We Need To Blog About Kevin

We saw We Need To Talk About Kevin last night.  Having read and enjoyed the book I was surprised by the film's fragmentary retelling.  The novel tells the story of a woman whose son committed a school shooting.  It's an epistolary novel in which the Mom reflects to her now-absent husband on how she always believed her son was a damaged soul.  This reflective narration allows for plenty of chronological flexibility, but Mom unspools each memory or thread of incidents in a carefully detailed and closely argued fashion.  In one of my favorite passages, the Mom, whose blend of wit and misanthropy recalls Humbert Humbert, details her loathing of a McMansion her husband bought the family.  She goes on and on about every last repellant detail of the bloated McGormenghast, and it is hilarious.  Mom is a hoot.

She's also, in another Humbertian nod, an unreliable narrator.  Is her son really as monstrous as she describes him, or is her misanthropy the root of the boy's damage?  It's a Turn of the Screw-style riddle without a provided solution.

In the movie the Mother's voice, along with her vinegar wit, is mostly excised.  No voiceover or soliloquies here.  And since the film shows what the book tells, the filmmaker (Lynne Ramsay, whose painterly and elliptical filmmaking here is a tour de force) must make a hundred little choices about how to show the boy's defiance and seeming wickedness.  He comes across as thoroughly reptillian, which tilts things in the Mother's favor.

The film is also more fragmentary, skipping through chronology in a succession of quick cuts, as if George Roy Hill circa Slaughterhouse 5 dropped acid with Antonioni circa Zabriskie Point with an assist from Resnais circa Last Year at Marienbad.  Oh, you know what I mean, quit bellyachin'.

You know what the film really reminded me of?  Anime movies based on long-running series.  These movies tend to toss linear narrative out the window and rely on a kinetic parade of highlights from the story in the original TV series/comic.  Lots of details are alluded to but glossed over in the assumption that you've engaged the source material and know the context of details that are plopped down into the movie without explanation.  If you want to see an example of what I'm talking about, by all means check out Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, the adaptation of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV show that makes utter hash of the narrative, on the assumption that you've seen the show and just want a fancy recap before the screamy, spastic, let's-throw-every-idea-we've-got-onscreen-because-we-may-never-get-another-chance-before-we-have-to-go-back-to-hackwork-for-hire film it precedes: End of Evangelion.

Anyway, I liked the film on its own gawgeously photographed terms, but I had a few quibbles.

• No spoilers, but there's a big tearjerking surprise in the novel's conclusion that the movie flattens out by choosing to remove the Mother's narrative.
• The film decontextualizes some of the novel's elements so vigorously that they seem like little more than accidental residue.  Mom's seeing her son's TV interview; Mom's work as a travel writer.  These things are alluded to in the film in a fashion that left my wife, who didn't read the book, confounded.  I don't think my wife was alone in this.  I know the director didn't want to elaborate things in the rational manner of the book, but I'm not sure the bewildering surrealism of the way these elements of the novel irrupt in the film seem like anything more than arty intrusions to viewers who missed the book.
• One of my favorite parts of the novel involves the pre-shooting teen psychopath boy befriending a witless hanger-on, and their attempt to frame an innocent schoolteacher of student molestation.  Author Lionel Shriver turns this into a screamingly funny passage about how it takes brains and guile to be a successful villain; brains and guile that hangers-on can't muster.  I missed this, is all I'm saying.  The film pared things down, and some fun sequences got lost.
• One last thing.  There's a sequence in the film where the boy takes a bow to an imagined audience in the gym just before his crime.  It's shot like something out of Triumph of the Will, which makes sense as a cinematic look at the connection between self-glorification and brutality, but as a matter of taste I'd have preferred a found-footage style presentation that replaced the Wagnerian lighting with a verite smeariness.  The subtle irony of the film's approach to this shot might be lost on people who don't get the Triumph of the Will reference, while a Who-does-this-daydreaming-little-foreskin-think-he-is? presentation might puncture the self-dramatizing more deflatingly.  

