These Storms

A round of Roulette. I read another children's book and re-read one of my favorite novels. More Popeye. A Hollywood film with some stuff about Japan and a Japanese film with some stuff about storms.

Roulette

Madeline’s Rescue by Ludwig Bemelmans, read in 2016. Looking over the complete reading list I see that I was on a Madeline kick that year, reading six of Bemelmans’s children’s books about his signature character and her Parisian boarding schoolmates. This had nothing to do with my volunteer work; I was not using Madeline books to help my learner with her adult literacy work. I was just reading them to get caught up on what the franchise was all about and because I dig the illustration style.

I Wonder by Annaka Harris, illustrated by John Rowe, read in 2018. Man, that’s wild — I was just thinking about this book yesterday while walking to my job, probably because I was listening to a podcast episode hosted by Annaka’s husband, the writer and philosopher Sam Harris.

Like her husband Annaka Harris is an author and meditation teacher. Rowe’s daydreamy, competently Photoshoppy illustration style is not to my taste; what I really like about I Wonder is that A. Harris set out to write a children’s book about how great it is to not know things because it means we all have an endless supply of stuff to learn about. The point is to instill in young readers a delight in being a skeptic, idea-haver and wonderer. As the adage goes, or ought to: get to ‘em while they’re young and keep ‘em curious, open-minded and dogma-resistent.

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor, read in 2021. O’Connor, one of my very favorite writers, just came up in the Roulette round for the last entry. Once again I must refer readers to the all-O’Connor entry of One Could Argue.

The Two Jameses

As mentioned several entries ago, I chanced across a work by a children’s book author and illustrator named James Yang and loved it so I am looking into more of his stuff. Bus! Stop! is similar to the first one I read but with a horizontal layout; the gimmick this time is that a kid waiting over the course of a long day for the right bus to come by his stop decides not to get on an increasingly whacky assortment of bus-length public transit vehicles including a covered wagon, ocean liner and spaceship.

I’ve moved along from The Big Nowhere to L.A Confidential, the next Ellroy book both in terms of publication history and in the chronology of the L.A. Quartet. I used a lot of ink in the last entry describing the innovation Ellroy came up with in The Big Nowhere to split the narrative focus across three protagonists whose fates eventually become intertwined; L.A. Confidential finds him taking this structure and turning all of the dials all the way up. From the explosively violent prologue onwards this one is denser, bigger and crueler — a much more sprawling cast of minor characters to pay attention to, a protracted timeline (if I remember correctly from the first two times I read it L.A. Confidential takes place over seven years where The Big Nowhere was set over about three weeks) and a more intense, biting, take-no-prisoners prose style.

I’ve scarcely been able to put this one down. I’m really glad to be revisiting these books at this point in my life because my ability to follow and understand them is enhancing my admiration for how great Ellroy is at the project of crafting epic L.A. noir nightmares. In The Big Nowhere he seemed intent on keeping an ambitious story with a converging array of threads pretty tightly spooled up. But in L.A. Confidential it’s like, fuck it — let the stitches rip, let the blood and bile gush into every corner of Fifties Los Angeles and its various subcultures and let the tripartite protagonists all get swept floundering into the deep end of this mucky pool, as deep and dark and unsettling as Ellroy’s imagination can make it. (Could be more in later entries about various subplots like the shotgun massacre, the rot behind a Disney-like animation dynasty and Dragnet-like television program, a serial rapist/murderer, vicious fist-fights, incestuous smut, prostitutes surgically remade to look like movie stars and/or the epic gangster prison train breakout sequence, the significance of which I partly forget and am eager to revisit.)

People like me who know and love the L.A. Confidential film adaptation might have trouble, as I do, in not visualizing the literary protagonists as the actors who were so brilliantly cast to play them onscreen, but the book is so very rich in detail and backstory that if you live with Exley, White and Trashcan Jack Vincennes for long enough the images of Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe and Kevin Spacey become a bit less indelible. Tom Hardy would make a great Bud White if the film were being cast today so maybe I can sub him in for Crowe. I reckon Robert Pattinson could slim down and clean up to occupy Exley’s specs for me. I honestly can’t think of any mainstream film actors working right now who could do Vincennes well but for some reason prime-era Gary Cooper has something hovering around the mouth and eyes that seems to embody Trashcan’s combination of discipline, self-loathing and flashy careerism. So let me see if that can help realign my relationship to the character in differentiation from a 1997 Kevin Spacey performance on which I had a massive nonsexual crush as an L.A. Confidential-obsessed lad.

For Dudley Smith I’ve been experimenting with crowding his ingenious portrayal by James Cromwell out of my mind by visualizing a cross between mid-career Lee Marvin (tall and authoritative with a feeling of cool lethality) and Samuel Beckett (for a hatchet-faced incisiveness and for the character’s famous Irish heritage and lilt). Unfortunately this often seems to just average right back out to the Cromwellian. I’ll keep tinkering with the formula.

