Farewell, Updike

Isn't it strange how we feel that some people, some artists and some works of art, belong to us? And how arbitrary it is who falls in to that category? Olivier doesn't belong to me but Brando does - never more so than in On the Waterfront. Godard belongs to me; Truffaut does not. Dreyer, but not Bresson. Fitzgerald is mine, Hemingway is a stranger I admire and am courteous towards, but he does not really hold a place in my heart. The Beatles are so much mine than I can get tired of them the way one grows tired of a sibling; and so forth.



Perhaps this familiar, filial feeling is most present of all with writers, who share their inner voice and speak to us in conspiratorial tones emanating from those innocent letters typeset on white pages. I already mentioned Fitzgerald and Hemingway, notable among the interwar Americans. With the Russians, I admire and enjoy Tolstoy but Chekhov and Dostoevsky are blood-brothers to me if not to each other. And with postwar Americans, among the last generation of great novelists and celebrity litterateurs there should be many names to choose from. But when Norman Mailer died, I had to acknowledge I'd never read much by him and that the astringent tone I'd gleaned from his image didn't quite gibe. When Vonnegut passed, I tipped my proverbial hat but left the real mourning to my college rommate, who - like so many others - idolized the writer on an extremely personal level. And now John Updike is gone, and I feel that I've lost a neighbor. Why, exactly?

It wasn't quite the novels. The only one I'd completed was Rabbit, Run and though good, Rabbit does not stride alongside Gatsby or Raskolnikov in the avenues of my imagination. Nor was it quite the WASPy milieu that belonged to Updike - one I have often found off-putting and limiting in other artists' work. In part, it was his peculiar looks: the wolfish/hawkish visage, those tiny shark eyes with the jack o'lantern grin. The face that shouldn't have been welcoming but somehow was, perhaps softened by the honeyed voice. When he appeared in documentaries, he was an oddly comforting presence - soothing and purifying at the same time. In this, his appearance reflected his prose, and that's ultimately what drew me to him. Specifically, the prose of his short stories.

I'd love to quote you a passage right now, pointing my finger in the air, brushing my long hair to the side (metaphorically speaking, as my hair is rather short) and pontificating like an undergraduate poet, closing my eyes to cultivate the right mood and then breathlessly incantatating some immortal words of the late bard. But I can't; though I don't readily carry quotes around in my head anyway, if I did they'd be more likely Fitzgerald's than Updike's. Besides, Updike was never meant to be invoked in that way, perhaps why he didn't quite have a cult the way Vonnegut or Mailer did. He was more often admired than beloved, yet somehow, something...

It isn't the words I remember, but the feeling those words evoked, the way Updike could so deftly find a warm glow in a superficially banal situation, the little eddies of feeling that carry one through a normal life in the suburbs, the aches and minor pains rendered so exquisitely that they manage to transcend their limits - not through exuberance but through focus, spilling just over the edge and suffusing all the proceedings with a fine-combed sensitivity. Finally, if I don't quite remember the words, I remember the images - a family stopping amidst a cacophony of roadside billboards for fast food, a father and son quietly stomping through the Northeastern snow on a hunting excursion, and finally, most poignantly of all, a civil ceremony in which the husband kisses the wife...after the clerk pronounces them divorced. (In other hands, this may have seemed obvious and trite, since the narrator recalls that he and his new bride had forgotten to kiss at their wedding twenty years before; but Updike manages to make it seem at once spontaneous and conscious, in an unembarrassing way, as if the divorcee knew the gesture he is making but does it instantly, without overthinking it, his self-conscious thought sublimely transfigured into action.)

These images bring me to my final point...the irony of celebrating Updike on a movie blog. Of 20th century writers, he might seem one of the least cinematic. His spaces were so often interior, and when not interior, certainly not larger than life either. So much of his writerly attention was focused on thought process, eschewing the concise action of Hemingway or the vivid scenery of Fitzgerald. Among the aforementioned recently deceased peers, Mailer made movies and struck tough-guy poses gleaned from them; Vonnegut wrote in the vernacular of science fiction, filling his work with wild imagery (albeit imagery so wild it could almost never be imagined, better left paradoxically unadorned on the page). And yet somehow it is Updike whose images linger in my imagination like half-remembered, hazy bits of home movies or overlooked quiet moments in a feature, the forgotten corners of some narrative - the naturalistic ephemera that draws our eye to its own surprise.

This ability to enliven the mundane - there's that word I've been seeking for several paragraphs - was one of Updike's greatest gifts. And always lurking beneath the pleasantness of his comfy suburbia was a frustration and a restlessness, seldom given free reign, though his breakthrough novel took its name from the impulse. In Rabbit, Run, the young hero hops in a car and beings to drive...and drive...and drive...and drive. The sense of freedom looms, terrifying almost, and eventually he turns around and races back to town - without returning to his home. The image is telling - though the journey has switched direction, it hasn't really ended. That searching, impulsive tone which drove the hero outward will carry with him back onto his stopping ground, casting the familiar in a new light and reminding us of the inner adventure that lurks behind every ordinary sight. This inner adventure was carried throughout the rest of Updike's life and career, but it was an inner adventure that belonged to all of us.

And implicit in that inner adventure was the knowledge that eventually the car would not be able to turn around, that it would continue to drive into the black night, eventually disappearing into the darkness altogether. The clinging to the familiar and the mundane, despite the restless desire to escape, comes in part from this skittish awareness that these moments, these conventions and comforts, will someday be ripped away from us; we might as well enjoy it when it lasts. And the best we can hope for is that on that day when it all ends, cognizant of the fact that we forgot to do so initially, we can gracefully lean over and give it one last gentle, light farewell kiss.

John Updike
1932-2009

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What's the Connection?

(E-mail your answers to MovieMan0283@gmail.com. If you'd like hints, request them in the comments section, and they'll be provided there as well. Research allowed, but kudos if you can get it without - though obviously I have no way of knowing...)