I think "deflatingly" is a good way to end a sentence or a blogpost.

Do Not Mistake the Pointing Finger For the Moon; or, From Mediated Life to Life.

In the late 90s I was enraptured by an anime miniseries called Please Save My Earth.  Never mind the story; the people who made the show certainly didn't.  It was adapted from a long-running comic book series (that screaming you hear is nerds yelling "It's not a comic book; it's MANGA!") that had way too much made-up-as-she-went-along plot to fit smoothly into the adaptation, added to which the story in the comic wasn't yet finished when the anime was made.  The first episode of the six-episode show had a leisurely pace, but as it went on the tempo picked up, with incident trampling over incident until, at the end, we got a montage of unaddressed plot threads that felt like a "Next time on Please Save My Earth" trailer and an effort at poetic, rather than narrative, resolution.  This failure/refusal/confounding of linear narrative resolution, no matter how clumsy, prepared me for literary modernism in a way my literature classes hadn't.  The ending burst like a seedpod, flinging unresolved plot threads and dimly glimpsed story points all over, and I found it more entrancing than any tidy conclusion could have been.

So I was really into this show.  At one point in it there's a shot of a tree with its leaves wafting in the breeze; it had no narrative significance, but it was pretty to look at while the heroine narrated at us, and perhaps it suggested a context to her affairs that a more conventional picture of her face wouldn't provide.  For some reason this animated image of a tree resonated with me, perhaps because I lived in a neighborhood full of trees.

Every night I would come home from my second-shift job and walk the dog in the dark.  One of our neighbors had placed a light under a tall tree; the light shone up the shaft of the tree, illuminating its entire length up to the canopy of leaves.  I think I would have overlooked it if I hadn't had that animated image of a tree awakening me to the way trees exist on their own beside our lives; the numinousness of trees suddenly mattered to me after a life of living around them, and that illuminated tree became a nightly touchstone for me.

So.  I've progressed from cartoon trees (that in retrospect looked more like wobbling green bubble gum blobs than foliage) to trees with dramatic lighting, to just liking trees in general.  I regard this as progress: from the mediated experience to the thing itself.

Joaningo Road

I saw a movie called Flamingo Road recently.

• Michael "Casablanca" Curtiz directed, and the film does a crackerjack job of zipping around multiple locations in a small city without ever getting confusing.  I felt like I knew my way around town by the end.
• It's one of those movies where every little diner is the size of a ballroom, and beautifully lit, yet still seeming cozy cuz of all the little nooks within that expanse.  Lots of delightfully sassy waitresses and such, any one of whom could support a picture of their own.
• Joan Crawford stars as a sweet young thang, despite clearly being in her mid-forties.  She plays the part well, but still looks more like your Aunt than your crush.  Multiple scenes of guys seeing her for the first time and reacting as if she is the most desirable woman they've ever set eyes on.  Maybe this is part of her appeal for her hardcore fans; the obvious element of fantasy and role-playing.  No wonder people who are drawn to drag are also drawn to Joan; she was kinda doing drag.
• Sure, it's easy to laugh at this movie, but one thing makes it linger with me weeks after I saw it.  Joan's character wants the freedom to pursue happiness.  She gets involved in politics, not because she's drawn to the politics, but because a political power broker (Sidney Greenstreet, doin' his creepy thang) is messing with her, and she has to push back to achieve that objective.  Through jobs, arrests, love affairs and betrayals, Joan's character is never passive, never just about supporting her man, and never a Femme Fatale.  She's bold and assertive, but the film never makes her out to be wicked.  It's kinda proto-feminist; the idea that a woman can pursue happiness on her own terms isn't common enough in Tinseltown, then or now.

