Treachery Afoot

I watch seven pictures. I improvise a scenario for a hypothetical film. I give up on a book and read seven other books.

Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper, 1969. Probably head and shoulders the best of the Sixties counterculture drugs/freakout/road genre. Actually a very good movie not as a genre piece but just on its own merits. Hopper performs in the movie alongside one of the other screenwriters Peter Fonda; they play two motorcyclist dropouts named Wyatt and Billy who do a drug deal on the west coast and then ride all the way to New Orleans to the strains of fully too much nondiegetic Steppenwolf music. On the way they have three significant encounters with people from wildly different types of communities — an isolated farmer and his family, a commune of free-loving hippies and a town of good ol’ boys instantiated most saliently in a great acting job by Jack Nicholson as an open-minded alcoholic square who respects Wyatt and Billy as fellow troublemakers and hits the road with them.

Notably all three of these disparate clusters of Americans treat Wyatt and Billy very magnanimously and benevolently. It’s not until they get to Louisiana that the trip literally and figuratively turns bad and Wyatt, Billy and George eventually reach their gruesome manifest destinies. The locals treat them with suspicion and mistrust them the moment they make their first stop in the Southeast; at one point Wyatt appears to have a premonitory vision that they are going to die violently. What’s surprising isn’t that this ends up happening but that the way it plays out is so utterly pointless and inconsequential for Wyatt, Billy, George and their murderers.

It’s signalled throughout the film that Wyatt and Billy are heirs to the American cowboy tradition. But they are traveling from west to east, reversing the traditional directional trajectory of American adventurism and expansionism, and so could be viewed as charting an outlaw’s crusade into the psychological interior of a country that in 1969 was asking some very difficult questions about itself and needed a few good freaks, outsiders and psychonauts to help brave uncharted territory. This movie explores this emotional, geographical and cultural terrain with subtlety and insight and remains unfailingly interesting for ninety-six minutes. Nicholson’s outstanding performance towers above many of the other good things about this all-around fine picture.

The Insider, directed by Michael Mann, 1999. There are two movies by Michael Mann on this entry’s list, one good and one not so good. The Insider is the good one.

Mann followed up his 1995 masterpiece crime epic and character study Heat with this awards-bait Prestige Drama for Serious Adults, based on a true account Mann got from a magazine article about a scientist who blew a whistle on the cigarette industry and the CBS News producer who had to fight tooth and claw to get the story out in the face of opposition not just from the tobacco lobby but from his own corporate media bosses who were afraid of the cost of simply reporting the truth.

One of the broader moral questions The Insider aims to address is whether and how elite journalists, the kind we used to rely on and trust back when the objective truth mattered to most people, can do their job of bringing more and clearer information to the public when a corporate profit motive sometimes incentivizes them to do the opposite. On an individual level the film looks into the personal and professional costs of doing the right thing in a difficult situation, or of even figuring out what the right thing is, which can sometimes be much more agonizing than actually doing it.

Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, actors of different generations from different parts of the world who were both doing some of their finest-ever work around this time, are so marvelous here as to essentially vanish into their respective roles as the brilliant, flawed, conflicted scientist and the aggressive, intuitive, principled journalist. The great thespian Michael Gambon and screen legend Christopher Plummer gamely show up to do excellent and finely-honed supporting turns.

All of the costumes are good and believable and not of the sort that usually draw one’s attention, but I noticed in particular that two minor female characters played by Gina Gershon as an intimidating corporate shill and Debi Mazar as a capable journalist, who of course are both very fine-looking women anyway, are gussied up in very slick, chic, remarkably cool Nineties outfits, hairstyles and makeup.

Overall this movie is good, a little deflated in the third act and surprisingly visually dated. I remember as a teenager thinking that The Insider was a bold and probably superior followup to Heat but as the decades have passed I feel the reverse: Heat (not to mention at least two of Mann’s pre-Heat pictures) have held up somewhat more sturdily than The Insider, which is still worth watching but not where I would recommend starting for someone who had never seen any of Mann’s movies.