The possibilities of You Tube take one down many different avenues, but sometimes all roads lead to Rome. For a while, I've been wanting to comb the riches of You Tube for weekly or biweekly Dancing Image posts. This will be my first stab at the idea - so here are several random clips, yet all with an unusual common bond which resonates with me. I was watching The Miracle of Morgan's Creek when the idea for this post occurred to me. Following the jump are five videos. I ask you: what's the connection? Whatever it is is not all that well-known, but I grew up with it and perhaps you'll recognize it too. I originally planned to use clips from films, but the TV clips (except for the last one, of course) turned out to be perfect...particularly since I first encountered the "common bond" on television. That's all for now. (The videos follow after the jump.)













So, what's the connection?

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Le Petit Soldat

Le Petit Soldat sits uncomfortably in Jean-Luc Godard's oeuvre. Supposedly, anyway. Godard is supposed to be many things, few of which actually relate to why I love the director and consider him among my favorite filmmakers. (I think he and Spielberg may be my co-#1's. They hate each other; or at least Godard hates Spielberg, but the American is just as misunderstood in his own way as the Frenchman. Peter Greenaway once said that they both make home movies. I'm not sure Spielberg still does, yet there's hardly a better way to describe E.T. and Close Encounters. But that's another post - on another director who, like Godard, I have remarkably not yet discussed on this blog). Back to Godard: Le Petit Soldat is supposed to sit uncomfortably because it's "political" and serious-minded, dealing with the Algerian war and such (it was banned as a result, another reason it can't really find its place in the Godard canon: by the time it was released, it was already a relic of Godard's ever-shifting aesthetic past). But it's also romantic, playful, and remarkably uncertain - not usually a trait one associates with Godard, although perhaps one should.



In some ways, my affection for the film may have been born from a misinterpretation. I viewed its early scenes as a spy thriller mock-up (half winking, half earnest in the way child filmmakers are with their water guns and ketchup-for-blood remakes of Hollywood crime movies). Watching them a second time, in light of the harsher sequences which conclude the film, they didn't necessarily appear as light-hearted as they once did, which is a pity. I hope I'm wrong, and that a third viewing re-affirms the lightness and playfulness of Godard's touch (this most recent viewing also followed a reading of the recent Godard bio Everything is Cinema, which offers a fascinatingly thorough account of Godard's actual behavior on set but is a bit dry when discussing the motivations or effects of his work; perhaps it colored my perceptions).

I like the idea that Godard mixes the playful hey-we're-making-a-movie! joie de vivre of his own early films with the realistic and spare torture scenes which follow. As cars circle Swiss roads and our protagonist trades cryptic spy talk with a couple senior agents, it could be as much a documentary of filmmaking as a film itself. This implied tension becomes overt with the revelation of the movie's trump card - Anna Karina in her first screen appearance. The first clip I ever saw of Le Petit Soldat was of a man rushing across the street and asking the pretty girl to shake her head so that her hair would fly around her face as she did so. She does, and for all the self-referential playfulness of Breathless, this is the first moment where Godard completely lets down his guard - he's wooing this pretty girl, camera in hand (or Raoul Coutard's hand, but you get the idea), the movie barely a pretense to get a date.

Then the story stops so that the main character can take photos of Karina in her apartment, grilling her with intrusive questions (it was really Godard, standing behind the camera, cajoling and harassing her - at one point the actress slips out of character and stares offscreen at him, annoyed), barely keeping up as she grins and dances to classical music, discussing art and politics with a lofty yet eager passion, eventually - whimsically, heartbreakingly - playing a game in which the two of them take three basic shapes and draw around them. Karina sketches silly, childish figures out of the triangle, square, and circle whereas the hero, the little soldier, the filmmaker's alter ego, turns the shapes into letters. We see only his hands in motion, but we can almost imagine his face, brow slightly furrowed, a cool disdain masking the lump in his throat as he transforms the triangle into an "A," the square into an "M" and the circle into an "E", a few more flourishes completing the message: "J'aime vous." The slightly distanced, almost respectful and conservative formalism ("vous") of the love letter, coupled with the playfulness of the exercise, and the whimsy and romance of the gesture (not to mention the transfiguration of visual content into literary, and vice versa) is Godard in a nutshell.

This is the best sequence in the movie, but another excellent - and quite different - sequence comes later, when the Frenchman is tortured by Algerians. It almost goes without saying, but might as well be said - these scenes are chillingly relevant today. The hero is burned lightly with matches, electrocuted, even waterboarded. All the while, Godard shoots impassively, closing in occasionally for a moment of pain. What makes the scene most effective is it's eerie relationship to what passed earlier. Those spy scenes in the back of the car seemed glorified playacting, but now, when we might most expect the movie to hold back and pretend, we get realism (and this was realism, because the actor endured much of what we see the character enduring!). The scenes are hard to read, not just because Godard's mise en scene, previously - and usually - so subjective, is suddenly removed, but also because Godard's own interpretation of the film's political conflict was ambiguous.

Given his later rendezvous with Maoism and the aesthetic radicalism of his work from its earliest incarnation, the director is usually classified as a Leftist. But in 1960, he still seemed to identify more with the cultural right - a trait he shared in common with fellow Cahiers critics turned New Wave directors, with the exception of Jacques Rivette. (It's often forgotten that the beloved and scandalous auteur theory of Francois Truffaut was actually somewhat incidental to a moralistic screed excoriating left-wing screenwriter's anti-Catholic impiety.) But Le Petit Soldat finds Godard (who youthfully, in writing, celebrated the aesthetic appeal of ideological certainty, regardless of its political origin) at a crossroads. He seems aware of and somewhat sympathetic to the origins of the Algerian struggle and, on a different note, impressed by the cool professionalism of the Arab torturers. On the other hand, he's too much an individualist, too much a romantic in love with Bertolucci's life "before the revolution," to subsume himself in any movement - or even to sympathize with one too overtly.

Later, as the New Left was born and political extremism became fashionable and somehow compatible with the counterculture, avant-garde, and even individualism, Godard found a home in mega-Communist doctrine on his own exacting terms. But his Maoism always struck me as somewhat disingenuous, more about the devotion to ideology (and the aesthetic fruits thereof) than the ideology itself - an implication borne out by his playful, semi-sardonic portrait of a student cadre in La Chinoise. Because he hasn't yet found a way to have his cake and eat it too, Le Petit Soldat remains one of his most honest and troubled looks at political engagement.