Picture source: http://legendaryjoancrawford.com/flamingoroad.html

http://robilla.tumblr.com

It's my new picture blog.  A mix of abstractish art, stuff I liked as a kid/teen/kidult, oddball bricabrac, pop culture with its pants down.  Admittedly most of it forwarded from other such sites, but some personal pix and fireside chats.  I started it for a class on social media as they pertain to libraries, so expect some class-related modulation between now and the end of the Summer term.

Minnelli Bovary

I'm fascinated by this essay.  Robin Wood was a brilliant and idiosyncratic film critic whom I respect, so to read his heartfelt defense of Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary is an intriguing experience, since I consider the film to be a stinker.  My wife and I watched the film shortly after finishing the novel (in Merloyd Lawrence's translation).  I don't expect film adaptations to be "faithful" to the source in a pious way, but to play with it the way Charlie Parker played with Embraceable You, to wit:

So I'm a bit put off by Wood's insinuation that those of us who dismiss the film for straying from the book are demanding overmuch fidelity to source material at the expense of the film's own integrity.  I don't ask for much from adaptations, but at least read the darn book before adapting it.

Wood and I agree, though: it's fruitless to evaluate the film in relation to the novel.  I doubt that anyone who worked on the film even read the novel, except an uncredited script department drone who wrote the plot synopsis which I suspect was the true source material for the film.  After all, if you're trying to capture the complexity of Emma Bovary, you don't cast a hambone like Jennifer Jones in the role.  And poor James Mason, in the thankless role of Flaubert, gets stuck mouthing narration that hews far more closely to Ye Olde Tinseltown Hack's Guide to Purple Prose than, well, Merloyd Lawrence, through whose translating lens I've viewed Flaubert.

I don't mind that, as Robin Wood explains, Minnelli made a film that was not a Flaubert adaptation, but while he was making a film that wasn't a Flaubert adaptation, couldn't he have refrained from titling it Madame Bovary, as if it were a Flaubert adaptation?  I call it a bait and switch.  I call it rude.

It's odd that Wood doesn't talk about the casting of Van Heflin as Charles Bovary.  In the book poor Charles is a nebbish who puts his wife on a pedestal but never understands her longings or perceives her infidelity.  Heflin, whom I liked as a tough-but-sensitive hero in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (where he convincingly out-butched Kirk Douglas), isn't obvious casting for the role of a clueless nebbish, and the way Minnelli mans Charles up to suit Heflin while still sticking to the plot summary memo he'd received from the script department is rather remarkable.  Heflin plays the role like "Chuck Bovary, Gumshoe Cowboy," and a guy like that doesn't miss his wife's philandering.  No, what he does is forgive it.  Confronted with written evidence of Emma's straying, he burns the proof in front of her, letting her know that he won't hold it against her.  It's almost as if he gives her tacit permission to be monogamish instead of monogamous if that's what it takes to keep her.  As daring as the novel was, the film actually one-ups it with this striking portrayal of a man letting his wife cheat if that's what it takes to keep the marriage afloat.  It's the kind of thing that probably goes on more than anyone wants to acknowledge, so kudos to Minnelli for tellin' it like it is.

One more thing: a lot of the action in the novel and film takes place in the city of Rouen.  How do you pronounce Rouen?  I don't know, and neither does anyone in the film.

"So how do you like Rown?'

"Oh, it's marvelous!  Row-wahn is the loveliest place I've ever seen!"

"Yes, she's had quite a time here in Roo-en."

Pure community theatre.

But check out the Ball scene, which Wood singles out for praise.  Revisiting it on Youtube almost convinces me to give the film another try.

