American Splendor: Review

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) lived the life of a real working class hero.  Most know about his life and work through the 2003 film American Splendor. In 2005, he published his own account of how the film changed (and didn't) change his life.  The comic is totally honest as usual with Harvey finally getting some recognition for his work while he struggled through depression, anxiety, and cancer.  Since the 1980s, Hollywood had expressed interest in making a movie based on his comics.  Eventually in 2001 pre-production began on the film which starred Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis.  American Splendor proved a critical and commercial success with its innovative approach to a formulaic genre, the biographical film.  By blending comic book storytelling, cinematic recreations, documentary interviews, American Splendor stands as a classic.

Pekar produced groundbreaking comics while holding a day job at the VA hospital in Cleveland.  In the 1960s he befriended Robert Crumb, who brought a counter-cultural edge to underground comics, and encouraged Pekar to start writing on his own.  He believed the life of a flunkie (his words) file clerk still had the makings of great drama and possibilities for narrative storytelling.  He knew lots of interesting people, saw comical things happen everyday that rivaled anything in a Hollywood movie.

In "Our Movie Year" our man not only chronicles his year as a movie star, but also his influences as a comic writer: jazz music, realistic literature, and politically aware artists.  We also meet some of Harvey's close friends in comics Robert Crumb, Alan Moore, and many others.  In addition, Pekar provides a travelogue with his travels to Sundance, Cannes, Japan, and Australia.  

A recurring theme throughout Pekar's career is how comics remain a largely untapped resource.  Superhero films have ruled the box office for the past decade;  DC and Marvel still dominate the industry.  He believed the narrative power of comics had infinite possibility to inform people on important issues like political repression, censorship, issues of race and class, and the struggles of everyday people.  

Infinite Jest: The Future is Now

Infinite Jest brings to mind the Irish saying, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan?"  No novel published in the past 20 years has attracted more analysis than David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.  As I spent the past two months reading the 1000+ book, I've listened to several interviews with Wallace.  He's always so self deprecating, polite, and interested in what the interviewer has to say. He was a master of deflecting questions by always relating them to his own experience without ever really addressing the question directly.  Wallace saw and processed so much in a world where people are so strange, sad, isolated, hilarious, heroic, petty, and full of so much curiosity, loss, and regret over history.  Yes, reading Infinite Jest feels like victory; albeit, a victory more akin to Austerlitz than Waterloo.

Honestly, I believe the novel is at least four scrunched into one.  All the plot lines do intersect at the end - or so I've been told The ending lacks the satisfaction one finds in Ulysses or most literature, but maybe that's the point.  In a first reading I won't even try to venture a theory.  I will say the final 150 pages the descends into one anti-climax after another.  Wallace takes the reader into the darkness of an imagination thriving on the banality of existence in modern America.  

Addiction and entertainment. In a narrow those are the penultimate themes in the novel.  Set at some point in an early 21st century where everyone lives for getting the entertainment.  Most of Infinite Jest takes place at various locations in Boston. One is a tennis academy for prodigies.  The other is a halfway house for recovering addicts.  Life at both places is highly structured to provide assurance for people in highly sensitive situations.  Hal Incandenza is the protagonist, the seventeen year old son of the deceased founder of the academy, who is in a constant state of anxiety.  Hal carries the world on his shoulders and smokes large quantities of pot.  At the halfway house the patients have every part of their daily routine under surveillance as they struggle to imagine life without drugs. The halfway house is the place where the American dream is not only broken, but squashed into goo.  Wallace writes about addiction in such a terrifyingly realistic way and with such virtuosity that one gets a visceral sense of its corrosive aftermath.  But the writing goes beyond mere accounting of addiction and into insights on the human condition, namely, the conflict within the human heart.  What happens when our pleasure outlets no longer satisfy?  How much do we need to escape from reality?  The void awaits . . .   Sometimes these dilemmas, as Wallace presents them, feel insurmountable. And then maybe there lies a faint hope.

The plot of Infinite Jest revolves around entertainment discs ( a precursor to DVD's) where any sort of film is available on demand. One such film causes so much pleasure for the viewer it will literally kill them. Today millions of people are addicted to the internet and its endless opportunities for pleasure.  What does it all mean? Where do we go from here?  Wallace was obsessed with boredom in a world where so many luxuries are available while the need for anti-depressants keeps rising at time when so much entertainment is available.  

