to comment upon and marvel at, which does give it a certain distinction for being even worse than so-bad-it’s-good. Not in any way entertaining to endure for eighty-three drearily mirthless minutes, but interesting afterwards to sit in dismayed awe of. Call this category “so-(so-bad-it’s-good)-it’s-bad.” And then grok that it’s just another crest of the sine wave into the realm of “so-(so-(so-bad-it’s-good)-it’s-bad)-it’s good.” All quite clear? I don’t recommend this picture.

I’ve recently revisited Joel Coen and Ethan Coen’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski and David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network. I mentioned two entries ago that The Social Network is one of my favorite Fincher movies and my enthusiasm for it hasn’t diminished. As for The Big Lebowski, this was possibly the first time since its theatrical release that I sat down and watched the whole picture in one sitting at the correct aspect ratio, and I think I’ve arrived at the deepest understanding I’m ever likely to cultivate of what makes this movie so good and why it remains evergreen nearly a quarter-century after its release. Articles, books and term papers can and have been written about this picture and I don’t claim to have exhaustively understood a movie as dense, layered, nuanced and well-crafted as this one. I’ll organize my Last Thoughts On The Big Lebowski (For Now) by breaking them out into a list of things I think this movie is about, clear-eyed in the knowledge that I’m potentially missing any number of details, subtexts and implications. Reach out or buy me a drink if you want to point out to me what I’ve misunderstood or mistaken about this deliriously great movie.

• It’s set in Los Angeles during the time of the Gulf War. The two most significant characters are Jeff Bridges's The Dude and John Goodman’s Walter, close friends both perhaps fifty years of age, the former a stoner-burnout conscientious objector and the latter an unhinged, divorced gun-nut Vietnam veteran who is obsessed with militarism and the memory of his wartime experiences. They’re bound together by their shared devotion to the sport of bowling and are spiritually mediated by their gentle, innocuous and mysterious omega wolf teammate Donnie, played by Steve Buscemi, whose childlike open-mindedness soothes and absorbs the sparks generated by his argumentative friends. Much of the fun is in seeing these characters careening off one another and disagreeing about almost everything while holding together as a unit for the sake of their bowling league championship, which is more important to them than anything else in life (because they don’t have much else going on, until the movie’s action kicks in). Maybe they also bowl for the social aspect of the sport, which juxtaposes diverse personalities and gives people time to drink, smoke and bullshit while competing.

• This touches on another theme: how Los Angeles brings different kinds of strange and eccentric people and cultures into contact, conflict and concert with one another. The bowling team comprising a triumvirate of best buddies with almost incompatibly different personalities is one example, while in the larger setting of early-Nineties L.A. they also encounter a Reaganite philanthropist (the “Big Lebowski” of the title), a trio of dispossessed has-beens from the Krautrock scene, pretentious representatives of the over-inflated high art market, members of the pornography industry, a legendary but down-on-his-luck television writer, dim-witted thugs, a low-rent private investigator and various outsider artist weirdos. And the mystical cowboy narrator, both literally and metaphorically a rambling man who is brought smolderingly to life by Sam Elliott in one of the greatest and most peculiar screen performances I’ve seen. And that’s in a movie packed to the brim with great performances.

• The choice to set the film during the Gulf War has some resonance that it’s taken me a long time to begin to understand. I think part of the point is to take men of The Dude’s generation who witnessed the Vietnam era in American life (as did the Coens) and observe their disparate reactions as they watch their country stumble headlong back into the arena of international military misadventure. The film also pokes lighthearted fun at the rise of early-Nineties P.C. culture, for example by having Walter, usually the most brash and offensive member of the bowling team, chide The Dude about using the “preferred nomenclature” after The Dude utters an antiquated ethnic slur.

• In terms of story, as far as I can tell, The Big Lebowski is basically a hopelessly over-complicated Chandler-style mystery plot that would have been at home in a black-and-white noir picture — but jarringly transposed onto a dazzling, tacky, candy-colored Nineties Los Angeles landscape of bright lights, cheap neon and stucco exteriors. I imagine the Coens did this just to see what would happen.