Bibliophile Owl-Earl

Apropos of nothing, I'm thinking about Sepulchrave, the Earl of Gormenghast, in the novel Titus Groan.  I need to reread the book, but as I recall, his situation is this: required by inherited title to perform meaningless rituals all day, he traipses, alone, to his library each night to find solace in books.  The rituals he is bound to perform every day are things like throwing rose petals into a fountain while reciting a bit of verse.  All these rituals are ancient parts of Castle Gormenghast's culture, but the meanings of the rituals are neither remembered nor considered.  In Gormenghast, the signifiers remain, but their referents have been sawed off beneath them.  The value of the rituals is not in what they signified to their originators, since no one remembers what that might have been, nor in what fresh significance might be crafted for them by the current practitioners, since no one bothers.  The value is seen as intrinsic: doing the rituals is what is done, for the good of The Stones, the stones that make Castle Gormenghast.  However complex the signification of these rituals may have been in a (presumed, never acknowledged) Golden Age, they have been reduced to the level of superstition and taboo.  It's no surprise that the Earl's job satisfaction is poor; there's no sense of accomplishment or significance in what he does, only obligation.

I don't recall what his reading consisted of (another reason to reread the book), but The Earl's nightly library time doesn't seem to involve any research into the point of the rituals.  Perhaps he could refresh the rituals by delving deeper into his own culture, but this he does not do.  He's the pitiful bibliophile, using books as solace/escape from a disappointing life, rather than as an enrichment of life.  This, I can assure from personal experience, is no way to live.

Sepulchrave goes cray-cray after his library burns down; he thinks he's an owl.  This animal isn't chosen at random; Gormenghast's highest tower is abandoned by humans, inhabited by giant owls.  Perhaps this owl masquerade is the Earl's desperate attempt to go deeper into Gormenghast's heart than the stagnant contemporary culture of Gormenghast will permit; or perhaps the poor man just wants to escape from meaningless symbolism, unmotivated (and unmotivating) busywork, and insufficient significance.   Owls don't do symbolism (although they can be made to symbolize, as Pallas Athena could attest).  Owls just live, as The Earl tries to live, mouse-eating and all.  Finally The Earl goes to The Tower, ascending into that physical, rather than idealogical, part of Gormenghast that humans have abandoned, and gets consumed by owls himself, which may represent a cathartic embrace of The Real for the under-stimulated Earl, but of course it does neither himself nor his family any good.

The Gormenghast books leave me contemplating missed opportunities, as each character, many of whom have promising qualities, is held back from fulfillment by the pointlessness of everything their culture values (which boils down to the aforementioned ritual).  if the Earl could have found, in his books, a means of instaurating (a term I take from fantasy critic John Clute) his culture with the best bits of what it had forgotten (why throw those petals in the fountain?  Is the forgotten meaning worth remembering?), he might have saved himself and his culture.  Cultural stagnation and arteriosclerosis of the class system are the ruination of Gormenghast.

Alma Matters

When I arrived at my alma mater, the student newspaper wasn't anything to call your Mom about.  People routinely carped about the puff pieces, the weak efforts at humor, the amateurish layout (And yes, I know I'm being awfully snarky for someone who uses a prefab Blogger website, but I make no pretense to this being other than a vanity blog, while a student paper ought to sit up straight and comb its hair).  One time in my freshperson year, the paper grasped for greatness, at least of a comic nature, with a proto-Onion article about a fraternity getting a bug zapper;  this inspired some real amusement.  Its knowing lack of substance was no less nutritious than the rest of the paper's offerings, though, so the joke reflected poorly on the whole journalistic enterprise.

Over the years of my time there, more ambitious up-and-comers changed things.  By my senior year, some future editors of professional papers were testing their skills at the rag.  I recall sitting at the cafeteria table with freshman K--- W------- as he leafed through the school year's first issue and dissected its failings with an anger that suggested he would soon be pressing for changes.  He would indeed, along with G----- B---- and G---- P-----.  By the end of the year the failings K---- had detected were gone, baby, gone.  Soon the paper boasted an improved layout, a lively editorial page, and even a humor column that, lo and behold, was amusing.  The only thing missing was that staple of college papers, vulgar cartoons.  Dunno why.