The geopolitical situation of Wallace's 21st century plays like a comic tragedy.   America has formed a union with Canada and Mexico, most of New York state is a landfill and angry Canadians plot war with the United States.  Vague references are made to massive population shifts, civil unrest, and economic catastrophe.  A renegade group of Quebec terrorists plan on using the film to alter the geopolitical balance.  The American president, Johnny Gentle, is combination of Ronald Reagan, Howard Hughes, and other oddities in the landscape of American celebrity.  

At the forefront of, is the saga of the Incandenza family.  Hal, the tennis prodigy, is the youngest son of James Incandenza, an avant guard filmmaker  (the footnotes contain a ten page filmography).  Hal has two older brothers as well: Orin and Mario.  Orin is a punter in the NFL who has an obsession with insects and single moms.  Mario is kindly, eternally optimistic, and Hal's conscience.  Their mysterious mother is headmaster the tennis academy.  All are in various stages of grief after the patriarch James took his own life; they are also in need of something they cannot quite define.  Themes of longing are juxtaposed with wrenching passages on the dread of loneliness:

Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think how he'll get through the day.  These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's uncertainty that the day will not have to be traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer (p.46). 

Struggles to make connections haunt all the characters as they ricochet like atoms off each other.  In Wallace's dialogue the characters tend to talk not at, but, past each other. 

The novel is made accessible with all the its pop culture references. The 1980s TV shows Cheers and Hill Street Blues are reassessed among other things.  One character devotes his entire life to watching reruns of MASH.  Relationships with media, TV shows specifically, can, for many, be more meaningful than real world relationships.  That's a conflict any American living in the 21st century must face whether they are aware or not.  All are in danger of being trapped in Plato's cave, only now it's in the form of screens representing reality.  But back to my first point, some predict the end of literature as an art form in the digital age.  However,  If good books are written - people will read them. 

What did I get from reading Infinite Jest?  For starters, I know it's made me a better reader.  It took me about 200 pages to get comfortable with Wallace's writing style.  After a while I felt like I was absorbing the prose instead of reading it.  The effect is cinematic because the text overwhelms

with so many images, almost like a collage at times, that it felt akin to watching a fast paced action film on another level entirely   Paragraphs come in large clumps going on for multiple pages.  My favorite section is about a role playing game called Eschaton;  a game simulating nuclear war on a tennis court. The book also triggered an interest in math (my least favorite subject) and the idea of it being a secret language and a skeleton key into philosophical thought.  Mathematics is the antithesis of the fragmented mindset perpetuated by a mass media driven age.  And the book demands rereading after rereading because despite all its intricate wording, fractured plotting, and shifting perspective Infinite Jest is an immensely entertaining and consistently thought provoking read.  Wallace delivers a rhetorical beating to the reader, not as a disavowal, but a plea to wake up and try to see hope within the white noise of the 21st century.  

Midcult and the 21st century

 Post-war USA saw the predominance of mass culture with the rise of television, rock and roll, bestselling books, self-conscious consumerism, pop heroes, pop art, and pop stars.  Mass culture, designed as a one size fits all entertainment to reach the widest possible audience.  Elite culture went into retreat.  I read Dwight MacDonald's seminal essay, "Masscult and Midcult." The essay, which appeared in 1960 in the New Yorker, lashed out at middlebrow art. While low art always existed throughout Western history in the form of folk art; the new midcults took high art and transmogrified it in a way to reach the masses.  Basically, MacDonald argued midcult cheated its audience.  For example instead of reading Romeo and Juliet, one could watch a massively popular Broadway show like West Side Story.  For MacDonald, such artistic endeavors cheapened literature because it had the pretension to masquerade as high culture.  Yes, I suppose it's fair to call to MacDonald a snobbish elitist, but his ideas are are an intriguing mix of stodginess and prophecy.

Building upon the work of the Frankfurt School's Marxist critque of the show business industry, MacDonald used Ernest Hemingway's career as a case study.  In his early writings, Hemingway mastered the short story while living as an ex-patriot in Paris under the strong influence of modernists Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.  MacDonald cited "The Defeated" as a masterful examination of mortality with the story's painstaking attention to character development through detailed descriptions of mood.  In 1953, Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea and later the Nobel Prize.  MacDonald crticized the novel as a sellout to the middlebrows with its "pseudo-biblical" language and overtly broad characterizations.  The nuance of Hemingway's early work gave way to a need to write something the "masses" would read and consider literature.  Thornton Wilder's Our Town is another target.  Wilder, who's play is about the passing of time in small town America with all its folksy wisdom.  Once again, instead taking on issues of mortality and the real problem of economic equality, Our Town, side steps the issues in favor of bland sentimentality.