Speaking of the voices for these characters: Ellroy’s way with dialogue at this point in his career had become noteworthily more sophisticated and efficient. Scope this exchange between Exley and White, two tripartite Ellrovian protags who despise one another as much as any pair of tripartite Ellrovian protags I’ve yet encountered:

“She sees through you, Exley. You can’t buy her off with teddy bears.”

“Don’t you want the case cleared? Or are you just frustrated there’s nobody else for you to kill?”

“Big talk from a brownnosing snitch.”

“Did you come here to get laid?”

“Different circumstances, I’d eat you for that.”

“Sooner or later, I’ll take you and Stensland down.”

“That goes two ways. War hero, huh? Those Japs must’ve rolled over for you.”

Ed flinched.

White winked.

Blammo. Ellroy gets better in leaps and bounds from book to book. To cover the time differential in L.A. Confidential he also starts breaking out of the omniscient narrator’s voice to introduce coordinated jumps forward over periods of months and fictitious newspaper articles to advance the story and to distinguish what his fictional public is perceiving from what he, we and the characters know is really going on with their investigations into the Bloody Christmas scandal and the Nite Owl Massacre. These storytelling innovations would become staples of later and still better works in the Underworld USA Trilogy.

Popping Off

At this poin in E.C. Segar’s Popeye: “I Yam What I Yam!” the comics are basically a series of seafaring exploits to different ships and islands where Popeye is in his seamanly element. Segar doesn’t stop to worry much at this point about working out some narratively smooth way to introduce new villains for Popeye to sock — he’s bringing them avalanching into the storyline in groups of three or four. This all started with Castor Oyl figuring out what to do with his African whiffle hen and hiring Popeye on as a sidekick but now their roles of prominence are quite thoroughly reversed. Segar and his newspaper must have been getting clear feedback from the marketplace of readers. A hero was born. I’m having fun.

Film Selections: An Accidental Theme of Japan

Rising Sun, directed by Philip Kaufman, 1993. I was fascinated by this movie as a kid and indeed the picture is operating at the intellectual level of approximately a ten-year-old child (with some noteworthy titties included for the pubescent). A deeply weird movie that is bad in unique ways.

Based on Michael Crichton’s novel, which I read in the Nineties when Crichton was all the rage but didn’t understand and remember next to nothing about, Rising Sun is nominally a sex-murder mystery encased within a larger setting about corrupt Japanese business meddling in American corporate and political interests. The improvised wrapping paper haphazardly taped around this premise is a mismatched buddy-cop coupling that slathers a half-interested Sean Connery, playing a mysterious LAPD Captain who dwells among the Japanese and knows their customs, against a doing-his-best Wesley Snipes as the police detective who wants to solve the murder against the behest of the more powerful forces that are conspiring in a hopelessly implausible coverup. Connery gets to show off his golf swing and Snipes gets to show off his martial arts prowess. Harvey Keitel plays a policeman character who takes time out of a tense SWAT raid on a suspect’s house to espouse the paranoid and mildly reactionary thesis of this Orientalist caper — that the American theater-going public of 1993 should be concerned about those strange Japanese people and their fetishizable customs. LOOK OUT, the movie tells us: they’re sexy and they’re weird and they’re coming for our American way of business. To top off this grating moral the movie also fucks around with odd time-jumps and flash-arounds that make it even harder to follow. Good actors, of which this film has many, can’t save this incoherent mess from having been poorly written and edited.

After the Storm, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2016. This came as a recommendation from a writer and filmmaker with whom I’ve grown friendly and it was a good one. I had never heard of this director before and now I’ll have to dig into his work more.

After the Storm is an emotionally evocative and contemplatively-paced family drama on an intimate scale with the kind of meticulously-curated mise en scène that operates with such a gentle touch that you forget to pay attention to it. The story concerns a guy played by someone named Hiroshi Abe who seems like he has everything going for him - tall, handsome, intelligent and creative - but is nevertheless floundering in midlife: his critically-acclaimed novel failed to lead to a sustainable career and he’s struggling to admit to himself that a demoralizing gig at a private detective agency that began as research for a new book has simply become his job. He lives in squalor and isolation, nurses a gambling addiction and is unwilling to put in the effort to get his shit straightened out so he can convince his ex-wife to let him have a relationship with his estranged son.

The editing roves about gently in static and well-composed framing choices, letting the characters speak quite plainly and calmly even when their spirits are suffused in sadness or consternation and putting the subtly handsome images on an even footing with dialogue and relationships — a lot of enjoying this picture is about just watching events unfold and sitting with them. After the Storm is utterly guileless; it’s not out to make the viewer “get” anything because what it has to say is coterminous with its dramaturgy and quiet beauty. It’s all there on the screen and one gets too engaged with the experience to want to decode or unpack it. It’s just a straightforwardly-written and well-acted story about disappointment, regret, mixed feelings and the resilience of hope. That sounds sappy if you haven’t seen the finesse with which Kore-eda and his collaborators pull it off.