The reality of the backlash we’re seeing is that most people do yearn to be good, even if they don’t try: they don’t want to be selfish, they don’t want to live off other people’s suffering, they don’t want to be onlookers at a society’s gory wreck. But the manner in which our society and the larger world is structured forces their hand: living with a modicum of comfort necessitates putting on blinders. put it more elegantly than I am in a recent essay for :

Despair narrows your field of vision. In this city, as in others, you learn to anesthetize the heart in order to live: we are stuck in the same train car for however long our commutes are, that’s all. And so, instead of considering the lives of these strangers on the subway, you turn inward, you must tend to your garden, you must guard your piddling fiefdom. You might yet wince at the idea of subjugating others, preferring a life punctuated by the consumption of goods and services. We are willing to suffer so many varieties of moral injury to preserve a shot at that white picket fence. Unmoored from any sense of place or time, all you have is yourself, your family and whatever assortment of friends and lovers you accumulate over the years, berthed to their dreams and your minor ambitions, bobbling along unto death. All you can ask for is the right to be left alone.

I do take some comfort in the fact that the consequences of the contradictions of capitalism are becoming so obvious and brutal that even the every day American middle-class are unable to look away. I take comfort too in seeing how Americans in Minneapolis and elsewhere have come together to fight what is obviously wrong. I hope that the podcast administration is too incompetent to carry out their obvious plans. I think, I hope, that American military won’t be turned on our own citizenry because I think and hope that your average American soldier doesn’t have utter contempt for our citizenry, but you never know. CBP and ICE are very, very small organizations with a lot of false bravado that happen to have an enormous amount of institutional backing right now. If that were to fade, they would go back to being a part of the marginal, right-wing lunatic boy’s clubs that they were pre-2025, preparing to emerge from their troglodyte caves when fascism is yet again ascendant.

On the other hand, I also know that we have taken for granted that authoritarian regimes fail because the most famous European ones we know so well did—but elsewhere authoritarian regimes in various forms have triumphed for centuries, changing their basic shape and structure but keeping their emphasis on repression. In fact, many of them last longer, shape-shifting, than our tremulous democracy has. Sometimes revolution only begets another generation of repression. And the nature of authoritarianism is that the powerful don’t need people’s consent to keep them under their boot: they just need them to be frightened enough to comply.

The least we can do with the moment is commit ourselves to taking care of each other. Community, organizing, and care remain our best bets toward moving towards a society with greater respect for our shared humanity. That way we won’t have to have any more of our great cinephiles ( ) driven to self-deporting.

I’m not going to even get into the Epstein stuff. I think we’re probably all getting enough of that in our daily media diet.

Wanted to cover some of the things I’ve been reading and watching, though this is by no means comprehensive.

New Stuff:

FILM

A New Love in Tokyo (showing now at @ Metrograph)

A warm, funny, film that follows two sex workers, one a dominatrix and the other a call girl, as they become best friends. The former is well-practiced in enthralling the submissive men she spends her days torturing, and also a part of a theater troupe that she’s fucking nearly every member of. This troupe puts together one of the most hilariously awful plays I’ve ever seen in my life.

The latter repeatedly thinks she has finally found love in another dumb, directionless man whom she will marry, and finds something of a role model in her new friend. The movie does not ignore the challenges and threats that stalk sex workers — a killer is on the loose, and a STD is passed around — but chooses to let the characters off the hook, if you will, for the duration: the killer doesn’t get anyone we know, and the STD is “just” gonorrhea, which she passes on to the theater troupe, who descend into hysteric: in her flightiness, the dominatrix fails to inform them of what she’s passed on to them (or they’ve passed on to her). She twirls out of the room like a ballerina as she delivers the news. You have to see this one if you’re in New York while it’s still showing!

Cure, Kiroshi Kurosawa

One of the most depressing and frightening movies I’ve seen recently. Though I know hypnosis doesn’t work “like that,” it’s nonetheless on the margins for believability. This isn’t a fatuous, Manchurian Candidate scenario. The villain of Cure draws out of people what they already want to do and simply removes their inhibitions. What’s supernatural about this film is subsumed by the truth that it reminds us of: there may be deep-seated, hidden desires, which are taboo for good reason, crawling around in our brain, waiting to be unleashed. One can imagine, one can even observe as I write this, entire societies where bloodthirstiness and contempt are being given psychological free reign, until they so thoroughly stain the social fabric one can’t recognize it anymore.

Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville

A film about the French Resistance that was buried for nearly fifty years for the crime of being, well, a little too real about how fatuous and self-involved revolutionaries and resistance fighters can be. Though it does not fail to endear them to us — they do some revolutionary work that is worthy — it also reveals the contradictions and hopelessness of fighting a war machine in secret with just a handful of private citizens who have little expertise in spycraft, weapons, and self-control. These characters spend more time whacking each other than the Soprano family, to be blunt, and in the end, the war would have almost certainly been won without them. What it suggests — that sometimes the manner in which we fight back is more informed by a desire to satisfy our own pride rather than for the putative cause we call our own — is a worthwhile reminder in these times.

BOOKS

At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien

This is no doubt an obvious observation, but O’Brien’s zaniness prefigures the post-modern metafiction of authors like Barth and Barthelme, but he’s employing wacky mode at a scale that others could only dream of: maybe not the scale of Pynchon, but scale nonetheless. He’s a writer of pith first and foremost, a comic distiller. The peak of this novel is its character’s revolt against its author, who has enslaved a number of characters from Irish folklore who are not happy to be what Nabokov called his “galley slaves.” There’s little heartbreak here, but I don’t always need that from a book: laughs will do, most of the time.

Zeno’s Conscience, Italo Svevo

A first-rate comic novel, lauded by Joyce, who brought the book to Paris, where it brought the author fame. Compulsively readable, featuring one of the most annoyingly self-involved narrators I can remember: convinced of his own genius, yet aware that he has no patience for anything but socializing and skirt-chasing, always flattering himself for feeling guilty for acting in bad faith but proceeding anyway, and inventing some of the most absurd humiliations and embarrassing self-owns to atone. Proceeds from one absurd situation to another with the briskness of a Kafka novel, but without the same mounting dread and suffering. Death looms, but it never threatens our narrator directly: though we wish it might.

Without being didactic, the book is also a terrific critique of the bourgeois. When our basic human needs for shelter, food, water, connection, etc., are met, the well to-do might seek out other sorts of goodness, devote themselves to something, (and our narrator does go to analysis!) but usually, they do not. Why? First of all, it might disrupt or risk their position, taking them outside what Bataille called the homogenous part of society, dedicated to productive utility and capital, and therefore violating the norms and rules that raised them to their position in the first place. In becoming well to-do, the only thing they’ve learned the value of is money. Knowing this is inhumane, they flagellate themselves in minor ways to alleviate their conscience.

Good Girl, Aria Aber ()

Thoroughly enjoyed this window onto the self-destructive life of a young Afghan-German woman, Nila, ashamed of her own heritage and existence, desperate to escape the judgement and lifestyle of a diaspora she is bound to and feels, from looking on the despair of her father, is nothing but a dead-end. That she attaches herself to another dead-end, a maybe once-gifted white-guy writer addicted to clubbing and abusing/discarding younger women, who is unsurprisingly consumed by his own nihilism, proves that we pursue what we think we deserve, even if we don’t realize it. Without giving too much away, I’ll say I was relieved to see the narrator afforded an escape route that her intelligence deserved, but was at the same time surprised the book gave it to her. Added bonus: I don’t ever need to go to a Berlin club, now. Not that I would have.

The Calculation of Volume, Part 1, Solvej Balle

A book that was so terminally boring that it wasn’t till the end of that I realized no one had in fact calculated volume for even a minute. I really wish a Groundhog-Day scenario book would, for once, put this opportunity to relive one day over and over in the capable hands of a sociopathic drifter. It would be more interesting than the sort of banal ruminating about the nature of time, the tenuousness of our connection to others, etc. that this book produces and reproduces, over and over again. I’m told that in the later books the narrator actually goes on to do something other than sit around their house, feeling bad for themselves, but I’m not sure I’ll ever find out what that was.