Anyway, that perhaps makes it sound too high-minded and misses the sense of fun. I just finished an exchange with Erich Kuersten in the midst of Out 1 's excellent David Lynch Week (check it out). The gist of it being that Godard is too often discussed in cold terms, missing the sense of fun, the free-spirited poetry, the romance. I don't want to do the same, so rather than the image of a young man being dunked in water in a shabby bathroom, I leave you with a pretty girl, dancing on the bed, photographed by another character only to have the camera swerve and remind us that she's really being photographed by someone else entirely, someone who's falling in love (Godard moved in with Karina after the shoot finished). Be they about aliens or Algerians, the best movies are so very often home movies at heart, and however others see it, that will never sit uncomfortably with me.

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Obama: Premonitions of a new epoch

I arrived in New York around midnight. This was already the third leg of a long, overnight trip to Washington, D.C. but it was only here that I began to see evidence of the gathering storm. There had been hints when I boarded in Boston - my 7:30 bus was cancelled and they were boarding people whenever they had the chance. But in New York they were boarding in relays, one bus after another after another, and a line stretched through the entire area and around the corner. I would say the majority of the crowd was African-American, and about half was young - with some, but not an overwhelming, overlap between the two.

Earlier that morning, I'd attended an annual NAACP breakfast in honor of Dr. King, who would have turned 80 this year. On everyone's lips, but especially those of the black attendees, there was an emotional, almost overwhelmed tone, a sense of still pent-up disbelief slowly releasing itself, coalescing into an unbearable excitement. There are so many aspects to Obama's newness - his youth, his name, his style, his savvy, his intelligence, his politics - but the most potent and poignant is his color. And the genuine (and genuinely non-exclusive) pride that the black population, young and old, male and female, liberal and conservative, seems to feel at his accomplishment has been palpable. As I've noted, most of those flocking to D.C. (at least who I saw: considering the numbers, this is extremely anecdotal evidence, folks) were young whites and somewhat older African-Americans, probably majority in their thirties and forties, sometimes bringing kids along, sometimes bringing along their folks - meaning those old enough to remember when a black person couldn't even sit at the front of the bus, let alone take one to see a black president getting sworn in.

The line moved swiftly, leaving just enough time for the buzzing crowd to get acquainted, and giving people working at the Port Authority a chance to shout their support and share their enthusiasm. The buses left 42nd street in one big contingent, zooming down the highway while passengers tried to get some rest - which was only possible intermittently. After about an hour, we pulled over to the side of the highway and the driver shut off the engine, restarted it, shut it off, restarted it, stepped outside to check the problem, returned, shut it off, restarted it, shut it off...a monotonous description? Believe me, it was even worse experiencing it.

This went on for about twenty minutes until he finally admitted that something was wrong with the "air brake" (I don't really know what this is), and the bus was stuck. Meanwhile trucks and other buses zoomed by on our left every few seconds, rattling and shaking our coach as they passed. Occasionally, as we waited for rescue, a bus would pull over in front of us and let people on in groups of ten. After about an hour, I escaped, tramping through the snowy banks on the edge of a Jersey highway, flopping down in my new seat and trying to get what little sleep I could manage over the next 24 hours. This would not be the last setback, the last experience of the tedium of waiting, en masse, for something to happen. But for the meantime, I drifted off in my cramped quarters, leg dangling over the aisle, as we barrelled south, destined for our Mecca, the capital of our Union, south of the Mason-Dixon line.



Around five or six am, the buss pulled into a dingy little parking lot located at the mangy rear end of Union Station, and we shuffled out into the early-morning streets. Some took the subway, others avoided the trouble and walked, up towards the gleaming white dome of the Capitol. We got about as close as we could, where ticket-holders stood in long lines (they had been waiting for hours and one section had already been closed off at six, filled to capacity). I ended up in a growing group of general-admission (read: ticketless) attendees who waited behind a barrier, the cops promising us that it would be opened promptly at seven.

By seven-thirty, the sky bright with the rising sun, we remained, patiently waiting for permission to proceed. Eventually the police officer emerged with his bullhorn to yell at the crowd impatiently (as if he had been the one waiting, not us) but nobody lost their temper and the Guardsmen standing around the perimeter were friendly and answered what questions they could. Of course, even once the barrier was opened and we entered the central zone in groups of fifty, the Guardsmen - from all over the country - could not tell us how to get to the Mall. Nor, it turned out, could the metropolitan police.

We walked north, then south, back and forth as new sets of directions were given (this was, as I was coming to realize, a terribly organized event). As a result we passed several times the only group of protesters, an angry clot of about eight or nine people, mostly women, with angry faces, holding signs which read, among other niceties, "Obama loves fags," "God hates all countries," "Thank God for dead troops" (supposedly because the military allows gays in, even in cognito) and, most tastefully of all, "Hell to the Chief" with the outline of stick figures sodomizing each other in front of the American flag. They were greeted with disbelief, more amused than outraged, by the passerby, which often gleefully shouted back in their face, "O-bam-a! O-bam-a!"

I continued to wander up and down the avenues, frustratingly able to see where I wanted to go, but unable to get there until finally the border was breached. After hours of approaching my destination (which had been, the whole time, less than a mile or so away) I finally reached the Mall, where - supposedly - millions were gathered (I believe it). I found a spot directly in front of the Capitol, though extremely far back, so I could at least see the event, even if the figures were too small to recognize. (By the way, did I mention how cold it was? It was freezing, freezing - and I was wearing a woolen hat, gloves, and several layers. Most cold of all, however, were my toes, scantily clad in black Adidas sneakers - next Inauguration I'll remember to wear boots. It was a little warmer in the crowd, what with all the body heat, but it still wasn't any "day in the park"- even if it was that, literally speaking).

