Virtue and Insecurity
Eight pictures and five books.
My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, 1985. Back in May I jotted down some notes about mostly not liking Frears’s work. This overrated and underwhelming lo-fi kitchen sink social drama confirms the trend.
Daniel Day-Lewis is always a pleasure to watch work, including here in the earliest of his performances I’ve seen. But he doesn’t seem to be able to mine a compelling or relatable character from this peculiarly-structured and disjointed picture, garishly overwritten in some parts and confusingly underwritten in others. It has to do with two young men on the verge of adulthood in Thatcherite London, one of them from a motivated and brutally domineering Pakistani immigrant community and the other a rough-and-tumble brawler with a background in anti-immigrant reactionary street violence (Day-Lewis plays this latter character and an actor with whom I’m unfamiliar named Gordon Warnecke plays the former). Having grown up together across political and class divides, they reignite a discreet sexual relationship while collaborating on Warnecke’s character’s goal of refurbishing a laundromat owned by his family. It’s possible I’m missing some important cultural context, but I suspect it’s more the thin and confounding dialogue and characterization that kept me at arm’s length. The writer of this piece is the well-regarded author Hanif Kureishi whom I’ve heard is supposed to be good but I didn’t like his work on My Beautiful Laundrette.
The Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer, 1962. Movies that are at once about so many different things aren’t usually this enthrallingly watchable unless those involved are all operating at peak performance, which they are here. A never-better Frank Sinatra holds his own among great performances by Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh and others.
This wasn’t my first time seeing this picture but I wasn’t able as a youngster to pick up on all sorts of nuances, contexts and subtleties, like for example the insistent and recurrent Lincoln imagery that presages the shock and horror of the story’s assassination-themed climax.
A critic named Howard Hampton wrote a great essay called Dead Center in which he accurately characterizes The Manchurian Candidate as “the first authentically postnoir thriller.” I experience the picture as a boiling-over cauldron of noir burnout, Cold War paranoia and the Sixties novelty of cynical political gamesmanship being refracted through and amplified by the new possibilities of television broadcasting for the first time. It also uses the medium of cinema to depict the delusions brought on by brain-washing and mind-control in clever ways that wouldn’t be possible in prose.
This is one of the most unique and engagingly well-done movies of its era, especially when you consider that it seems to eerily presage the jarring violence with which the American paranoiac tradition would spin out of control just over a year after its release with the assassination of Sinatra’s friend John F. Kennedy. Included in the well-cast and uniformly excellent roster of performances in this film is the ice-cool, elegant and stirringly sexy turn from Leigh performing some deeply weird dialogue.
I’m an admirer of the 1998 action/espionage thriller Ronin which was also directed by Frankenheimer and includes a frenetic zoom-reveal during the climactic action sequence that has always appeared to me to be a direct reference to a nearly identical shot during the climax of The Manchurian Candidate. I guess Frankenheimer either made a little in-joke or just felt like paying tribute to himself, a privilege he certainly was entitled to as far I’m concerned.
Ida, directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, 2013. In December I watched a film called Cold War that was written and directed by the same filmmaker and loved every second of it. Astonishingly this earlier film Ida is every bit as good and makes a perfect pairing with its successor. Both are meticulously composed in gorgeous, understated, breathy monochromatic photography, clock in around ninety martially efficient minutes of running time and plumb depths of sacrifice, grief and hope experienced by pairs of protagonists reckoning with and attempting to outrun Polish communism.
In Ida the pair of characters comprise a young woman and her middle-aged aunt who are meeting for the first time. The orphaned girl has spent her entire life in the Church and is soon to take vows as a nun; her aunt has ensconced herself in communist ideology as a high priestess of the authoritarian government. Together they confront the ways in which they have been forced into these institutions by the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, when Poland was squeezed between two competing anti-Semitic totalitarian societies. Pawlikowski makes all of this feel minutely human and spiritually expansive and wraps it all in a well-told story that makes you care how it all turns out. (I may, or should, have described Cold War in similar terms.) Really beautiful, poignant, engrossing film, well-done all around.
They Live, directed by John Carpenter, 1988. I’ve been meaning to watch this for years, having heard much about the famous central fight scene between Roddy Piper, a marquee star from the world of professional wrestling who plays the protagonist in They Live, and the great actor Keith David, in which they beat the shit out of each other for like ten minutes simply because David’s character understandably doesn’t want to try on a particular pair of sunglasses and Piper’s character really, really, really wants him to.
The glasses let anyone who wears them see that what looks like everyday life is a projected illusion controlled by alien monsters who dwell among us disguised as yuppie plutocrats, encouraging working folks and poor people to consume junk food and bad culture so they’ll remain ignorant, pliable serfs. It’s a gutsy message and a clever premise which Carpenter translates into a silly, sloppily-written and sometimes boring movie. The aforementioned fight sequence is a good example of what’s wrong with this picture: Carpenter seems at odds with himself about what kind of film he wants to make, reaching for laughs, scares, thrills and polemics without grasping any of them strongly enough to make me care.