High and Low Culture Merge

Ideas raised in "Midcult" seem partly from another era, but strangely prophetic.  By the late 1960s, the whole "middlebrow" system broke down.  Intellectuals started taking rock music seriously. The London Times declared the release of Sgt. Pepper Lonely Heart's Club Band  a decisive moment in Western Civilization. College kids couldn't get enough of Marvel Comics brand of complex superheroes the Fantastic Four and Spiderman (one fan was Italian filmmaker Fellini once visited Marvel headquarters).  Pop culture began to envelop high culture.  MacDonald insisted a democracy must insist on the highest standards of art and never settle for quick, easy solutions.  By essay's end he envisions a revolt of the artists who aspire to high art will find their esprit de corps and set themselves off from society.

 Mad Men, which many consider the finest fiction writing anywhere these days, shows the possibilities of good TV.  Long running dramas like The Sopranos unfolded like a novel with complex character developments, subplots, and ambitious themes.  Mad Men is set in the 1960s; a time when mass media exploded on television.  In a brilliant fifth season episode, ad man Don Draper and colleague attend a Rolling Stones concert and witness the powerful combination of rock and roll and youth culture; a young fan tells Draper, "you guys are jealous because you never had any fun."  Both are enthralled with the energy or the Stones, but also see them as a marketing tool.  The irony, however, is Madison Avenue now uses anything considered hip and revolutionary as a marketing tool.  Outbursts of personal expression fall under the spell of mass media.  One time revolutionary bands of the past now sell their songs to monolithic corporations. A recurring theme in Mad Men is the struggle for individual identity in an increasingly homogenized world. I would speculate that Macdonald would be a fan of Mad Men because of its realistic engagement with 20th century America.

MacDonald predicted the fragmentation of culture in his essay. As audience tastes become more and more diverse he hoped the middlebrow impulse would go away, and he predicted, "perhaps one would rather pay for bread than get stones for nothing."  But today, with so much entertainment out there; consumers know some of is good for them and some serves as time filler.  Currently, I'm in the process of reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The addictive nature of mass media is central to the novel.  In the bleak 21st century of of Infinite Jest, the West is controlled by corporations (corporate sponsorship replaces the Gregorian calendar), people thirst for non-stop entertainment available at a moment's notice.  The catchphrase, "getting the entertainment"  takes on many meanings in the Jest.  Personal relationships are dissonant.  Is isolation the price we pay? Champions of middlebrow maintain art aimed at the masses can have a transcending (or cosmic) effect.  MacDonald scoffed at the notion; he imagines great art usually comes from alienation and isolation.  Are such distinctions still necessary?  Does the question still matter?  


The passing of Roger Ebert is significant here as well.  Ebert wrote about every type of movie. Campy classics or obscure b-movies had a place beside the films of Antonioni or Bergman.  Ebert's Midwestern background had a strain of anti-elitism combined with an open mindedness towards art films made to challenge or even provoke its audience.  MacDonald himself wrote film criticism in a recognition of film's ability to weave between levels of expression.  Nevertheless, over 50 years later the idea of Midcult still has an edge and a point of view to ponder.

Classic TV: The City on the Edge of Forever

What makes great television?  Television always seems so . . . disposable.  Most television series are DOA when their pilots fail with executives and test audiences.  If a show is successful it may actually make it to air and get a chance to build an audience.  For those shows who stay on the air, they inevitably seem dated after leaving the airwaves.

Even for the most successful of TV shows there's maybe a few episodes audiences remember.  The original Star Trek is one anomaly since it achieved cult status after NBC, canceled it.  To the surprise of programmers ratings soared in reruns for local stations. Star Trek capitalized on the popularity of Sci-Fi in the late 1970s and later reemerged as a highly profitable film franchise for Paramount studios.

One episode all fans remember is "The City on the Edge of Forever."  So I watched it and to see one if it still holds up.  Written by the legendary Harlan Ellison, the episode in many ways latched on to themes that made the show unique: the camaraderie between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, a mission involving time travel, and a chance for Shatner to overact.  

"City on the Edge of Forever" is Ellison's sole contribution to the Star Trek canon.  For years he  expressed bitterness over producers meddling with his script (the original script is available in book form).  In addition to writing for television, Ellison wrote groundbreaking television criticism in his collection of essays, The Glass Teat.  Writers like Ellison did inspire a later generation consider the idea of television as a useful storytelling medium and to not shy away from being subversive.  