Jumbotrons were stationed around the Mall and the crowd responded boisterously to the celebrities and politicians as they appeared on the screen. (Beyonce got cheered, Diddy was booed.) Some snarky young folks traded anti-U2 jokes and chanted enthusiastically, "Ah-nold! Ah-nold!" when the governor of California was shown (there were scattered boos, but mostly by women, I think). However, this flippancy (perhaps best embodied by the throaty "We want Blago!" shouts which went up intermittently) seemed undergirded by a sincere enthusiasm about the event - and it was also part and parcel of the youthful crowd's energy (an air-filled globe was bounced around atop outstretched hands and had it been warmer, I'm sure there would have been crowd-surfing too).

If the cheering and jeering of show-biz celebs and show-biz celebs/governors was playful, there were louder and often more serious-sounding responses to the straight-up politicians as they emerged onto the rotunda. McCain got warm, respectful applause, the Clintons received pretty enthusiastic cheering, while Lieberman got an overwhelmingly negative jeer. But the most enthusiastic response - prior to the emergence of the new vice-president and the first family - greeted Colin Powell as the crowd waved and cheered with unbridled enthusiasm for the former Bush official who loudly (and more forcefully than most) endorsed Obama and condemned anti-Obama rhetoric last fall.

When Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney stepped out, there was some scattered booing, countered by a few cries of, "Leave them alone, they didn't do anything" (true enough in the former case, not so much in the latter). But unrestrained hostility greeted the spouses of these women. Already, every time Bush's picture appeared or the announcer mentioned his name, the crowd booed. Dick Cheney was the first to show up, rolled out in a wheelchair, and his suddenly pitiful state reminded me of several occasions in The Godfather: Hyman Roth, weakened by age and illness, ambling through the airport before he's cut down, and the Sicilian Don Ciccio who, years after killing Vito Corleone's mother, is feebly ensconced in a wheelchair where he's gutted by the returning Vito. In other words, the pitifulness, the palpable enfeeblement of corrupt power as it exits the stage. From day one, Cheney has played the role of villain to the hilt and he bowed out accordingly.

And then there was Bush. One could almost feel sorry for him as the announcer declared the arrival of the 43rd president and the angry crowd began to chant, "Nah-nah-nah-nah, nah-nah-nah-nah, hey hey hey, good-bye!" Though he often seemed so obtuse, one could almost sense a slight surprise and embarrassment in his face as he emerged to a probable majority of boos over cheers. For so long, he's been propped up in front of diminishing crowds of supporters and here he was before the American people, his presidency coming to an end, and the crowd was more or less calling him a failure, telling him he'd done a terrible job in the most important work of his life, that his eight years had been a disaster for which he was responsible. Just as Nixon grew in poignancy as Watergate faded in the public consciousness, so I suspect the pathetic figure of Bush will as well - but without the dignity that Nixon's intelligence and political cunning conferred upon him.

My own feelings at Bush veer closer to bitter disappointment than unbridled anger. This was a time once when I thought it possible for him to be a good leader, and when I felt an instinctive liking for the amiable fellow. I met him once, briefly, nine years ago, and he was genial and charismatic, compulsively likable. But if he may not have had sinister motives, if his horrible judgement and general incompetence and extremely poor judge of character is not enough to condemn him angrily as a failure, than his unbridled arrogance, his stubborn refusal to admit mistakes and correct course, is more than ample evidence for his forceful condemnation. In my opinion, he earned every boo in that audience, and then some.

Meanwhile, an older black women stood next to me, defending the Bushes, who were roundly booed, and shouting, "No more pigs! No more pork-barrel spending!" as a counterpoint to the angry chorus surrounding her. This would seem an odd counterpoint (it sounds more like a complement) to the Bush-jeering, and she also said, in Bush's defense, "At least he respected the Constitution." The young man standing next to her, who spoke in Bush Sr.'s favor ("he's a nice guy, a war hero") could only respond with respectful silence and lip-biting to "George W. Bush is a nice guy too. He was a good president!" Meanwhile, her daughters, stationed beside us, laughed and shook their heads: "Stop it, Mom, you're embarrassing us!" Later this same woman, who expressed a disgust with a Carter and Clinton coupled with her affection for the Bush family, cheered Obama enthusiastically, especially after some lines which were not-so-veiled jabs at the now-ex-president sitting at his side.

Indeed, the hostility which greeted Bush quickly dissipated as Obama was announced and he was greeted more like a rock star than an incoming president. Again the chants of "O-bam-a!" and "Yes - we - can!" Who could resist? My generation has had little to tie us together. There was the trauma of 9/11, quickly repressed, and tenuous tentacles of a new youth culture - Facebook, You Tube, AIM - which promise some sort of connectivity but haven't delivered it yet. Music? Compare to the sixties, in which dozens of uniquely talented artists were followed by millions and names like "Bob Dylan," "the Beatles," and "Jimi Hendrix" could tie together the tastes, dreams, and attitudes of so many kids. We don't have even one artist of that magnitude today, not even one with half, or a quarter, or a hundredth, of that magnitude. Movies? There was nothing that reached the masses with the force of an "Easy Rider" or "The Graduate," nothing that captures the effervescent zeitgeist of a generation, if there even was an effervescent zeitgeist to capture.

So how shocking, surprising, and heartening, that we get our unifying principle, and it isn't lodged in the culture, or in technology, but in politics, and at the very head of the country which has been unravelling. The president as rock star? After 8 or 9 years in the wilderness - political, cultural, spiritual - it's astonishing that it should come to this. I am sure I will have plenty of disagreements with and doubts about Obama in the years to come, but I will always be thankful that he offered us a unifying experience, a chance to be tied together after existing, dispersed, in our own little holes for so long, for longer than eight years.

I thought he gave an excellent speech, a reiteration of previous points but elegantly weaved and containing a thoughtful power. There were no original lines which can stand aside "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" or "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," but there was one quote, from Scriptures, from St. Paul to be exact, which resonated. "The time has come to put away childish things," he warned. This was the fatal flaw, the Achilles' heel among heels of the Bush years, the childish self-absorption which the country embraced in lieu of a real grappling with the problems of the country and the world. I've written about this elsewhere, but to hear Obama say as much in his speech was inspiring.