Why derail the already-scant narrative momentum of the picture to have Piper and David, whose characters are on the same side, slug it out in a comically-overdone alley brawl? A pal conjectured to me that it must have been in Piper’s contract that he, a successful pro wrestler with a brand to burnish, have an extended fight sequence somewhere in the picture and I guess Carpenter just didn’t have anyone else for him to fight.
Anyway, a lot of people seem to have a generous affection for this movie and I respect Carpenter for chasing such a wild idea and making an unusual horror/action/social commentary picture out of it. But in terms of giving the viewer a fun watching experience, he didn’t stick the landing here. Carpenter and David both did much better work on their earlier and superior film The Thing back in 1982.
Sudden Death, directed by Peter Hyams, 1995. I was on a big Van Damme kick recently and it’s still kickin’. Sudden Death is Van Damme’s bid to get away with a straight-up Die Hard ripoff. The results could have been worse.
This is a good-looking A-list picture with a solid performance from the inimitable character actor Powers Boothe in the villain role. As with Die Hard, the setting is grandiose and puts many innocent civilian lives at stake; in this case it’s an NHL game with the Vice President of the United States in attendance and Powers’s character’s gang is giving the authorities to the end of the game to meet their demands before they blow up the arena and everyone in it.
As with Die Hard, the protagonist is a tough-but-humble civil servant who happens to have family on the premises. And as with Die Hard, the conflict isn’t just between good and evil but between a working class hero forced to improvise using limited resources and a well-dressed, soliloquizing villain-sophisticate who positions himself in a place of high authority both literally and figuratively (the boss’s office atop a fancy skyscraper in Die Hard and the Vice President’s private viewing box in Sudden Death).
Sudden Death is finally a middling, mildly diverting, by-the-numbers mainstream Nineties action picture that isn’t particularly good or bad, stumbles with many scenes that are either too long or too short and has one truly impressive bravura sequence, a thrilling and convincing climax that involves a helicopter plunging through the aperture of the hockey arena’s dome and looks surprisingly great. The picture should be of interest chiefly to Van Damme enthusiasts and probably no one else; that final stunt with the helicopter is pretty cool and worth a look on its own without the rest of the movie around it.
The Freshman, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1925. I love Keaton and Chaplin but this was my first time watching a picture with silent comic legend also-ran Harold Lloyd.
This movie has a control of cinematic language that is surprisingly sophisticated for its era, including onomatopoeic screen-text “sound effects” where the text actually dances and sizzles around the frame. Lloyd is a good actor and stuntman and this picture has a quaint, engaging, well-structured story about his goofy and naive character shipping off to become a university freshman with dreams of popularity and ending up as an unwitting laughing stock until he stumbles onto the football roster and careens into the end zone. Unimaginative and unambitious compared to the best competition from within the genre but overall a good movie that holds up well nearly a century later.
The Green Knight, directed by David Lowery, 2021. Great and strange. A dreamy, magical-realist, sometimes abstract Arthurian chivalric adventure that remixes a fourteenth-century Middle English poem by an anonymous author into a meditation on what it means to challenge one’s self to step out into an unpredictable world and attempt to forge a path to manhood. The simmering, super-cool gravel-voiced actor Sean Harris does a well-cast turn as King Arthur.
The protagonist Gawain begins the picture by literally mortgaging his life and future possibilities in exchange for honor and the hope for a resonant legacy; the bulk of the movie is him journeying towards a duty-bound appointment where he must prove his integrity and bravery by offering himself up to the mercy of the eponymous supernatural Green Knight, quite possibly submitting to his own death. Along the way he has a bunch of eerie, frightening, sexy and psychedelic experiences (literally tripping out on mushrooms at one point).
I like when movies use the same actor in different roles for no apparent reason or for interestingly obscure reasons, as this one does with Alicia Vikander playing two markedly different women who are both objects of lust for Dev Patel’s Gawain character. One of them delivers what may arguably be the thesis of the picture, a monologue about how the color green and everything in the universe that produces it represents the reproductive drive, temptation to impurity and persistence of the natural world that human beings seem so determined to eradicate for the sake of some flawed conception of purity and control. (Or something.)
Even if one doesn’t care for the story, this movie is a stunning and unrelenting feast for the eyes. The special effects are pretty good but most especially the hairdressing, costumes, cosmetics and set designs are simply breathtaking and on their own make the picture worth sitting through.