The episode itself starts with Dr. "Bones" McCoy accidentally injecting himself with a serum making him temporally insane.  In his madness he is beamed down to a planet and enters a time portal transporting him back to 1930s earth.  Kirk and Spock beam down and discovered McCoy had changed the course of history.  Earth never achieved space travel so the Enterprise is not there.  So they enter the portal to restore history to its proper course.  Ellison's original concept centered around a drug dealer on the Enterprise who enters the portal!  But the revised story still hinged on Kirk and Spock making history right.

Once they arrive in 1930 there are the obligatory scenes we get with time travel stories. Spock must don a cap to cover his Vulcan ears.  They meet a cop and both improvise an explanation about Spock's ears? The concept of Kirk and Spock as lost time travelers was later revisited in one of the best films Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  Eventually they are taken in by the angelic Edith (Joan Collins) who runs a homeless shelter who Kirk falls in love with, but then tragically learns she will prevent America from entering into the Second World War thus allowing the Nazis to prevail.  Someone disrupted the timeline by saving her life.  You can guess how the show ends.

I have not watched every Star Trek episode, but have seen many over the years.  At its worst the show is campy fun.   As for "City on the Edge of Forever," the episode epitomizes why the franchise endures.  At its best, the journeys of the Starship Enterprise are a space adventure with a sense of humor and that sparked the imagination of a whole new generation.  

Zero Dark Thirty: Into the Great Wide Open

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

- William Butler Yeats
  "Easter 1916"

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's follow up to The Hurt Locker, encapsulates post- 9/11 America.  As we follow Maya in her pursuit of Osama Bin Laden through interrogation rooms, embassy hallways, and satellite photos a historical tunnel vision sets in.  Many reviews have focused on Maya as a "blank slate" type character with not much of a personality, no real relationships in the film, and a self-righteousness bordering on obsessive.  But these are recurring types in American lore from Captain Ahab of the Pequod to the Mark Zuckerberg of the The Social Network.  They are driven by revenge and a sense of justice to set the world right- even to the point where their will and determination leaves them with a unique type of emptiness.

As cinematic entertainment, Zero Dark Thirty towers over the rest.  At 160 minutes the film builds to a chilling climax (or an anti-climax) with the killing of Bin Laden.  The years fly on by with no context provided for what else was going on in the world.  The geopolitical background behind 9/11 and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan are too complex for any to film to handle so instead we get an epic about a capturing a charismatic terrorist.  As one insightful critic noted, trying to make sense of modern history is akin to staring into the sun.  A 24 hour news cycle gives all of us a tunnel vision where there is no historical context for anything.  No one will even a agree on a narrative because we don't know where to begin.

The past few months I've been teaching a class on Western Civilization and we examine the Roman Empire in some depth.  While it is tempting to think of America as  the "New Rome" the parallels are striking.  During the height of the Roman Empire, the "Pax Romana,"  Rome defended their borders while those inside the empire went about their lives with prosperity quite rare in the ancient world.  Trouble from the Barbarians rarely effected them directly.  Have we reached a similar moment in American civilization?  Unless you know someone in the armed forces one can go about their lives with little concern for what's happening in the world.  Instead we have video games, movies, Fox News, and strip malls. Yes, America is now an Empire.

As for the film, it is tightly edited, well acted, procedural and is more interesting by what it chooses not to address.  Bigelow's narrative drive is so seamless it left me disoriented. The final 45 minutes are filmed through night vision as the Navy Seals close in on Bin Laden's compound.  They exchange banter before the raid that exudes a professionalism one expects from the most elite unit in the military.  On the one hand it is a marvel to see them at work.  On the other, there is a banality to it making it all the more haunting.  As the film ends Maya stares blankly into the camera there in the midst of ominous silence inside an empty cargo plane.  What is she thinking? Have we all stared into the void of history?

In perhaps the greatest of all procedural films All the President's  Men is about two heroic reporters who pursued the Watergate scandal and helped end a corrupt administration; thereby preserving the idea of democracy.  Zero Dark Thirty is working in reverse:  a film working from within the national security state.  Security is the theme, but it adds up to a negation and an aimlessness implying a future shrouded in fog and unpredictability. 

Revisiting Pulp Fiction

Recently I had the experience of watching Quentin Tarantino's 1994 masterpiece, Pulp Fiction on the big screen.  Nearly twenty years old, the film remains vibrant and alive.  Seeing every shot as the director intended is full of riches. One example is just watching the eyes of the actors.  During an early, now iconic, scene when Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) turn a routine hit job into performance art, one can observe Jackson's eyes shift eerily from whimsical to thoughtful to deadly.  Television fails capture those nuances.

