George Jones R.I.P.

One of the not-so-horrific things about growing old is that you learn stuff.  You live, and you grow, and you know stuff you didn't know before.  For example, you learn how a song like this can be true.  It's a truism but no less true for it that country music, the real stuff, is music by, for, and about adults.  But you don't really get that until you're an adult.  You may like this song when you're 20 or 25, and you may even think you get it.  But I guarantee that you don't get it until you're at least 30.  More like 40. This is adult pain.  The grown-ups are talking now, sonny.  Shut up.

I've got nothing more original than that.  But George Jones was one of the great ones.

Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

I seem to recall liking this when I first saw it.  Liking it a great deal.  Considering it one of my top
Wes Andersons, in fact. So I was surprised to read up on it and find that it's not well regarded critically.  And I was even more surprised to see it again and find that...  Well, it just didn't work for me this time.

If this were a blog that was consistently trying to apply an intellectual approach to its subject matter, and I was really interested in delineating my vision of Anderson's vision, I could probably note how this fits in with the rest of his oeuvre, in terms of characters, themes, motifs, etc.  Because it clearly does.

But instead I'm just going to try to put my finger on why I was left unsatisfied by my second viewing of it.  Here's what I think is the thing.

I'm a Big Lebowski cultist.  Almost a Dudeist, really.  I've lost track of how many times I've watched that film, and I still find it funny each time.  There are some comedies that succeed like that, where even when you know the punch line and no longer have the element of surprise working on you, you can still appreciate them for the mastery of their timing and calibrated exaggeration, the absurdity of the conception and the brio of the presentation.  Humor isn't just punch lines.

This film contains elements that could have made it a rewatchable success in the manner of Big Lebowski.  It's got a wonderful premise, nicely chosen weird characters, and a suitably shaggy storyline.  Discovering all that for the first time, it was enough to make me laugh.  But it doesn't have the right timing, the right rhythms, for the gags to hold up over time.  I don't know if it's trying to be funny, really;  it might just be satisfied to be whimsical.  But it could have been more.  The material deserves a little bit more than archness.  If Anderson's approach had beckoned us in, rather than distancing us like he normally does, it could have been a comic masterpiece.  It wouldn't have taken much tweaking, even, I suspect.  It's almost there.  But not quite.  Second time around, I found myself appreciating it, but not enjoying it.

Huh.

Superman (1978)

I loved Superman Returns.  I felt like the only one who did - well, me and Mrs. Sgt. T.  So the first thing that struck me, watching the 1978 Superman for the first time in probably a couple of decades,
was how much the later movie was an homage to this one.  I hadn't realized that, actually.  I don't know if it makes me appreciate Returns more or less, to tell the truth.  So much of what I loved about that movie was the religious dimension it invested the Superman mythology with, and now I realize (because I surely didn't pick up on it when I was a kid) that Donner brought that in 1978.

But they're very different movies otherwise.  Part of that is because Superman was the first movie to do this thing that had been done almost ad nauseum (but not to me) by the time Superman Returns did it best.  That is, to take a comic-book superhero and make a serious movie out of him.  It still feels fresh in that sense:  its depiction of other worlds and superpowers is respectful and believing without being stiffly reverent.  It has a sense of wonder about it all, as opposed to a sense of doctrine. 

And part of it is because Superman is so very much of its time.  1978 was a moment of great cynicism in American culture - post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, post-counterculture - but that cynicism, at the height of the disco era, was expressing itself in an almost missionary hedonism that coincided with a very humanistic extension of the counterculture ethos.  In other words, the world as we knew it had ended, but we felt fine, and maybe that was going to be enough to see us through.  As opposed to the America into which Returns delivered Superman:  an America that felt itself to be in deep, deep crisis, hopeless, in need of any god but unsure it could believe in one - and sure it wasn't worthy of one.