Kramer vs. Kramer, directed by Robert Benton, 1979. An uninflected and workmanlike look at what it would be like for a man to practice being a single father after his wife abandoned him and their son, something of a novel concept in 1979. For some reason this movie is well-regarded critically but actually it’s fairly smug, unimaginative and sometimes unrealistic. Dustin Hoffman is supposed to be relatable as the struggling single father but he comes off cringily self-satisfied playing a bratty man who fails from win to win, acts like something of an asshole and has the film’s moral victory gift-wrapped and hand-delivered to him in the denoument. Skip this one unless you need to watch it for a paper you’re writing or unless you’re a Meryl Streep fanatic and just want to see her do her usual incomparably fine work in what was one of her first significant roles.

Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, 2009. Art-house provocateur Korine made this conceptual film which is meant to look like found footage depicting bizarre small-town degenerates having sex with trash, pretending to have sex with trash, murdering someone, singing nonsense songs, getting fucked up and other stuff. Trash Humpers is mildly diverting but ultimately is the same as all of the Korine material I’ve seen: tedious, containing a few generally arresting images of striking beauty and horrifying grotesquerie, and très cringe when you can see Korine and his collaborators either reaching too far to appear outré or trailing off without an ending because they’re making this shit up as they go with too little earnest intention. Trash Humpers finally provokes neither thought nor offense. And it mostly doesn’t entertain. So I conjecture that Korine accomplished approximately none of what he presumably set out to do.

Blackhat, directed by Michael Mann, 2015. Mann’s last extant feature film. It’s lowest-tier Mann but it still has a few interesting moments, concepts and images, even if they have to be appreciated more or less in isolation because they don’t fit into a cohesive whole. There are two very cool and peculiar shootout sequences that are both composed with unusual and distinctive action choreography, a couple of telling camera shots rich with suggestive details and some quietly strong supporting performances from good character actors. That last bit is interesting because the main actors kinda suck, not necessarily because they perform poorly but because they seem to have been cast with the broadest possible appeal to provide a blank template on which the viewer can project herself. The muddled plot isn’t worth unpacking in detail; it’s crime-genre expert Mann engaging with topics that were prominent at the time like cyber-crime, overreach in American governmental surveillance and opportunities for new kinds of mischief and perfidy afforded by the process of globalization. It’s quite a morass and has the feel of Mann gathering to his breast various loose tropes from the James Bond franchise, the Hong Kong action subgenre and his own earlier and better work. The aforementioned two action sequences are worth observing in isolation.

Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021. I really adored this movie. Like most people I dig Anderson’s pictures, Inherent Vice notwithstanding, and Licorice Pizza finds him in fine fettle. A big part of the Anderson mythos is his emergence from the San Fernando Valley of the Seventies and since this is when and where Licorice Pizza is set one likely has to consider this film as being deeply personal. I’m guessing certain components might even be autobiographical in kinda roundabout ways.

The light-footed, zigzagging story involves a WASPy teenaged professional actor and a Jewish mid-twenties Valley girl, two individuals at personal crossroads both casting about for new directions in their lives. Over the course of the story they try, fail and try again to be more or less than best friends against the backdrop of shifting social mores and the gas shortage of the Seventies. Their city of residence and the cultural milieu of their era mean that they also rub elbows with eccentrics, assholes, addicts, overly ambitious entrepreneurs, politicians, faded showbiz types and other kinds of Hollywood weirdos.

Indeed Licorice Pizza is about too many disparate and interesting things to go into here. But Anderson has always been exceedinly great at weaving multicolored threads into a seamless garment and this one comes together beautifully. It’s funny, engaging and affecting. A couple of touches seemed noteworthily unrealistic to me but I can’t quite work out how much I care. I’ll sift through those feelings and report back on my second viewing some time.

Outstanding casting and acting all around in Licorice Pizza. Sean Penn and Tom Waits are precision-molded into small but fascinating and very funny supporting roles. The two main characters are convincingly and engagingy played by Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim.

The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers, 2022. I was on a mild dose of psilocybin and a less-mild serving of absinthe while watching this picture, which made an already-strange and occasionally tedious movie more strange and less tedious.

