World Problems
I watch a film. I read classic newspaper comics from different but equally tumultuous decades. I read two novels.
Film Selection: First Watch in a While
Until now I haven’t watched a movie since Oppenheimer back in January. Might be the longest I’ve gone without since I first started watching ‘em. Haven’t been motivated; been much more into reading.
Anyway I finally watched Tár, a 2022 film written and directed by that guy Todd Field about a brilliant and distinguished classical music conductor, played by Cate Blanchett, who is also a complicated, mistake-prone and flawed individual. This is (I think?) the first slick, serious, mature A-list picture to embed a thoughtful character study and intelligently-constructed drama inside of ruminations on our new cultural puritanism.
This film invites different interpretive approaches, but of primary significance is the presentation of Lydia Tár as a whole and complex human being — one who at once contains the potential for creative greatness and moral failure, and perhaps also the very reversal of that. What we are finally to make of Tár, and of Tár, is left largely to us. But any interpretations are to be built up from this plausible, heartfelt, bittersweet, caustic depiction of a gay woman who has used her inherent artistic genius and uncompromising work ethic to claw viciously and/or immorally to the top of a vertiginous cultural minaret.
For its many virtues, which include stunning compositions, exquisite casting and unimpeachably tasteful editing, I didn’t come away from Tár jumping up and down with enthusiasm. It’s austere and self-serious, smart with more smirk than invitation. And for what a legendarily great actor Blanchett is, she actually seemed to me to have a bit of trouble getting her chops around some of Field’s dialogue, particularly in a lengthy establishing sequence where Tár’s being interviewed for The New Yorker.
But then there’s probably some calculation in how C.B. played Tár playing that interview. Maybe Blanchett and Field surmised that Tár had to seem phony and affected at the front of the picture so that they could spend the rest of it cutting away the aura of success and perfection that attends her technical and aesthetic genius. And a post-downfall third act set on another continent finds some clever metaphors for Tár’s confrontations with others and with the worst parts of herself as an opportunity for her to humble herself, relinquish control and take a step into a new unknown.
So I say Tár: very professionally and thoughtfully made. Overall not the tour de force some have been saying, though quite an interesting and good picture all around. We’ll see if it’s another two months before I watch another one.
Popeye and Van Pelts
I got my hands back on the library’s copy of E.C. Segar’s Popeye: “Well, Blow Me Down!”. Olive Oyl spent much of February and March 1931 trapped in an outlaws’ bunkhouse self-defensively shooting thirteen cattle rustlers in the shoulder and pushing them headfirst down a trapdoor into a basement. That same month, in a Depression-conscious sequence, Popeye and Castor come into some money and inaugurate plans for “the One-Way Bank,” an enterprise “where money goes one way only — out.” (“No millionaires allowed unless busted.”)
Meanwhile in The Complete Peanuts 1961 to 1962 Lucy screams at Charlie Brown “DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT WORLD PROBLEMS!”
Two More Ellroy Novels
I was roughly correct in May of last year when I postulated Dudley Smith “being revealed as bisexual in the newer books.” In 2014’s Perfidia, the first book of James Ellroy’s projected Second L.A. Quartet, we are treated to the bizarre spectacle of a fully-clothed Dudley seated in the office of Ellroy’s depiction of real-life Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn, dispensing film-industry gossip while Cohn, who is seemingly sexually aroused by scandal-rag tattle, pleasures himself beneath his desk. In the next book in the sequence, the 2019 novel This Storm, the reader learns of an elaborate Night of the Long Knives-themed costume gala in 1939 at which Dudley engaged in sexual activity with a drag queen whom he brutally murdered in flagrante in a burst of titillated self-loathing.
I’ve been hiding out Lucy-like from the headlines among these combined 1,291 pages of War-noir. Perfidia begins the day before Pearl Harbor and lays out the premise of how Ellroy is approaching this new series: he takes a broad smattering of characters from across the L.A. Quartet and the Underworld USA Trilogy, tosses them all backwards in time to Los Angeles in late 1941 and looks for ways to intertwine them. To take a most flamboyant and self-satisfied example, the author reveals that in his narrative universe, the real-life Elizabeth Short, soon to become known to history as the wretched Black Dahlia, is Dudley Smith’s out-of-wedlock secret daughter! Both books are full of such crisscrossing connections that strain the cords of plausibility to near-breaking. As does much else in the style and substance of this material.