So the attitude Superman takes toward its god-man is one that no future superhero movie could really take:  one of bemusement.  Super virtue was such a quaint idea in 1978 - everything Superman represented seemed so wonderfully old-fashioned.  It's the jazzed surprise on Lois Lane's face whenever she interacts with Clark Kent that tells the story:  she didn't know they made them like him anymore.  Wasn't sure why they even bothered.  But what the hell, why not?

It's not a perfect movie.  Lex Luthor, as hard as Gene Hackman works to make him vivid, is a cipher:  we don't know where he comes from or why he's so evil, or why he's so weird.  And his dastardly plot, when the movie finally gets around to presenting it, is kind of underwhelming.  And there are a few loose ends in the resolution of the plot (I gather the super-extended version that once played on TV tied them up - that would have been nice). 

But what the film gets right, it gets indelibly right.  The poetry, for one thing.  Not just the poetry of flight (and I even like the goofy poem Lois composes in her head while flying), but the poetry of the Smallville skies.  There's a luminosity to the earthbound scenes of this film that is entirely expressive of the Superman mythos. 

Most of all what it gets right is its answers to the big, critical questions the Superman mythos presents.  How do you depict limitless power and keep it suspenseful?  How do you depict stainless virtue and keep it attractive?  How do you make an adult movie out of the most childish of superheroes?

The answer to the last question, this time, is to make him childlike.  Innocent.  And to play that straight, so that while we may smile at Superman, we never laugh at him, never ridicule him.  To camp up Superman would be the big mistake, and this film never makes it. 

Which allows it to gain purchase on the other questions.  It keeps his limitless power interesting by making it clear he's not sure, yet, that it is limitless.  The key line in this regard is when Lois asks him how fast he can fly.  I've never thought to time myself, he says, and this is more than just a joke.  I've seen the question raised:  why can he fly fast enough to turn the world back in its orbit, but not fast enough to stop both missiles in real time?  And I think the answer is that he could have, but he didn't know it - it wasn't until he realized that Lois had died that he decided to really test the limits of his power. 

What we've got is a god learning how to be a god.  Of course it is:  like most first superhero movies, this is the Origin Story, and part of that is the superhero discovering his powers, and how to control them.  But remember - this was the first of its kind.  I'm not sure it was an obvious decision to start at the beginning like that, to spend so much time on Krypton and in Smallville.  And in the Fortress of Solitude. 

It keeps his limitless virtue interesting by making him human.  Why does he do what he does?  Is it nature or nurture?  Obviously Kryptonians aren't all wise and virtuous, so Kal-El didn't have to be.  He's taught to be, by his earthly father and the other one.  But that means he has to choose to be.  And although it's not hit real heavy in this film, he does have to choose;  the climax of the film is nothing but a choice between virtues, a choice of how to be good.  A choice between helping but not interfering, as Jor-El had instructed him, and interfering, accepting the mantle of godhood once and for all.  He chooses. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Pat Hobby Stories

A series of short-short stories FSF published in Esquire starting the year before he died and running until after his death, collected in 1962. They're set in Hollywood and center around a hack scenario writer, a washed-up relic of the silent age.

As Hollywood stories they're the obvious counterpart to The Love of the Last Tycoon, and they're a nice counterpoint to that work, too.  Whereas the novel dealt with success, these stories deal with failure;  the hero of the novel was still in his prime professionally if not emotionally, a man of his age, while Hobby is over the hill in every way.

The temptation is to read these stories autobiographically, mapping Fitzgerald's own Hollywood malaise and post-Tender Is the Night literary irrelevance onto Hobby.  I don't know enough to say whether that reading is right or wrong, but I will note that Hobby isn't a mirror image of Fitzgerald. 