The Northman is by Robert Eggers, the guy who made the excellent movies The Witch and The Lighthouse. The Northman is his first non-great movie, though it’s far from shitty. It’s a trippy, brutal, psychedelic viking Bildungsroman, which sounds better in theory than it works out here in practice. I know half from vaguely remembering reading about it and half from piecing it together from watching that The Northman is a retelling of a viking legend that inspired the Shakespeare play Hamlet.

The dashing, feral warrior protagonist is played by Alexander Skarsgård. An actor named Claes Bang shows his exquisite bottom. The ingenious young actor Anya Taylor-Joy shows her exquisite bottom. Skarsgård doesn’t show his butt as far as I can recall, though most of the rest of him is visible at one time or another and it’s pretty remarkable the physical condition he got into for this part — bigger, gristlier and far more ursinely imposing than the lean, sculpted and chiseled look he usually sports.

After watching The Northman I texted a good friend who had already seen it a severely oversimplified theory that runs something like: The Witch is about womanhood. The Lighthouse is about homosexual male love. The Northman is about manhood. So according to this theory Eggers’s next picture might be about homosexual female love. (I think he’s already got something else in the offing but I’m not saying what he will do, I’m saying what he should do.)

The next day I was on a much more generous helping of psilocybin and my pal texted me back to tell me to expatiate on this theory by pitching an idea for this hypothetical Eggers project and casting two female actors for it, an “industry veteran” and a “promising newcomer.” For good or probably ill, what I improvised goes like this. (These particular performers are two artists whom I respect and I’m casting them in these non-existent roles because I think they could play them well, not because it reflects anything about the actual actors themselves. They would be playing characters in this scenario, you see.) Industry veteran Rebecca Hall plays the world’s most brilliant up-and-coming primatologist. As a PhD candidate in her twenties she spends her free time as a DTF Third Wave feminist slashing a sex swath through the pubs, clubs, raves and back alleys of the metropolis where her university is located. She bangs her thesis advisor, her undergraduate students, the president of the university, several other competitors in the field, all of her acquaintances and a few strangers. All of these encounters are with men. Ultimately she becomes disillusioned by this lifestyle because men are either too dishonest with themselves and with her for her to be able to manage these relationships and encounters safely and productively and enjoyably, or they are too easy for her to control and not interesting enough to be challenging. Upon earning her degree and being promulgated as the preeminently promising primatology practitioner on the planet, Dr. Rebecca is given the keys to the academic kingdom and told she can do whatever she pleases because she’s just that goddamn good. So she renounces sexual relations with male humans and follows her intellectual curiosity into the research field, going into some remote and untamed sector of the planet where viciously warring tribes of great apes have made the terrain impassable for human beings. This is probably in an isolated valley somewhere. No primatologist has dared to venture into this area to access the cache of discipline-redefining scientific data the community is sure foments within because the zone is too hot. She goes in and gets the data by taming the silverbacks and alpha chimps through the wiles of her sexuality. She uses sex to drug and control the leaders of the warring tribes of apes and in turn imposes detente on the hot zone and bring peace to the valley. And by exploring the sexual behavior of these creatures so directly and intimately (by participating in it), she collects ground-breaking data that only further cements her status as the world’s top expert in the field. (Probably without fully disclosing how she got it.) She disseminates this data through a drop-point so that she never has to see another human being, which goes on for years as the legend grows of the brilliant scientist who disappeared upriver and hasn’t been seen in years. In apes Dr. Rebecca finds averbal, animalistic sexuality of a kind today’s broken, neurotic, maladjusted, self-deceptive men can only aspire to. She gets what she believed she wanted from heterosexual sex but minus all the bullshit and crossed wires of compromising and vulnerable interaction between sentient humans. The interloper is played by the New Zealand comedian and podcaster Alice Snedden. After years have passed and the legend of Dr. Rebecca has grown, Snedden’s character is earning her own PhD, perhaps at the same university. This character has grown up with the changing times and is entirely at ease living out an individual personal life and online brand that are inextricably intertwined. This aspect of this character doesn’t have a moral valence; it’s just matter-of-fact — she is fluent in the new digital dialects and cultural currencies that are reshaping modern society, something to which Dr. Rebecca is ignorant and heretofore immune, since for years now she has lived, socialized and fucked only among the apes. So Snedden’s character figures she can tie her thesis project into her online life by documenting a journey into the hot zone valley to find Dr. Rebecca and bring her into reacquaintance with human society and first contact with the Gomorrah of podcasts, social media feeds, cancellation campaigns, tribalized cos-play activism, disinformation cults and subscription-based neo-blogger newsletter platforms where people for example pass the time outlining nonexistent movies. She twitches and live-streams and truthfully socials her way into the valley like a Twitter-era Stanley in search of her breakout Livingstone scoop. She finds Dr. Rebecca and now we close in on the transition from Act I into Act II. I suspect that the point of no return is crossed when these two characters somehow meet beneath the moonlight, perhaps with a congress of great ape chieftans observing in awed silence as Snedden’s character shows Dr. Rebecca what a woman can give her that no male Great Ape, human or other, has ever been able to provide. So at this point in a sense Dr. Rebecca has exposed herself to a kind of vulnerability to which she has not previously been subject, which means that, were her motives to be anything other than pure, Snedley could potentially use Dr. Rebecca’s own weaponized feminine wiles against her and by controlling her seize control of the allied ape armies Dr. Rebecca has united under her aegis. This would be around the middle of the Act II where this begins to come into clearer focus and things start to really heat up, partly because the sexual intensity between these two characters is explosively genuine. But treachery is afoot. In fact I hearby declare Treachery Afoot to be the working title for this project. Because humans alone among Great Apes walk upright on their feet and practice conscious treachery, you see. Eventually the intrigue, seduction dance and shifting political alliances lead to a succession of regressive ape wars and a dynastic power struggle. All concerned parties must make their way downriver back to civilization (though Snedley has never been fully out of contact with it and in fact has introduced the toxic virus of online culture to Dr. Rebecca’s atavistic Shangri-La, which will play into the proceedings during the transition from Act II into Act III). Anyway, you get the idea — a lot of interesting shit plays out downstream of these developments which completely works dramatically and has, uh…something profound to say about gay female love and sex as refracted through the kind of Boschian genre nightmares at which Eggers excels. I can’t get into all of the details, which I absolutely have all worked out to a very fine degree and am certainly not leaving out simply because I have been too tired from my day-job to make up, the mind-blowing profundity and sublime satisfactoriness of which I would be all too happy to share with Eggers’s people if anyone can get me in touch with them.