Red Dragon, Thomas Harris

I was stunned by how good this is. Inspiration for adaptations by both Michael Mann and Brett Ratner, it’s yes, an FBI serial-killer-profiler book, but it’s one with a bleak sense of humor and a terrifically frightening psychopath at its center. Hannibal Lecter makes appearances yes, and he steals the show (and someone’s tongue). Some of the backstory — which is inserted via tendentious flashbacks in the middle — is a little too Freudian paint-by-numbers for me, and drew an almost Nabokovian (and Lecterian) contempt for psychology out of me, but I got over it when we got back to the good stuff.

Old Stuff:

The Sopranos

This has got to be rewatch number, like, five or something. The show is still wickedly funny as a send-up of American capitalism, an endless rip-off/jerk-off nearly indistinguishable from the mafia lifestyle, as the show reminds us of again and again, and it feels more relevant every day as the depravity and conman-ism has become more and more flagrant. What’s hardest to watch is how blithe the men are in their sociopathy. This would seem to have prefigured our current political and social moment in a way that would have astonished even David Chase, if he could have looked into the future twenty-five years ago.

Resurrection, Bi Gan

I’ve seen this now three times in theaters, and it moves me more every time. I can’t say I’m any closer to understanding it, honestly, nonetheless something there’s something in there about the death of cinema, the death of art, and our own dooms, each impending at its own rate, that brought me to tears.

Killing of a Chinese Bookie, John Cassavetes

An uneven film, messy and not as punchy as I remembered. I watched the director’s cut, which is half an hour shorter than the theatrical cut, and I still felt the film was shaggy: which is ironic, since I remember liking the theatrical cut more. I suppose that despite the desperation of Cosmo Vitalli’s situation, the film feels laconic. The other characters, too, especially the women who work at his strip club, seem like cardboard cut-outs, lacking agency or motivations of their own that might lead them to, you know, act. Maybe that’s an unfair criticism: they do act out, or lash out, at times, at Vitalli’s sleaziness and lack of transparency. Ultimately it has heartbreak in spades, and Ben Gazzarra is tremendous.

Finally…

I had occasion to meet up with good old friend , who is lucky enough to have avoided substack, the other week, for a reading at KGB Bar, a place that I usually avoid because I am nearly 35. He gave a terrific reading. To close, here’s a piece by him that I quite like, from 2021:

In late 2019, I was reading Tokarczuk's Flights and, finding myself in Philadelphia, took a fieldtrip to the Mütter Museum. Known for its collection of medical oddities, the Mütter was not as obscure, judging by attendance, as I'd anticipated. The halls of warped human skulls, conjoined fetuses in solution, and paper models of history's most grotesquely oversized colons were packed tight. The air was heavy with the breath of several thousand Thanksgiving hangovers. It was damp, and far too warm, but if I'd missed the coat check, so had most everyone else. At length, I found a temporary exhibit (mercifully, it was deserted), Spit Spreads Death, which covered the social history of pestilence going back to the Black Death and featured, more specifically, the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918-19 that ravaged Philadelphia. The city had waged a campaign to stop public spitting (banners flew, spitters were shamed), meeting much the same results as today's mask mandates. Rampant, flagrant failure to comply, anger in every beating heart, death, despair, bitterness, etc. A panel at Spit Spreads Death's exit dared visitors to wonder whether the next great pandemic had already begun. I knocked, ignorant as a 14th-century peasant, on the first length of wood I met. Now here's Pavement with "Spit on a Stranger."

P.S. One dog owner to another: pick up your dog’s shit. It’s the least you can do!

Here I am, with thoughts on the end of the year and a beginning of a new one, with lots of help from Adorno1, if only because I’ve recently read Minima Moralia and it’s been on my mind almost constantly. We’re living in a moment that might have been prefigured by that which inspired his work. For that reason it carries an eerie kind of prescience.