Yes, there was an overwhelming sense of the "new" on January 20. I've only experienced it twice in my life, once spurred by an arbitrary change (the dawn of the millennium in 2000, which ultimately underwhelmed) and once spurred by tragedy (9/11, which, as I've previously stated, did not lead to the transformation it should have). We are not living in the same world we were a few years, a few months, even a few days ago. Something fundamental has changed. Those of you who are older have a better sense of the shifts history brings with it, but keep in mind that for my generation, raised after the fall of the Cold War, experiencing in recent years events which had great impact but virtually none close to home, this shift in the public consciousness is something new and unfamiliar.

As I walked in the vast crowds across the mall, past the tall obelisk of the Washington Monument, I was walking into a future which is unmapped, an unnavigable sea of doubt and risk and hope, most enticingly and frighteningly of all, mystery. The ways in which our mind frames things will have to change, because the dull patina which the Bush years placed over our consciousness has begun to be lifted. We will have to face the world as it really is, as the consequences of our actions and the actions of others catches up with us. Surrounded by cheering throngs, faced with a spectacle of transformation and ascension which was inspiring, listening to the uplifting words of Obama, it was easy to feel that the challenges he described were almost abstract, something like the obstacles a movie hero faces on his way to victory, something we experience vicariously without taking in deeply.

But as the hordes of American citizens milled about the capital, trying to find a way home, as I stood atop the hill of the Washington monument, looking out over the hundreds of thousands of people - each individuals, each participants in the American dream, each stars, not extras, in their own lives, and part of an ensemble cast which constitutes the American character - I could feel the fear and uncertainty welling up. This was the future we were marching into and it wasn't, it isn't a game or a movie - it's our lives, it's lived history, it's mass experience. One can condemn the solitude of the iPod, the immersion in virtual reality, the splintering of consciousness, and then faced with the daunting challenges of reality, long again for the dissatisfying yet secure comforts of superficiality once again. But there is no going back, only a wandering, a striving for the truth.

As the crowd lumbered up the streets of Washington, blocked here, squeezed there, faced with officials who didn't seem to have a clue where we were going, this reality seemed more tangible than ever. As one girl said, speaking aloud the suppressed fears of many, "I hope they don't try to use this is a metaphor for Obama's presidency!" And indeed, after hearing those inspiring words, one hopes we aren't let out into the streets, wandering a maze of sterile bureaucracy, drifting from one dead-end to another, trapped in the claustrophobic crowd (somewhere, in the distance, an inspiring official parade marching along in efficiency, but nowhere near us), looking for someone or something to show us the way. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

After three hours, I finally found my way to Union Station. (It was, of course, pretty close to where I'd originally been, though the city would not let us travel such an obvious route.) I stood at a bistro to order a hot dog (my first food since the night before) and listened to a radio show - the host was saying he still had trouble believing what he'd seen, not just a black president but this black president, and that - ultimately - we had Bush to thank for it, so "thanks, Bush." This is when many of these thoughts, which I'm recording now, about the page turning, about the blank future before us, occurred to me so forcefully. Though I'd been there watching, now the truth really sank in.

Barack Obama is now, right now, the president of the United States of America. One era is over. Another has begun.

I entered the station and immediately boarded a bus. For hours, trying to find my way back (and listening to the contradictory directions of different cops, who always made it sound like the station was just around the corner) I'd felt like the greyhound chasing the rabbit, realizing only afterwards that - even though it looked so close - it was on a wire racing before me, always remaining the same distance away. Now I shot through the station onto another Greyhound, like the missile from a slingshot, flopping into my seat. Those of us on the same bus were also on the same boat - I kept hearing people, looking at each other in disbelief, proclaiming with a sort of giggly awe, "I can't believe we did it!"

We pulled out of the station, three hours earlier than expected, and began the trip home. Later our bus would come to a dead halt in immobile traffic, the highway shut down for several hours because of a bomb threat (though we didn't find that out till later) and we sat still for about two and a half hours without explanation, bus chugging with nowhere to go.

But that's a story for another day.

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Number nine, number nine...

Not especially wanting to write a full-length post at the moment, but feeling that two posts was a bit scant for the work-week, I was rescued by Piper of Lazy Eye Theatre, who tagged me with a New Years meme, nine resolutions for 2009. You can trace this back to its root at DVD Panache (courtesy of Adam) and also visit there for the full rules. If you're tagged, I suggest you do so. I've already lain out my plans for the new year, so I'll try not to be redundant. My new nine reside after the jump:



1. Keep blogging. Hopefully I'll keep a pretty good pace going here after a slow start to the year.

2. Look forward. Aside from discussing films of the past (which will continue) and films of the present (which will hopefully increase - see below), I'd like to muse on where movies are going, where I think they should go, and what all of you think. I don't want to see the cinema shrivel into a museum artifact, a niche market, a once-central cultural touchstone that used to matter more than it does now (the way Paul Schrader and other aging cineastes seem resigned to see it go).

3. See more movies from the 21st century. I've spent most of the past five or so years getting acquainted with classic Hollywood, postwar European cinema, and assorted Great Movies. All of this is - as the last category suggests - great, but I've also missed a lot of interesting films created in the - more or less - here and now. I would like to make significant a dent in They Shoot Pictures Don't They's top films of the 21st century list. Meaning at least 50-75% of the movies I haven't seen, preferably more, enough to write a respectable top 100 of the decade at the end of the year.

4. Read more novels. This is and isn't movie-related - though it's theoretically a distraction from watching movies and reading about them constantly, I think it will also strengthen my perceptions of the ideas and craft and mood of films.

5. See more classics on the big screen. Precariously teetering at the halfway point on this list, this is one of the least tenable of my resolutions - I don't have the same access to retro houses I once did, and even when I do, it can get to be an expensive habit (though not nearly as expensive as some; I don't know how my foodie and pothead friends do it...) Nonetheless, it's a unique experience, pretty much the highest a cineaste can attain (next to seeing a masterpiece theatrically on its first release), and one I should try to take advantage of once in a while.

6. Investigate more off-the-beaten path movies. I've been treading the annals of the Canon, in which I'm a great believer, for years now. But I would like to explore the flotsam and jetsam of film's mainstream, hopefully digging up some hidden classics along the way. A voyage of discovery, rather than the trek with tour guides I've generally been on, enjoyable as it's been. Though with so many acknowledged classics yet to see, this may also fall by the wayside.