• I’m sure I’m late to this party, but it’s only now that I’ve contemplated The Big Lebowksi as the Coens’ tacit response to Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino’s groundbreaking and industry-rattling film of four years prior. The connections between the two movies are too superficial to read much into but too numerous to dismiss out of hand. Both are noir pastiches set in Los Angeles with byzantine plots, sprawling casts, metatextual self-references and parodic nods to other genres and formats. Both are beautiful, grotesque, funny and violent pictures with stories centered around similar MacGuffins of much-coveted briefcases that may or not contain things of immense value. If anything, the Coens answered Tarantino’s brilliant salvo with a cannonading response of at least equal genius, but they had been making good movies and honing their schtick for a while before Tarantino came along, so maybe he drew inspiration from them first. Or maybe there was just something in the air in the Nineties that made Hollywood’s best oddball filmmakers want to start telling self-reflective, stylistically audacious stories about L.A. Or maybe it’s simple coincidence. In any case, I think both are good movies.

• Underneath all of the wacky bells and whistles, The Big Lebowski is a standard-issue Coens movie where weighty stakes like birth and death, sin and redemption or the purpose of a human life become gleefully, comically irrelevant by being reduced to props in what is, from the standpoint of the viewer, a screwball comedy and cosmic joke. The characters are grappling with what to them are matters of great importance, but if they could see the whole picture they would cackle along with us at its absurdity. Good artworks have the power to universalize aspects of our experience and help us imagine what it would be like to perceive reality more (or less) objectively, and in their best movies the Coens exercise their finely-tuned sense of how to derive from this creative process a film-going experience that is horrifying, exhilarating and, of course, deeply funny.

I read another fine collection of late-period Gary Larson Far Side comics, this one called The Curse of Madame “C”. In the prose realm I read three non-fiction books variously concerned with history, epistemology, political philosophy and American civic engagement.

The 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth is the first I’ve read by the journalist and author Jonathan Rauch, who seems to have seen precisely the sort of intellectual argument demanded by our troubled times and taken it upon himself to answer the call with clarity, insight and humor. Rauch is determined to plant a rallying flag for what he calls the “reality-based community,” those who know that objective reality exists, however poorly equipped any individual human being is to grasp it, and that fallibilist systems for generating and testing scientific, political and moral knowledge are the best methods available for negotiating a functional understanding of the material and social environments that we have to coinhabit. Rauch evinces particular reverence for the political insights that James Madison brought to the work of designing an American Constitution that would balance competing interests while incorporating mechanisms for error-correction. Rauch correctly explains why no working theory about anything is ever final or irrefutable, that it is only as good as the best available critique and that a healthy individual, institution or society should welcome well-reasoned criticism as a potential opportunity to bring a model of perception closer to an accurate reflection of reality. He explains the idea of objectivity and our relationship to it from the ground up, starting with classical philosophical quandaries and proceeding to root out present-day enemies of the reality-based community in every corner of the ideological landscape and confront them in detail, apportioning equal scorn for practitioners of trolling, disinformation and cancel culture (a term Rauch doesn’t like, preferring to call it “coercive conformity”). His writing style is warm, elegant and accessible, which is lucky for us since this is perhaps the most important nonfiction book that attempts to outline the contours of truth and reality at a moment when we’re all struggling to maintain the flimsiest of holds on those very concepts. Don’t miss this one!

Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution is something I found in a Little Free Library and is the sixth book I’ve read by James M. McPherson, a Princeton University professor emeritus and the historian of the American Civil War who has managed most successfully to make the wealth and depth of his knowledge accessible and interesting to a popular audience. McPherson is a great writer and his monumental text Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era is usually cited as the best single-volume work on the subject. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution was published in 1991, a few years after Battle Cry of Freedom, and comprises a series of essays that, as McPherson notes in his introduction, “originated as lectures or papers to audiences ranging from fellow historians to that indistinct but real entity, the ‘general public’.” The book should be of interest chiefly either to an expert or to a Civil War hobbyist like myself. For the uninitiated, I would suggest starting with Battle Cry of Freedom.

After McPherson’s book I read the short book This America: The Case for the Nation by the Harvard University historian Jill Lepore. I think I would have done better to have first read Lepore’s lengthy single-volume These Truths: A History of the United States, particularly since Lepore herself mentions in her introduction that This America is “a long essay, really.” McPherson’s work suggests that the same might be true for Lepore’s: a great historian who knows her stuff is probably more at ease stretching across the pages of a sprawling tome with room to incorporate background, context, nuance and colorful details. This America was published in 2019 before Lepore or anyone else knew the circumstances or outcome of the 2020 American presidential election and it has a straining urgency, as if Lepore was intent on making a stand, come what may, on behalf of the worst and best of her country. I learned some interesting facts but got worn out by the loping, recursive, scattershot structure of many a paragraph. I predict I’ll have a better time with the much-praised These Truths, and will let you know as soon as I get around to it.