Hellraiser, directed by Clive Barker, 1987. This was my first time ever seeing this well-regarded and influential horror picture which, as a friend who is the same age as me correctly observed, was always very intimidating to see the cover of at one’s local VHS rental place (not to mention its many franchise sequels, which I may venture into since I enjoyed the original so much).
I never quite knew what Hellraiser was about but understood that it was woven into the fabric of the culture and had an enduring reputation as a genre classic. I’m glad I finally got around to watching it because it’s good! Low-budget aesthetic with some creature effects that are silly by today’s standards. But the character and makeup design for the villainous “Cenobites” who were on those VHS covers are genuinely cool and grotesque and actually still feel ahead of their time.
The story is solid too, functioning as all good horror movies do on two levels: a visceral level of whatever killer or monster is providing threat to life and/or limb, and a personal level on which the visceral threat represents a physical manifestation of whatever emotional or personal unpleasantness the main characters are facing. Well-done horror movies utilize the power of cinema to translate our strongest emotions into universally relatable narratives and fashion nightmares out of them — a standard horror film might make you writhe in discomfort and jump with fright but a good one will connect those experiences to some disconcerting emotional situation and will leave you less relieved that the scares are over than stuck with some unsettling moral implication gnawing at your mind. Hellraiser does this well, layering grotesquerie and over-the-top blood-and-guts effects over a story about the intoxicating thrill of sadomasochism, the shame of marital infidelity as a threat to family stability and the desire of a promising young woman to forge her own path by escaping from the literal and metaphorical house of familial horrors in which she is trapped. All of this is tied up with those compelling Cenobite characters who reduce human bodies to slabs of still-living meat designed to be pleasured and tortured beyond the scope of human understanding for all eternity, extrapolating the premise of sadomasochistic sexuality to an unsettling extreme.
This movie isn’t perfect and there are some head-scratching unforced errors with the writing and casting, but it operates impressively on limited resources and has a few interesting things to say. One has to credit Barker and company for coming up with something back in 1987 that still feels fairly original today.
I finished reading that book of dogshit “poetry” by e. e. cummings 95 poems and found at the library another installment in the “Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library,” one about dinosaurs called Oh Say Can You Say Di-no-saur? to compliment the one about prehistoric mammals that I read back in December and crafted by the same team of writer Bonnie Worth with illustration by Aristides Ruiz and Joe Mathieu.
I also read a couple of short non-fiction self-help texts by esteemed thinkers, The Means and Manner of Obtaining Virtue by Benjamin Franklin (part of the “Penguin 60s” series, another one of which was the version of Bartleby that I read around the beginning of October) and The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, written back in 1951 when Watts was living in San Francisco. I’ve recently been getting into recordings of Watts’s old lectures and, finding a copy of this short book at a yard sale, figured I should add at least one of his books to my reading list. There were two to choose from so I went with the one with a cover that advertises the book as “A Message for an Age of Anxiety.” Because I am living in one of those right now, you see.
Most importantly, I finished Anna Karenina! It’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read, a prototype for the modern novel that somehow manages to still feel light-centuries ahead of much contemporary fiction. The book describes experiences of birth, death, infidelity, passion, jealousy, heartbreak, faith, courtship, ambition, gossip, class conflict, creativity, addiction, sport, regret, unsuccessful and successful attempts at suicide and, finally and most importantly, self-reconciliation and a kind of peace and controlled elation that settles over a conscious mind as a result of a mystical experience that connects one human soul to the rest of the universe. (Tolstoy had a message for his own Age of Anxiety of the 1870s as much as Watts did for the 1950s.) As a reserved, stately, confident narrator and dramaturgical architect who stacked short chapters into a spacious and sprawling novel, Tolstoy had more resources than he needed to make all of these lofty themes fit comfortably and plausibly into one extended aristocratic social circle swirling within the magisterial unsteadiness of Imperial Russia.
In fact just about the only major human theme that doesn’t get a full treatment in Anna Karenina, though it is gestured towards at the end when a heart-scarred Vronsky and other military characters ship out for a troubled corner of the empire, is the broad subject of war and peace, which I’m guessing from its title is the main focus of Tolstoy’s only other full-length novel. That one is even longer than Anna K. and there is an extant translation of it from the distinguished Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky team who translated the edition of Anna K. that I read, so maybe a reading of War and Peace is yet on my literary horizon. (I don’t want to look into it and find out I’m wrong but I imagine, I bet correctly, that Pevear and Volokhonsky are an item. A nerdy, adorable, Russian-literature-translating item.)
I recently found on the streets of San Francisco a copy of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov, which regular readers of this newsletter will remember was described by Roger Scruton as one of “the two great works of art that have attempted to show what redemption means for us, in the world of modern skepticism.”
I don’t claim to understand precisely what Scruton meant but it’s handy to have a Karamazov around so that I can try, when I’m good and ready, to find out.