7. Evangelize. Too often I keep movies to myself, with the self-defeating thought that, "oh, my friends won't like this." Which may often be true, but nonetheless I shall try to defy my inner Joe the Plumber and "spread the wealth around."

8. See at least one modern masterpiece on its initial run - preferably an unhyped one that sneaks up on us. Film industry, this is all on you.

9. Make a movie. It may cost nothing, be shot on my old mini-DV camera with a tape permanently lodged in it, use friends as actors (actually, all of this is a near-certainty) and it may not be any good, but it will be feature-length and I can say I "did it" (followed by "no, of course you can't see it...").

I hereby and forthwith tag the following (generally trying to eschew those who, like me, have already set out prospective agendas for the year):

Erich Kuersten, Acidemic-Film
Tony D'Ambra, Film Noir
M. King, Goodnight, Mono
Jeremy Richey, Moon in the Gutter
Graham, Movies et al.

And indeed, anyone else who wants to participate.

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The Terminator

The Terminator is well-served by its eighties setting - and not only because the very elements which dated it within a few years give it a fresh charm now that '84 is a quarter-century into the past. Its cold, metallic feel - the electronic music, the shadows-pierced-by-blue-light cinematography, the constant use of machinery - underscores its mood of dread, a fear that the unthinking, malignant machines really might take over, which is very 1984 - in both senses of the year. Indeed, looking back on the era in which I was born, it sometimes seems like the 80s were more futuristic than contemporary times. Technology has, in some ways, been domesticated and made friendly; popular music has gone through more "authentic" phases since perfecting the synthesized dance beat; and despite the focus on artificial intelligence, part of The Terminator's machine dread is a lingering aftereffect of the already-dying industrial age - whose ominous, imposing aesthetic still seems more "futuristic" than its sleek, downplayed information age successors.



History has, of course, added other ironies to The Terminator's legacy; how was James Cameron to know that Arnold Schwarzenegger was more likely to evolve into a governor than a killer cyborg (one thinks of another time-travel movie of the same period, in a slight paraphrase: "Who's the vice president? Eddie Murphy?!"). Here he shows the ruthlessness of the politician, though not the canned charm (nor the scandal-averse wisdom, as his full-frontal stroll through nighttime L.A. evidences). I've always preferred the original Terminator to the slicker, more complex sequel, in part because Arnold makes such a great villain, a role in which he was seldom used subsequently. (Terminator 2 was classified at the time as "kinder and gentler" than the original, 1991's Bush to 1984's Reagan).

One of the film's most terrifying moments comes about a half-hour in, as Sarah Connor waits in a nightclub for the police to arrive. Already we have seen the relentlessness of the terminating cyborg; we've secretly thrilled and recoiled from his ironically bloodless bloodthirstiness. Half the terror is in his ability to commit violence, but the other half - the more potent half - is the fact that he feels nothing while doing it, not even the pride of a job well-done. Rather than undercutting our fear of the machine, the fact that the killer ("murderer" doesn't sound right) looks human only heightens the paranoia - is this the direction humanity will go in, becoming colder, more like his machines? And so The Terminator works as an allegory of man's spiritual extinction, as well as his physical.

But anyway, that scene. Sarah is waiting at a table, 80s dance music is blasting, and the young and horny are displaying their unique fashion senses (Sarah herself wears a female mullet for much of the movie, though she still looks cute). Arnold enters the club, ignoring the pay desk and crushing the bouncer's fingers. He surveys the crowd, just missing Sarah as she ducks under the table to pick something up. When he catches her eye, he pushes through the cluster of dancers, the throbbing score displaces the club music, and then Sarah's rescuer rips out a sawed-off and fires at the Terminator, knocking him down. People scream, Sarah sits transfixed, and the killer lying on the floor is motionless for only a second before his fingers twitch and his eyes re-open (his mouth remains locked - never a smile or even a sneer; Arnold's range may be limited, but he certainly gives a controlled performance). We've seen indestructible foes before in movie history, but never one who was so undefeatable and yet so (close to) human. Within moments, he's back on his feet and a chill goes down our spine: this thing may be unstoppable, after all - it has all the advantages.

Except one: history (and the future) are on the heroes' side. They don't know that, and neither do we at first, but eventually as The Terminator's theory of time travel becomes clear, we know that past and future exist in an endless playback loop (the movie's catch-phrase could be, "haven't we been here before?" if it wasn't already the more succinct - and funnier - "I'll be back.") Sarah Conner will sleep with the man from the future, her son's protegee, and before dying, he will father her son, who will grow up, older than the young man he sends back to save his mother but also that young man's son. John, whose mission is to fight the terminators, only exists because a Terminator was sent back in time to prevent his own birth (instead, his birth is enabled by the Terminator's trip). And so on. This stands in stark contrast to Back to the Future's contemporaneous comic theory of alternate universes, but while that theory is imaginatively entertaining, Terminator time travel is far more compelling.

It also adds to the sense, simmering beneath the surface in The Terminator as it does beneath all dystopian narratives, that the future is really just an allegory for the present. Terminator actually takes this idea further than most sci-fi movies; as its opening title declares, "the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present..." And of course, the final battle is also the first shot fired (this becomes even more evident in the sequel, when it's revealed that the deadly technology of the future evolved from scientists studying the Terminator's detached arm, in other words the future result of what they would develop by studying its own future result, et cetera...). At any rate, by placing the final battle of the future in the present, The Terminator reminds us of the link between the two, a link which is further exemplified by its cold, metallic feel - the electronic music, the shadows-pierced-by-blue-light cinematography, the constant use of machinery, all of which underscores its mood of dread, a fear that the unthinking, malignant machines really might take over...

Wait a second, haven't we been here before?

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A Charlie Brown Christmas & It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown!