Anyway, I didn’t like The Northman as much as his very fine first two pictures. I’ll be watching to see what he comes up with next.

I read two mediocre children’s books, Aquarium by Cynthia Alonso and Neon Leon by Jane Clarke, illustrated by Britta Teckentrup. As I suggested several entries ago I did breeze through Sona Movsesian’s book The World’s Worst Assistant and finished reading The Lines Are Drawn: Political Cartoons of the Civil War, the completion of which left me in need of a new library book of classic newspaper comics to crack into.

To this end I decided to finally find out what the deal is with that strip Moomin by Tove Jansson that I’ve been vaguely seeing around for years. I read the first collection Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume One, loved it and have moved right along to the second book. It’s a whimsical, playful, restrained strip drawn with quiet confidence and formal experimentalism, instantiated for example in how Jansson regularly divides panels not with simple borders but some sort of vertically-aligned doodled object which gestures towards the contents of that particular day’s strip. Like for example if that installment’s three or four panels are devoted to a scene depicting eating, the panel borders might be represented by standing-up silverware.

The content has to do with an eccentric, naive hippopotomus-like character in a misguided search for his place in an alienating world. Eventually he finds a family of relatives with which to live who are as odd as him. One of the best and most distinguished things I can say about Moomin is that for all of her sweetness, generosity and positivity as a storyteller Jansson appears to have next to no interest in conventional joke-telling. Punchlines sometimes fall out in the middle of strips and rarely arrive in the final panel; each installment seems at once to quietly peter out while also setting up a quaint but hair-raising cliffhanger that makes you want to keep reading. It makes the Moomin narrative universe feel expansive and open-ended. One can imagine inhabiting such a place while still finding it cute and pleasant.