Perfidia marks several Ellrovian firsts:
Four protagonists in one book.
First Asian American protagonist in the person of criminology prodigy Hideo Ashida.
First time Ellroy has spent all the book switching between third-person and first-person narration. One of the protagonists is Kay Lake (a younger version of a lesser character from Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia); perhaps half of the book unfolds in the form of her diary. Kay, a more-or-less reliable narrator who by coincidence has exactly the same prose style as James Ellroy, credits herself with lines of dialogue such as “You have a hierarchy and nonmeritocracy, offset by a paramilitary ethos and casual social codes. Close personal and professional bonds are formed within this oddly flexible structure.”
Perfidia has a quadruple-murder case of a Japanese American family the day before the Pearl Harbor bombing, fifth columnist sabotage/intrigue, competing war-profiteering conspiracies, inter-agency rivalry and a guiding theme of the nightmarish perversions of cockamamie race pseudoscience. It also has Sergeant Dudley Smith marauding Wartime L.A. doing murders, frame-ups and a self-destructive fling with none other than Bette Davis. This novel shouldn’t work but strangely it does, though I imagine someone who had never read a word of Ellroy before might find it very peculiar. At least it can be said that Ellroy’s hardboiled style is very refined and sophisticated and that his flair for just the right amount of detail makes Perfidia rather compulsively readable. I could scarcely put it down.
I can’t say quite the same of This Storm, which is confrontationally dense and layered but without a followable narrative structure. It’s clearly deeply thought out, but the numbingly complex web of conspiracies, of which Ellroy has to regularly remind the reader “It’s all one story, you see,” is interesting more in its scale than in its implications. As a nefarious character states during a pages-long expository dialogue, and this could pretty much serve as the motto for this entire novel: “You should not be surprised to see armed robbery as a recurring motif in this account of political misdeeds.” I’m not surprised, Demon Dog; I’m just vaguely lost.
This Storm picks up immediately after Perfidia, partly utilizes the same three-protagonists-plus-Kay-Lake’s-diary structure and swaps out the race science theme for the idea that far-left and far-right internationalist politics are both no more than natural resting ground for thieves and cynics of any ethnicity and sexual orientation. This plays out with the pursuit of members of a “Kamerad,” a cabal of Nazis, Stalinists and American race-hucksters who are planning their post-War futures around a cache of stolen gold. The theft of the gold some years prior, along with a murderous case of arson in Griffith Park and a triple-homicide that includes the death of two corrupt LAPD men, forms the wall of storytelling fog through which Ellroy forces readers of This Storm to peer.
Fittingly another guiding motif is that the L.A. of This Storm is enduring a sequence of historically strong rainstorms, a metaphor for the maddening, all-consuming jingoistic fervor, moral confusion and existential fear that juices the moods, sensibilities and libidos of all of these characters, the fully fictional and the real-life-based alike. (Where Perfidia has Dudley cavorting in and out of illicit love with Bette Davis, This Storm finds him beating up Orson Welles and suborning Welles as an informant.)
Ashida, a fascinatingly complicated genius in lust with Dudley, comes to a singularly and anticlimactically unsatisfying conclusion near the end of This Storm. Other noteworthy protagonists include Ellroy’s fictionalization of William H. “Whiskey Bill” Parker, AKA the Man Who Would Be Chief, and Parker’s paramour Joan Conville, a tall, attractive, strong-willed redhead from the Midwest who meets a grisly end — in other words, yet another case of Ellroy installing into his fiction a stand-in for his own mother, the murdered memory of whom is perhaps the only woman Ellroy can ever really love. I can gingerly recommend Perfidia, though must again stress that I can’t fathom what someone unfamiliar with the Ellrovian gestalt will make of it. And I can say that I admire This Storm from the safe remove of no longer being involved in the process of reading it. It is an inscrutable, confounding novel and is so hard to follow that even to try becomes much less fun than just letting one’s self drown in the narrative storm Ellroy has unspooled. I have absolutely no idea if that is what he intended the experience of This Storm to amount to. Perfidia feels like a successful proof-of-concept for the Second L.A. Quarter while This Storm seems to promptly torpedo that concept into reeling overwhelm.