Whale and Leviathan

A round of Roulette generates some nostalgic ruminations on the passage of time. More from Amend. Two pictures. A new novel and an old children's book. An experimental new feature of this newsletter.

As usual let us put the sections for this newsletter into a randomly-determined order — except for an experimental new feature which I will install at the very end. Feel free to skip ahead if you want to check it out. It’s definitely going to make this space a more lively place for me to hang out.

But first:

Roulette

Haw! Horrible, Horrible Cartoons by Ivan Brunetti, read in 2021. I wrote about this one back in the summer of 2021 when I was voluntarily homeless, just out of a very important and difficult relationship, traveling across the United States of America entirely by train and only stopping in municipalities where I had a free place to crash.

The entry wherein I wrote about Brunetti was also the first one I published after I got word that my good friend and mentor the photorealist painter Don Jacot had died suddenly of a heart attack. If I hadn’t left Seattle on July 30th, 2021 and stopped off to see my friends in the Bay Area I would not have seen Don on August 5 which turned out to be the last time before I got the call on August 26 that they had found his body in his combination apartment/studio where Don spent up to eight or ten hours a day researching and painting.

Unlike me Don was neither a dilettante nor a struggling semi-pro with a succession of annoying day gigs; he was a master craftsman, skilled technician and ingenious draughtsman who was monastic in his professionalism and work ethic. He was also part of a circle of friends who were there for me during an earlier interlude of homelessness when I had to improvise new digs because a roommate who kept firearms in the apartment started behaving erratically.

The angry gun-having roommate was later arrested on drugs charges. The house I ended up living in before relocating to Seattle eventually burned and the owners relocated to the New York area. Don’s death was basically the closest thing to a good reason I had to come back to San Francisco in the fall of 2021. Others from that circle, like Don all decades older than me, encouraged me to return since I had no other plans or obligations at the time. I inherited two really cool black jackets from Don, one in suede and one in leather, which I wear as often as I can.

Birdsong: A Story in Pictures by James Sturm, read in 2018. Sturm is my former cartooning teacher and I was sleeping in his studio when I read that Brunetti book; in fact I took it from his shelves. He (Sturm) is one of the best cartoonists working today and another essential mentor figure in what passes for my artistic life.

Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons by Flannery O’Connor and edited by Kelly Gerald, read in 2021. Wrote about this one for the all-O’Connor entry back in March of 2021, almost exactly four months before I clambered on that train and started rambling about the U.S.A. I’m still mostly pleased with the writing and editing for that entry and O’Connor will always be one of my very favorite authors.

Lucy-Goosey

While reading a treasury of Bill Amend’s FoxTrot strips from around the turn of the new century I stumbled upon what I at first thought must have been a tribute to Charles Schulz on or around the date of the last printed Peanuts newspaper strip in February of 2000. However some research indicates that it was from later in May of that year and was actually part of a coordinated tribute in which many newspaper comics referenced Peanuts in their strips in recognition of Schulz’s having died the day before that last Peanuts strip was published. Amend’s offering is a stretched-out single-panel offering that has Jason, the youngest and most entrepreneurial of his five Fox family protagonists, whistling to himself while manning a stand where a cup of lemonade costs $50,000 while Lucy Van Pelt occupies her famous “Psychiatric Help 5¢” booth, casting a sidelong look at Jason and asking “Got a nickel?”

If I understand the gag correctly Amend has Lucy basically telling Jason he needs professional help, which is true. While he’s the smartest of the Fox force five Jason is also arguably the least self-aware and most unstable, and Lucy’s “psychiatric help” was always rather more insouciant, acerbic and tinged with cynicism than with any genuine desire to talk Charlie Brown through his problems. Jason Fox wouldn’t have given Lucy as much time and attention as Charlie Brown but was probably much more in need of being put in his place in the way only Lucy Van Pelt can cut someone down.

Film Selections: Plumbing Depths

The Whale, directed by Darren Aronofsky, 2022. The fact that this incomprehensibly overrated piece-of-shit film is so tastlessly tone-deaf in its pandering depiction of a very heavy person turns out to be one of this picture’s relatively less significant flaws.

Of greater consideration is that the writing is unforgivably bad. First of all making a good movie out of a play, even a good play, is difficult for a number of reasons (Glengarry Glen Ross is a case study). I haven’t seen The Whale performed on stage but the source material here is cringily trite and banal. The premise is that a severely obese shut-in man with regrets about his choices and mistakes spends the last week of his life eating himself to death and having implausible conversations with his friend, his ex-wife, his daughter and a door-to-door religious proselyte. The setup is lazy, the structure pat, the relationships inauthentic and the dialogue laughably bad. It’s mostly characters telling us out loud how we’re supposed to feel, and we don’t find ourselves agreeing because the film hasn’t earned our pathos.