Admittedly, it isn't exactly "Christmastime again." Not even if you count all twelve days (I think they start after, not before, the 25th, right?). I had originally hoped to get this post in under the Yuletide gun but eventually let the festive dancing of Fred and Ginger (that's a Christmas-sounding name, isn't it?) suffice as my last official post of the year. But as I like to review new additions to my home DVD collection, I only put my thoughts on the Charlie Brown twofer (which I bought on the eve of Christmas Eve) on the backburner, instead of in the trash. Now that The Dancing Image is sputtering back to life after a long holiday-inspired break, the time has come to put pen to paper, so to speak. If Charlie Brown's original Christmas is your thing (and it is for all of us) check out these three good write-ups on the 1965 TV special: Screen Savour's historical, Filmicability's personal, and Bright Lights After Dark's religio-cultural. As for myself, what fascinated me most about my new DVD was the contrast between the classic '65 special and the rather paltry "sequel", which was aired in 1992.



The differences between the two films are not only aesthetic and thematic but cultural-historical, personal (as far as Charles Schulz is concerned), and even musical. First, the music. Vince Guaraldi is credited with the score for both holiday specials, but the '92 music was recorded and arranged by David Benoit, whose taste seems to run more in the smooth jazz direction. Whereas Guaraldi's original soundtrack (which may be both the best original soundtrack and best Christmas album of all time) was spare, melancholy, lightly joyful, and quietly warm, Benoit ladles on the sax styling and keyboard backdrop and the result is more akin to a jaunt through the shopping mall, muzak playing on the sound system, than it is to hovering around the stage in a beat-up little jazz club in a small, sleeping city on the eve of Christmas (the effect of the original).

Of course, to be fair, the nostalgic value of the synthetic former for someone like me (who was about 8 when this special came out) should not be underestimated. Children can mysticize almost anything, and even crowded malls seemed like exciting places when I was four feet tall (and hoping for bundles of Christmas presents). But it's obviously the effect of the original music, and ultimately the original special, which lingers while the artificial charms of the follow-up quickly disintegrate like snowflakes on the tongue, leaving a watery aftertaste which is not at all satisfying.

The music sets the tone, but it is entirely indicative of the other differences between the two specials. Whereas "A Charlie Brown Christmas" takes place mostly at night, its setting spare and lonely, its starkly delineated color scheme echoing Guaraldi, "Christmastime Again" is all warm and fuzzy, its characters placed against bright blue skies, its interiors cheery and colorful. The original has a slightly shabby, desolate feel - the dozen or so kids are the only characters we see, and they gather on a threadbare wooden stage to rehearse a Christmas pageant we will never see performed. The follow-up has a far more widespread cast, the infamous offscreen blaring adult voices, and its Christmas pageant is performed in front of a packed auditorium (looking out the open door we see an inviting, sunlit street corner). The garish tree farm of 1965 is replaced with a gleaming, appealing shopping mall circa early 90s.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" is not only more minimalist, it's edgier, and not only because Charlie bemoans the commercialization of the holiday (egregious product placements for Coca-Cola were later axed, killing a potent discrepancy). The kids' voices have an appealingly rough tenor, as if the juvenile actors (many nonprofessionals) could barely get out their lines. The roughness adds to the charm, complementing director Bill Melendez's peculiar aesthetic, which echoes the comic strip form by cutting in for wordless close-ups. And Snoopy is more aggressive, leaner, more of the phallic Id, so the rounder, softer dog of 25 years later feels comparatively and disappointingly tamed. (Meanwhile the smoother voice talent lacks the slurring, lisping, halting appeal of the original cast.)

Charlie Brown, the precociously depressed boy we all know and love, is not really the focus in 1992. Attention is spread over the whole Peanuts gang, which lends the proceedings a rather diffuse and half-hearted air (more on that in a moment). When Charlie is onscreen, he seems of a healthier mind than in his previous incarnation. He does gets doors slammed in his face as he sells a wreath, and the gloves he buys for the red-headed girl go to waste when she runs into him with a new pair already on her hands. But at the same time, she's friendly towards him and is even referred to as Charlie's "girlfriend." This is all nice for him, but not so nice for us; we miss our neurotic poster child. At one point, with Peppermint Patty talking his ear off on the phone, Charlie turns to the audience and moans, "Why can't I ever be a wrong number?" Would the old Charlie ever have griped about being popular? Would the old Charlie ever have been popular?

The changes in the main character and the show's aesthetic are due to any number of causes. For one thing, if biographies are to be believed, Charles Schulz himself had changed in the three decades since penning "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Back then, trapped in a difficult marriage, he was a somewhat repressed family man, who fed off a sense of insecurity and frustration (though he was, of course, already a millionaire). But since then he had divorced, married a different woman, and loosened up his personal style. This is not to say his demons had disappeared, but one biographical documentary theorized that if the morose Charlie Brown was the focus of Peanuts in the 60s, the playful Snoopy was grabbing more attention by the 80s and 90s (admittedly the mostly Snoopy-free special does not bear out this thesis, but the thesis does correspond more generally to the new mood of "Christmastime Again.")

Culturally, the differences make sense as well. American pop culture of the mid 60s, not yet fully embracing the youthful energy of the adolescent baby boomers, was still in thrall to the minimalism of the late 50s, of the Beats and cool jazz and modern art and the "clean line" style of design. In a few years this would be swept away by psychedelia, followed by a kind of tacky cultural decadence in the 70s, and then the slick, big, crowded (but often somewhat shallow) look and feel of the 80s. "Christmastime Again" very much corresponds to the mood of cartoons and television and pop culture as I remember it when I was a kid. Upon watching it, I could immediately place it in the late 80s/early 90s (I erred closer to the Reagan era, but still). This difference between 1965 and 1992 is, I think, especially noticeable in children's media: look at a cartoon from the sixties vs. a cartoon from the early 90s, or a children's book from the era of Vietnam and the Great Society against one written around the Gulf War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I should note that I have a fondness, even a preference, for the later style. This is partly for aforementioned nostalgic reasons, partly because of the richness inherent in a broader-ranging aesthetic (probably brought by boomers as they entered children's entertainment in the 70s and 80s). But that brings me to my final point: the second Charlie Brown Christmas is ultimately not strangled by its approach, which could provide an interesting, if ultimately inferior, contrast to the classic original. Its Achilles heel is rather a creative laziness: the story appears to be a series of recycled comic strips, non sequitur with punchline followed by non sequitur with punchline. The focus is on gags rather than mood, and the special suffers as a result. While some of these ideas might be amusing on the page, strewn out over the course of a half-hour TV special, they become aimless and redundant.