At over 2 1/2 hours, Pulp Fiction has a narrative drive rare in American film.  For Tarantino, plot means everything and nothing.  His screenplay (written with Roger Avary) does not follow the three act conventions of most scripts usually greenlighted by the studios.  Long sequences of dialogue between two characters are often punctuated with intense action.  Tarantino's dialogue displays his virtuosity as a writer since it is used to add dimension to the film instead of advancing the plot.

Another example of the film's genius is how it uses genre as a means to reinvent storytelling.  By working within the confines of the "mobster" film genre, Tarantino simultaneously deconstructs, destroys, and recreates. In fact, how many people even think of Pulp Fiction as a "mobster" movie?  The three stories are standard "b" movie plot - taking out the boss's wife, a boxer deciding whether to take a dive, and taking care of a job going all wrong.  Few mob films contain ongoing discussions on metaphysics or "divine intervention."  Scorsese's gritty epic Goodfellas is about wiseguys doing their thing in everyday life: Can we imagine such a scene in a Scorsese film?

In fact since the term "Tarantinoesque" is now part of cinema parlance- meaning a potent cinematic experience.  For example, when John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance to Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell" Tarantino allows his actors to reconnect with audiences through dance and nostalgia, recalling Travolta's 1970s classics Saturday Night Fever and Grease.  Meanwhile Uma Thurman's French New Wave style elevates the scene to a pastiche of Godard.  The entire setting for the sequence, a retro- 1950s car hop fits the film perfectly; a simulated artificial environment with enough verisimilitude to make it realistic, but not like real life.  Tarantino's is realistic in terms of cinematic reality- that's his playground.

Since Pulp Fiction really is what exactly the title promises it's a film of escalating moments of terror, hilarity, loyalty, and even beauty. Characters in minor roles deliver some of their best work such as Eric Stoltz as Lance or Harvey Keitel as "Mr. Wolf."  Tarantino is well aware it is character actors who make movies worth watching and uses them maximum effect.  

I always thought the "Butch's" story seemed the weakest of the three since it relied more on action and pure shock value (thinking the "gimp" scene.)  But after watching it again I was struck by its optimism and subtle themes of loyalty.  Butch decides his self-respect is more important than money so he refuses to take the dive and outsmarts Marsellus and his crew.  But in the heat of battle he decides to save Marsellus when they confront an evil neither has experienced.  Butch's redemption  foreshadows Jules in the last act. 

And what of the final scene?  In the opening scene Tarantino sets up the ending with the absurd criminals Pumpkin and Honey-Bunny (an inept Bonnie &Clyde) plan to rob a diner.  Meanwhile Vincent and Jules are having an intense discussion about what constitutes a miracle.  In a final irony the post-modern epic ends with a sermon.  But is that the final joke?  Or do we read this as "character development?" Is their a hidden spiritual meaning to Pulp Fiction?  No more than one gets from Paradise Lost or The Pickwick Papers.  Pulp Fiction is a vivid film of color and humanity pulsating with a love of film - and throwing some profound questions around in the process.

Book Review: In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien

Those familiar with the work of Tim O'Brien know the Vietnam War is central theme in his novels. But the war here has more of a ghostly, ephemeral presence.  The main character, John Wade, has lost a primary bid for the U.S. Senate and retreats to the woods of Northern Minnesota to heal from his defeat.  At the cabin, his life begins to unravel as his world external and internal world unravels.  Readers will likely see John Wade as a distant character who we never get to know, nor do those closest to him.  O'Brien shows episodes in his life throughout the novel, never quite revealing the whole picture.  Without revealing too much we learn John Wade took part in one of the most horrific incidents during America's war with Vietnam. He marries his college girlfriend in a relationship that is seemingly normal, but also filled with darkness.  As a politician Wade is on the cusp of gaining a seat in the Senate until an unspecified scandal derails his campaign.  

Like every Tim O'Brien novel the prose is sharp.  But some readers may be frustrated by the lack of resolution.  Instead O'Brien provides hints and possible explanations for Wade's actions.  He seems harmless and deadly at the same time.  The characterizations are my major issue with the novel.  John's political adviser is an annoying caricature of those strange behind the scene figures.  Kathy Wade is a sad character drifting unhappily through her life as a political wife.  Unlike his other literature on Vietnam like Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, In the Lake less concerned with the reality of the war, and more with the unreality of it.  How did America get involved in Vietnam?  Does it matter?  Like any event in history, historians will invent narratives and causes for the war in long winded tomes, but behind all the rhetoric lies mystery, awful truths, and finally unresolved grief among the living and dead.  Yes, In the Lake of the Woods is a solemn novel because it suggests ideas instead of propagating them.