You know what else is surpisingly bad for an awards-bait prestige Makes Ya Think piece that was feted for its good acting? The lousy acting. Brendan Fraser does okay performing through a kitschy fat suit as the troubled protagonist, though his work here is hardly the genius accomplishment for which he’s been lauded. A charismatically gritty (and this is neither here nor there, but quite physically attractive) actor named Hong Chau does serviceably well playing the friend. Two young actors named Sadie Sink and Ty Simpkins stumble with the teenaged daughter and twenty-something pilgrim roles; their in-development acting talents just can’t mine anything useful out of characters so thinly-sketched and clunkily-written. Very surprisingly the worst performance is by Samantha Morton, a capable actor whom I’ve seen do solid work in several other films but who is miscast and adrift here, most observably in one knock-down/drag-out emotional confrontation with Fraser playing the ex-husband who abandoned her and their daughter for a relationship with someone else.

We learn that it was the death of that unseen character, the protagonist’s gay lover, that launched Fraser’s character onto his spiral into reclusivity and food addiction, and here we get past the dramatic problems and come around to the moral aspects on which this film tumbles still further down. Aronofsky almost as a rule produces films that are flashy and interesting on the surface but have far less moral and emotional signifiance than they purport to. The signature Aronofsky tone is “I’m saying something Controversial yet Profound here. Don’t look into it too closely and can I have my award now please.” In The Whale he in fact is not only inartfully drawing undue attention to The Point but also badly overselling it.

That Point is mainly to humanize and empathize with a really obese, lonely and depressed man. Could they have found a genuinely severely obese person who is also a good actor to take this part instead of putting Brendan Fraser in a fat suit? I would guess probably so, but then again casting a famous actor and dressing him up in silly makeup is more in keeping with the general tone of implausibility in which The Whale swims.

Is it offensive that a protagonist with a severe weight problem is also depicted as disgusting, pathetic and addicted to food? It wouldn’t be if the writing and presentation were good enough to make us accept that the filmmakers were telling a particular story about a believable individual. Since the writing, acting and gestalt are all so flimsy, it ends up feeling like the moral arc of the film was all sewn up before the first frame: Lemme tell you a story about a sad and obese person. But wait, get this: he’s a complicated, relatable human being with flaws and problems! Betcha didn’t see that coming. Aren’t we good people for deigning to depict a really fat guy like he’s our equal? In my view there’s a better and less pandering version of this concept waiting to be explored by more subtle artists.

So basically there are no winners here, except for Fraser who appears to be launching a decent career comeback off of this project. The filmmakers don’t get to be the great people they smugly imagine themselves to be for telling this story, the actors stagger through their badly-written roles, some hypothetical obese person who is a good actor may or may not have missed out on a chance to do something more interesting than what ended up onscreen and I, against my better judgment, sat through a really bad movie.

Leviathan, directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012. Brilliant piece of documentary filmmaking set entirely on a commercial fishing trawler that operates in blistering rain on an unfriendly sea. This film takes an up-close real-life depiction of hardy, taciturn men at work in an uncompromising environment where industry and brutalist design confront the sublimity of nature and makes from it something meditative, gothic, pseudo-abstract and oddly metal. (Noteworthily the only significant piece of music in this scoreless film is an off-camera speaker playing a track from the excellent record Leviathan by the great metal band Mastodon.)

The boat itself becomes a marauding predator, swooping up massive nets full of fish which are deposited in flopping, bulging-eyed Lovecraftian piles on the deck to be hacked and eviscerated by teams of merciless and professionally unsentimental slicker-armored fisherman. The camera prowls the deck in searching, aggressive handheld closeups and frequently bobs below the surface of the water finding odd angles from which to frame metal surfaces, murky depths, emotionless wildlife and micturating subsurface streams of bloody viscera into eye-gouging experimental compositions.

The sound design is a huge part of the fascination here; what few words are spoken by the people on camera are obscured into barking static by the relentless drone of the ship’s motor and the punishing rhythms of wind and rain, and when the camera (and I guess whatever sound recording devices were being used) are allowed to bob and jut beneath the water’s surface the sound is mixed and edited to derive from the harsh grating of air and water against the microphone a type of harsh, hypnotic noise to outclass Reed, Patton or Stockhausen. The only moments of respite we get are a claustrophobic sequence in a steamy, grimy shower and a long take of the ship’s captain staring in blank exhaustion at an off-camera television until sleep kidnaps him before our eyes.

This is a film that shows everything and tells nearly nothing, leaving the viewer to draw her own conclusions. It’s fairly easy to infer though that the life of a commercial fisherman is not for the faint, that it’s worth getting a close look at just exactly how the fish I regularly eat get out of the ocean, that human bravery and ingenuity are astonishing, that industrialized predation is more admirable in its adventurousness than condemnable in its avarice and above all that skilled image-makers have a refined facility for traversing the line between between beauty and horror. Most highly recommended.