Ultimately, the two programs' conclusions are telling. At the end of "It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown," in one of the special's best scenes (perhaps because it's the most honest) Linus reminds Lucy of how just yesterday, sitting under the tree on Christmas morning, she wished the Christmas spirit could go on forever. Unswayed, she continues to tease and torment him, noting that the holiday is passed and there are no lingering feelings of goodwill towards men (let alone little brothers). Meanwhile, we move across the decades to that sad little cartoon (whose idiosyncratic slow style, slurred voices, and melancholy tunes, perhaps too indicative of the postwar zeitgeist, frightened the network execs). The children, after mercilessly mocking Charlie (there's nothing remotely like this in the later special), gather around his pathetic little tree and decorate it, before calling out in joyous unison, "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!" and, pointing skyward the gaping black holes of their pink little globes (no Franklin as of yet), launch into, "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."

Couched in darkness and melancholy, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" ultimately ends with a confirmation of the Christmas spirit. "It's Christmastime, Charlie Brown," comfortably numb, regarding its own lineage from the vantage point of the 20th century's conclusion, shrugs off that goodwill as yesterday's news and settles down in the beanbag for some more television. The original is a small, spindly little Christmas tree, beaten-down, rough around the edges, but authentic. The sequel is one of those pink trees from the lot, the years having slicked over its garish artificiality, yet just as synthetic as ever.

Good grief, did Charlie Brown go commercial?

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The New Year

And as the sun rises over a new year (forget for a moment that I'm writing this at night), we look forward: what does the future hold for The Dancing Image? Well, first things first, let me play a bit of catch-up. Like many of you, I've been partaking of my own "Dancing Image in 2008" megapost (and if you haven't checked it out yet, please either scroll down or click on this, which ever is easier). I've spotted a few mistakes in the process - follow the jump to discover my mea culpas...



One is the exclusion of Joseph Demme of Cinexcellence, my very first commentator, from my blogroll round-up. To rectify, let me point you to his run-down of The Men Behind the Monsters (sorry, Joseph)...Another accidental exclusion, only discovered months afterwards, is the excellent Holy Grail entry of The House of Mirth and Movies. As I said in The House's comments section, I always keep my word though sometimes it takes an absurd amount of time...

As for me in 2009, I've got a lot of ideas which are scurrying around my mind as it coughs and sputters its way back into activity after a New Years break. Expect the pace to be a little more relaxed around here, but I hope that will lead to tighter and more enthusiastic posts, with plenty of time to discuss - I've really appreciated the back-and-forths which have emerged on this blog, and hope they'll continue.

First up, early next week, will be my review of Synecdoche, NY, the first film I've seen in theaters this year. I may return to see it again before writing down my thoughts, or else I'll let it fester a little longer in my memory and go from there. After that, I hope to offer up some writing on movies which have recently entered my DVD collection. Their subjects range from the yuletide neurosis of a morose animated boy to the restrained passion of two lonely spouses in 60s Hong Kong to the relentless endeavors of a robot from the future/governor from the future to assassinate a hapless young waitress in an uber-80s L.A.

When all the leftovers have been finished, I'll initiate my long-dormant Netflix queue. Though this means more Auteurs (soon to be rechristened) and more of my slow chronological crawl though an absurdly long master list of great films (known only to myself), it will also mean a return to my perusal of acclaimed 21st century movies unseen by me (which fell by the wayside last August) and something new to fill the void in my TV/Experimental/Documentary queue, so long absorbed by the devotion to "Twin Peaks" (interrupted briefly for a rundown of political docs in election season). I hope to explore all three facets of that queue beginning with - respectively - the defunct "Project Greenlight," the impressive Criterion collection of Brakhage shorts, and an offbeat personal favorite which surveys four 20th century left-wing (at least initially) intellectuals. Meanwhile, a reshuffling has led me to replace my Criterion queue (much utilized in '06 and '07 but hardly tapped as of late) with a permanently random one, entertainingly eclectic enough (I hope) to hold your interest. And that's enough Netflix navel-gazing...on to more important matters.

One thread I hope to pursue in 2009 is an interest in "amateur" filmmaking. I mean this in a broad sense, and without the pejorative connotations the term has taken on. To me, it refers to a willingness - often borne out of necessity - to work outside the conventions and superstructure of the film industry, a practice which has produced fascinating fruits over the years. My interest in this matter is admittedly not entirely academic (or I should say, I hope will not be for long), but aside from practical considerations, I find the subject aesthetically rich. I will probably post some entries on this blog (I've been considering Breathless, Within Our Gates, and Be Kind Rewind - which takes amateurism as its subject rather than its form) to kick off a new venture: a blog called Amateur Hour which I hope, after my initial musings, those of you who are interested will contribute to, whether in an ongoing, one-off, or sporadic fashion. I see it as examining a broad swathe of movies, from B films to art pictures to avant-garde experimental works - the good, the bad, and the fascinatingly ugly.

I'm not sure when I'll get this going but I hope some of you take the bait. With the current expansion and affordability of filmmaking technology and the new avenues for distribution provided by the Internet, I see great potential for the "amateur" film in coming years and hope this new (potential) blog can collect interesting ideas and perspectives on the matter.

I also hope to tackle a big series later this year: a rundown of my (possibly 100, more likely 150, maybe even 200) favorite films. I hope to devote an entry to each, with the interest of burrowing inside the picture to relay my impressions rather than providing an objective survey of the given movie's history and subject. And if my computer situation has improved by that time, I can provide interesting screen-grabs and perhaps even snatches of the movies in question, selected by myself.

In addition, I may delve into analyzing the craft of filmmaking from multiple perspectives - perhaps with Auteur-like series on screenwriters and cinematographers, and posts focusing on a specific aspect (story structure, dialogue, photography, editing, art direction) of a particular movie.

I've got other half-baked ideas for the last year of the 00s (and the first year of the Obama administration), but I'll leave them on the back burner for now. Hope you stick with me as we plow on into the unknown territory before us...

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