The paper even indulged in some investigative journalism, proving that the administration's claims that the the campus food services were being run on a nonprofit basis were false.  Not that there's anything wrong with trying to make a buck per se, but all students were required to buy into the meal plan, and there were no refunds for unspent meal plan moneys, so trying to make a profit off a captive customer base (with no competition for those moneys) wasn't exactly playing by Adam Smith's playbook.  Nothing changed, but at least we knew where we stood.

After I graduated I still came crawling back to campus and scooped up the paper.  It continued to grow in might.  The humor writers got funnier and more pointed, and the editorial page initiated two regular columns, one by a fightin' liberal (who largely focused on local social justice issues) and one by a peacemaking conservative (who extended the hand of come-let-us-reason-together bipartisanship to lefties in a manner I found irresistible.  I need to find out what happened to that guy.)  And although I wasn't a sports fan, I'm told the sports page was exceptional.

Then one year the bottom fell out.  Suddenly most of the student-written content vanished, to be replaced by syndicated national news stuff, so if you wanted to know what Bill Clinton had done the previous week, the school paper was your rag.  Heaven help anyone who gets their national news from a college newspaper.  The humor columnists and the lefty guy remained, but the conservative guy had graduated and his replacement lacked his ability to draw illuminating connections.  She just typed up that week's values voter talking points and called it a day.

I was friendly with the lefty guy, and still consider him a friend (despite his cold snubbing of my facebook friend request last year) so I asked him (this is shortly after the paper's downturn) what happened.  As he explained it, K--- W------- and G---- B---- had been grooming the sports page editor to take over, but the Student Council had the final say in the matter, and they chose Miss Affability instead of Mr. Black Guy With A Track Record.  (For the record, two of the three editors who made the paper great were in fact editrixes, and the better of the humor columnists was female, lest anyone think I'm implying that the gender of the new editor (or righty editorialist) was a problem.)  It seems the new sheriff in town just wasn't up to scratch.

The climax came a few months later, when the paper carried a huge advertisement, a half-pager or so.  As I later heard from an English Prof (who accepted my facebook friend request, bless her) someone called the ad editor and placed a big order.  The ad editor said "yes I said yes I will yes" without adding "Oh, sorry but I have to ask: the ad doesn't say the Holocaust is a myth, does it?"  And so the ad went straight to the printer without anyone from the paper checking to make sure it didn't say the Holocaust was a myth.  And so my alma mater's school paper found itself one day besmirched with a tiny-type explanation of how Them Thar Juden are skeered to honestly debate the reality of the Holocaust.  I assume I was not the only person to send the editor an email explaining that she was perhaps a bit of a fool.  Apparently everyone with on-campus emails got an apology/explaination, while those with email accounts ending in ranma.com didn't, which explains why I didn't.  ( I also found that ranma.com email accounts only had enough memory for about two messages, which may explain why it did not last and ranma.com is a rather enigmatic website today.  It was the 90s, people.)

About a decade later the paper got some national notoriety because, as part of its hallowed tradition of reporters interviewing their friends and fobbing it off as journalism, the paper ran an interview with a pair of students who went on to burn down a bunch of churches.  This interview got a lot of play in what-were-they-thinking articles.  (Another thing about those guys: I was almost in a lo-budget comedy movie with them.  I auditioned, got offered a small part in which I woulda been interacting with the arsonists themselves.  I thought the script was unpromising, and took a pass.  The production was scuttled by the boys' arrests.  The filmmaker planned to salvage to footage with a documentary, but he didn't seem like the sensitive insight type, so I doubt it panned out.  On the other hand, his awesome loft apartment/audition space was decorated with Kandinsky and Klee prints.  Kandinsky and Klee are My Favorites, so maybe I'm underrating his potential.)

Recently I went looking for online versions/archives of the alma mater paper, like grown-up college papers have.  I found a couple of listless, abandoned efforts at online versions scattered about the place, but for archives you gotta go to my alma mater's library.  Have fun.

If this article reads oddly (or even poorly), that's what comes of mixing foreign beer with American microbrews.