Melt ‘n Honey

Jeremy P. Bushnell is a professor, novelist, publisher and experimental artist based out of Massachussetts. He is also a close friend of mine and sometimes serves, quite soberly and patiently, as an intellectual and ideological sparring partner when I’m in a feisty mood.

In 2020 I read his second novel The Insides and enjoyed it. His third book Relentless Melt has just been published and I lobbied the San Francisco Public Library to buy some copies. I am reading one of them now.

It’s early going and I’m still getting a grip on just what Relentless Melt is as a work of fiction. It has a workmanlike but elegant prose style, though Jez does have an interesting habit of composing his omniscient narrator’s third-person viewpoint in the present tense. In this case that choice takes on an extra resonance because the story is not contemporaenously set (another first for Bushnell from what I understand): the action is set in Boston in 1909, though there are already hints that this may be one of those “a Boston not quite our own” kind of fictional universes. In fact Jez either suggested to me a while back and/or I am inferring for myself that all three of his novels may or may not be set in the same fictional universe, in which case based on having read The Insides I can anticipate some otherworldly components in Relentless Melt. Call it “realist magicalism,” a conceit whereby supernatural narrative possibilities are close to the base layer of the story and more something to be confronted and manipulated than interpreted or marvelled at.

I’m not far enough into Relentless Melt to know if I’m right. I know the story is about Artie Quick, a young girl from a “laboring class” background who works at a department store, is masquerading as a man to get into a night school course about how to become a detective and hangs out with a photographer-nerd friend named Theodore who is much richer but no less eccentric than Artie herself. Artie also has a mysterious associate named Zeb who in some way seems to be the motivation for Artie having enrolled in the class, though that’s about all I know at this point. Zeb must be closer to the heart of whatever mystery Artie is out to solve, and Theodore’s facility with cameras must be part of the assets that will help her get there.

The other thing I have a sense of from the jump is that issues related to sexual identity and gender are going to be an overt component of this story in a way they weren’t in The Insides. I find this topic generally a lot less interesting than does the moralistic and screechy discourse of our moment, but both as Jeremy’s friend and independently as someone who has chosen to read this book and wants to give it my full attention and take it on its terms, I’m going to try to keep an open mind. The book’s dedication is to “the questioning, and the nonconforming,” and while Jez and I have had some productive and stimulating disagreements about sex and gender, there are times when I’m still not quite sure I fully understand his positions. In a roundabout way reading Relentless Melt might help me with this, but on the other hand Jeremy is too good of a novelist to let moral instruction or any particular didactic point of view get in the way of his story being interesting to read and characters empathetic enough to care about. More to come on this book once I can bite off and chew a healthier chunk of it. I am going out this evening specifically to read Relentless Melt at a bar and, as I offered to do in last issue of this newsletter, also read some of it on the way home in a self-driving robot car.

In a Little Free Library I found a copy of and read The Big Honey Hunt by Stanley and Janice Berenstain. I grew up reading the Berenstain Bears books in the Nineties but surprisingly it never occurred to me to investigate the origin of the series and the earliest books.

I don’t want to do any research and find out if I’m right about this, but I’m fairly confident that The Big Honey Hunt must have been the very first book in this illustrious and long-lived franchise. The publication date goes back all the way to 1962, Sister Bear is nowhere to be seen and the other three main characters aren’t even called by their names Mama Bear, Papa Bear and Brother Bear. The text is written in a Seuss-light rhyme scheme and the illustration style is crude compared to the later installments I read as a kid. Of all the Stan/Jan B-bear books to stumble upon in the street, and in fact the only one I’ve read in well over a decade or more, I’m providentially pleased that, like Papa Bear rooting for honey in the “wrong kind of tree” before deciding to simply buy the good stuff at the store, I traced this venerable series back to its source.

And now for the first new feature I’m adding to this newsletter since I introduced Roulette back in March of 2021. I’m going to experiment with including polls to let people vote on what movies I watch and write about. For lack of a snazzier title I’ll just call this section the Polling Place. For now this will mostly have to do with movies but I hope to also try out using polls to determine what prose and comics I read. Let’s see how it works! What should be the VERY NEXT MOVIE I WATCH for this newsletter? I have never seen any of these.

• To Have and Have Not, directed by Howard Hawks, 1944. Bogie/Bacall war/adventure classic; said to be good. Like any red-blooded American man I have a big thing for Golden Age Lauren Bacall but I think I’ve only seen one of her pictures in my life.

• They Saved Hitler’s Brain, directed by David Bradley, 1968. So-bad-it’s-good television movie classic; said to be extremely, laughably not good.

• Straight Time, directed by Ulu Grosbard, 1978. Some gritty crime drama I never heard of with Dustin Hoffman; a reader told me to check this out when I mentioned thoroughly disliking the Hoffman picture Kramer vs. Kramer.

• Blackenstein, directed by William A. Levey, 1973. A blaxploitation/horror film that has been hanging around my Kanopy watchlist for a while.