In later decades the Fitzgerald type, the literary writer who goes to Hollywood and fails even to become a hack screenwriter, would become a trope of its own, but that's not what Fitzgerald is giving us here.  Hobby isn't a genius with words who finds Hollywood's debasing of words beneath him;  he's a "writer" who started his career in a period when "writing" for the films wasn't really writing, when it was a matter of slapping together story clichés and a few intertitles.  It's the new Hollywood, the one that values and requires words, that Hobby can't deal with, and in fact the few real writers that Hobby encounters, the obvious analogs for Fitzgerald, seem to be succeeding pretty well.  What I'm saying is that if Hobby does represent Fitzgerald's own sense of failure, then Fitzgerald has objectified that in a determined way, so that the parallels aren't completely obvious.  Hobby is less a comment on the passé writer than he is on the transition from silents to talkies and what it might have felt like to be middle-aged at that time.

That's where I think the sense of failure comes in, or rather Fitzgerald's empathy with failure.  Hobby's a guy whose talents are obsolete, whose tastes and joys are superannuated, whose indulgence that once seemed heroic now seem tawdry.  He's middle aged, in other words, and his failure is that of every middle-aged guy.  Right?  He's 49 when these stories take place, which makes him a few years older than FSF was when he wrote them, but no doubt the author could see himself going there. 

Are they great stories?  I don't know about that.  I didn't laugh, but they kept me amused.  They didn't move me deeply, but they rang true.  And I'm always interested in literary explorations of failure, of decline.  It rings true...

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep (1939)

Jeez, what cliché I am:  read a noir and write about the way it depicts the hero's relationship with women.  But there it is:  you can't avoid it. 

Like, notice how there's four women in this book, essentially:  the two Sternwood sisters, Agnes, and Mona.  They break down into pairs, naturally:  the sisters of course, leaving the unrelated Agnes and Mona in the other corner.  But Agnes and Mona make great sisters anyway, despite not being related;  both are gangsters' molls, both spend time hidden away by their latest sponsor, and both end up on the run.

And there's a potential physical correspondence, too.  Agnes, when we first meet her, is described as an "ash blonde" (p. 23 of the Vintage edition), while when we finally meet Mona she's a platinum blonde, although we learn this is a wig.  They're both associated with the color green - Agnes wears black but we're reminded often of her green eyes, while Mona's wearing green when we meet her.  Silver and green:  they're money.  No surprise that Marlowe thinks of Mona as "Silver-Wig." 

So these two fugitive femmes are a fine match for the Sternwood sisters, a fine contrast, but in a more important way they're all four the same.  Look at how the book ends:

On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches.  They didn't do me any good.  All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.

In fact, he's lost all four of the women by this point.  Agnes has fled, after the successive murders of her two small-time crook boyfriends.  Mona's in the wind.  And Marlowe himself has demanded that Carmen be sent away, with a harshness and knowledge that suggests Vivian won't be in his life anymore either. 

Of all four, it's Vivian we expect him to miss, and I don't think that's just retroactive because we can't escape Bogart and Bacall's chemistry;  Vivian is the only one of the four whose intelligence, courage, and spirit match Marlowe's own.  She's the one we naturally expect him to be attracted to.  But it's Silver-Wig he misses.  Why?

She freed him.  She saved his life.  She's the only one of the four who wasn't in some way trying to hurt him, and he knows it.  That his last thoughts, in this book, are of her, not of Vivian anyway, tells us a lot, maybe everything, about this character.  He plays with being self-destructive, with his whiskey and his cigarettes, but in the end he isn't:  he's not hung up on the femme fatale. 

Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon (1930)

From p. 11 of the Vintage edition of the book:

A telephone-bell rang in darkness.  When it had rung three times bed-springs creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man's voice said:

"Hello....Yes, speaking....Dead?...Yes....Fifteen minutes.  Thanks."

A switch clicked and a white bowl hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling's center filled the room with light.  Spade, barefooted in green and white checked pajamas, sat on the side of his bed.