As I mentioned earlier, I had planned to go from Sona’s memoir to Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I’ve only read two other Dickens books, one of which Hard Times made almost no impression on me and the other David Copperfield I very much enjoyed. I’ve seen two of the filmed versions of Great Expectations and enjoyed both to differing extents.

But I was surprised at how bad the novel Great Expectations is! Clearly my expectations were too great. I really tried to get into it but finally gave up before I reached the hundredth-page mark.

In frustration I stormed into the library and grabbed the first short war book I saw, The American Revolution: A Concise History by Robert J. Allison. It was readable, informative and interesting, just what was called for under the circs. The copy of Great Expectations that I found in a Little Free Library and failed to finish now sits disconsolately in my work locker with my last stopping place still dog-eared amongst its meandering, tiresome pages. I’m not sure exactly why but I still want it around as some kind of talisman, some indicator that I haven’t quite given up on it yet. With my mixed success it’s possible that I’ve quite simply read enough Dickens to last me the rest of my life, though I hear tell that A Tale of Two Cities is worth a look. (I first heard this quite insistently from my ninth grade English teacher but ended up having to simply take her word for it. Her word and her failing grade.)

So after the limp dick I got from Dickens and my quick-and-satisftying Revolutionary dalliance with Allison, I decided to start re-reading some of the earliest work by James Ellroy, a writer whose work I’ve loved for twenty-five years. I re-read his very first novel Brown’s Requiem, written when Ellroy was thirty-one, fresh into a new life of sobriety and non-criminality and paying his bills working as a golf caddy. It’s a trashy and amateurish private eye Los Angeles noir set contemporaneously around 1980 and contains literally every single one of Ellroy’s pet obsessions: L.A., cars, golf, dogs, boxing, classical music, recovery and sobriety culture, quirky nicknames, incest, serial murder, pornography, police corruption and even a passing reference to the Black Dahlia murder, a subject about which Ellroy would eventually work up to writing his own quite good novel and which he himself would be the first to admit has long been a proxy for his own desire to spiritually and perhaps literally fuck his mother who was murdered in a sex-related homicide when Ellroy was a prepubescent.

Brown’s Requiem is not an especially good book but it shows a certain level of sophistication, imagination, ambition and a flair for convincing procedural detail. What’s thin and cringey here are the tin-eared dialogue and disproportionate stretches of prose where Ellroy zeroes in too obsessively on the wrong details.

After finishing Brown’s Requiem I’ve started right in on his second novel Clandestine, the only early Ellroy book I’ve never read before. Straight away one feels the improvement: Clandestine is less stiff and kicks in the door of the reader’s attention with a sure-footedness and sense of controlled grandeur that is absent from the stammering patchwork of Brown’s.

It’s noteworthy that with Clandestine Ellroy also had several significant insights that later helped to guide the course of his career and which he eventually refined in much better and more ambitious stories. With Clandestine he transposes the action back to Fifties L.A., the era and place in which Ellroy himself was a little kid and when his mother’s murder froze him aesthetically, politically and morally in a bygone historical period that the adult Ellroy evidently needed to examine more closely and reimagine for himself. And in Clandestine, instead of making the narrator/protagonist a lone private investigator going after morally-compromised cops as in Brown’s Requiem, he makes main character Fred and his partner Wacky themselves morally-compromised cops. At this early point he was already delving deeper back into time and further into moral ambiguity and complexity, correctly intuiting that going as far down this rabbit hole as his bleak, deranged, freewheeling imagination could take him and then forcing himself to write a way back out of the darkness to a sense of grim, conservative resolution would provide a template for the rest of his brilliant career. I’m intrigued to see if he sticks this landing with Clandestine and then I’m planning on skipping along through further re-reads of some of Ellroy’s early and classic mid-period works. I think I’ll dip in and out to indulge in some other types of books along the way but I’ll let you know it unfolds.