Could this have been written before motion pictures?  Notice how carefully the narration sticks to only what a neutral observer could pick up - a camera eye, a boom microphone ear.  I don't think Hammett makes any exceptions to this rule, not even meaningless ones.  We've already met Spade by this point in the book;  you might think we'd recognize his voice on the phone.  But voices sound different in the dark, and we don't know Spade well yet;  if this were a movie, we might not know who it is right away.  And so Hammett doesn't tell us it's Spade until Spade turns a light on.  Then we see him, and know.

It's a cinematic way of writing.  Not a theatrical one - I think the sounds he describes here are too small and specific to be heard by an audience in a theater.  Same with the way he describes gestures facial expressions (p. 33):

Her eyes suddenly lighted up.  She lifted herself a few inches from the settee, settled down again, smoothed her skirt, leaned forward, and spoke eagerly:  "And even now you'd be willing to - ?"

Spade stopped her with a palm-up motion of one hand.  The upper part of his face frowned.  The lower part smiled.  "That depends," he said."

I think some of these things are too small and subtle to come from watching a play.  But they're just the kind of thing you'd be shown in a film.  Time and again he focuses on a facial or bodily detail, like a camera giving us a close-up.

I don't think I've ever read a book that so perfectly adheres to the creative writing dictum - which I don't necessarily agree with, by the way - "show don't tell."  Hammett never once tells us what a character is thinking, or why a character is doing something - we learn nothing that's not spoken or acted out in front of us. 

Which is not to say that Hammett's prose is strictly factual.  It does have its occasional flourish - but only of the most concrete kind (p. 144):

The District Attorney put his finger on one of the pearl buttons in a battery of four on his desk, said to the lathy youth who opened the door again, "Ask Mr. Thomas and Healy to come in"...

I don't think the buzzer buttons on the D.A.'s desk are actually made of pearl, although they might be;  if they're not, then describing them as "pearl buttons," not "pearly-gray buttons," or "pearl-shaped buttons," or even specifying that they're "pearl-topped buttons," is taking a risk.  Combine that with "in a battery of four," and you have quite a concentrated charge of evocative, metaphorical language here.  Once you mentally unpack it, it's actually the most concise way Hammett could have said it - much shorter and more concrete than "one of the pearl-like gray buttons set close together in a row on his desk," and much more powerful for its concision.  But it's so concentrated that it actually calls attention to itself.  As does the adjective "lathy," which is perfect, but rare enough to make you pause. 

I'd argue that these moments of descriptive flourished scattered sparsely throughout the text don't break the cinematic rule he's imposing on himself, because they're so concentrated that they don't imply cognition on the part of an author who's interposing himself between scene and viewer so much as they describe the scene the way an eloquent viewer would, if shown the scene just right.  They're the verbal equivalent of careful set design and cinematography, casting and costume.

Brilliant.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Love of the Last Tycoon

His last, unfinished novel, of course.  Which means I've run the course with Fitzgerald, as far as full-length works go.  I've been pretty hard on, because disappointed in, FSF regarding most things except for Gatsby.  But this one was a pleasant surprise.  Well, not entirely pleasant, because of course it's unfinished.  But I came away from it feeling that Fitzgerald died, perhaps, just when he was beginning to get interesting. 

It's well known that this work is a product of Fitzgerald's failed Hollywood stint, and that it's a roman a clef of Irving Thalberg.  Which means that it's not about Fitzgerald himself, and not about Zelda.  Did his failure in Hollywood humble Fitzgerald?  Did he realize that there were worlds out there and people who didn't care about the Riviera and its denizens?  Did it knock him out of himself? 

If so, it seems to have been all to the good.  Even in its fragmented, blurry state this is one of the most focused things I've read by Fitzgerald.  The characters stand out in sharp relief;  they're largely new types in Fitzgerald, doing new things, talking in new ways.  The descriptions, the scenes, are carefully observed and rendered. And you get the feeling that all of this is possible because Fitzgerald has been forced to look at something outside himself and his familiar, self-reflecting world for a change.  And he had the good sense to write down what he saw.