With 2026 around the corner, let me begin with doom. There’s no shortage of reasons to be frightened of the passage of time. Capital continues to gamble on exponential growth as if the bill won’t come due on an ever-increasing wealth gap and the devastating increases in the global temperature that are melting glaciers like ice cream left out at a picnic. The United States, the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world and the most advanced army and global influence, has finally dug up and exposed its white nationalist roots by electing a grifter administration helmed by a lunatic narcissist and a Supreme Court stacked with frauds, a cabinet stuffed with a bunch of conspiracy-theory peddling reality television hosts and podcasters,2 and Stephen Miller, a hateful psycho who is giving new meaning to the “melting pot” by boiling as many people alive as possibly can as he cribs from Goebbels, even though he himself has Jewish heritage. Russia continues to burn through its young men in the name of a war that seems to have begun simply to satisfy one old man's vanity. For all our advances in technology, the human race's ability to backslide intellectually and morally into hedonism, greed, and stupidity makes it seem like the arc of moral history, rather than bending toward justice, is just a silhouette of a hill, slippery with ice, which we're all pushing the same dumb boulder up over and over again Sisyphus-style. We are not beating the "We Are Rome" allegations, on several levels: I saw an ad for UFC on the Subway the other day which did nothing more than quote Gladiator ("Are You Not Entertained?"). Then they had bread and circuses to pacify the masses, now we’ve got no shortage of mind-numbing options: AI slop, football, reality television, and a constant onslaught of social media that you could literally keep scrolling without stopping until you die.

And yet, and yet, and yet. New York elected an honest-to-god Socialist mayor, who was sworn in yesterday; the simple truth “it’s the economy, stupid” might actually derail the plans of Trump’s admin (I see a bunch of gleeful idiots getting so high off causing people pain that they don’t realize they’re turning the entire country against their agenda). And the contradictions of capitalism may actually be accelerating to such an extent that the people and their governments might actually realize some kind of revolutionary change is necessary to stop the vampires of capital from leeching every last good thing dry of its value. When I think of the horror of the great Depression and the horror of World War II I also think of the New Deal, the closest the United States has ever come to a socialist program (even if in the end it was just one more way of prolonging capitalism by making temporary concessions to labor). The manner in which the right and capital have removed their masks to reveal the enduring cruelty which is their project and the utter rapaciousness of their greed will, I believe, make it impossible for capital and authoritarian wannabes to continue to behave as if their are no repercussions for their behavior. There might be a lot more suffering first, but I do think at the end of the day fascists and capitalists are too shortsighted: they are gamblers first and ideologues second, and the action is the juice for them. The SpaceX spaceship to Mars which they think can all hop on, John Galt-style, to avoid the pitchforks and retribution that they deserve, may never come. Maybe the utopia we want isn’t possible, but in striving for it, maybe we can make something better.

I will add that I've been extremely lucky, personally, this year. I've found love that is kind and encouraging, I've found another gear as a writer, though that hasn't manifested itself in a lot of published writing (this is the exception). I've had an extremely hard time watching my parents grow old, but that’s the passage of time for you.

A few thoughts and other things I’ve been up to…

Stuff I’ve seen recently

I’ve been at the cinema an absolutely obscene amount lately because I love a big screen with loud noises. Can’t be beat. People will insult Alamo Drafthouse but the sound system is such that the much-malinged eating-in-the-movie-theater is actually almost entirely drowned out — whereas in a place like Metrograph (which I love!) you can hear every single popcorn crunched and candy-bag fiddled distinctly, and IFC Center is filled with NYU students laughing at inappropriate times and old people who are confused if the train is going to come out of the screen and run them over. Anyways. Love the movies. Love ‘em.

No Other Choice (2025)

“You probably want to be covered in lube oil”

There’s a degree of silliness to this one that some found tiresome, but I understand what I’m getting into with Park Chan-wook. Lacks his characteristic shocking twists, though there’s some turns, but it all comes together because of the strained smiles and forced cheer of its main characters and an excellent script. Ultimately a satire with some teeth about what capital is driving many of us to: alienated laborlessness and ultimately, murder.

The Apartment (1960)

“That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.”

“Some people take, some people get took. And they know they're getting took and there's nothing they can do about it.”

One of the great films about a guy getting cucked by his job. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine are fabulous, as is the script What makes me love this film is obviously Lemmon and MacLaine’s romance, but it’s also the films moral center.3 One thing you could do in a romantic comedy in the 50’s and 60’s that you can’t do now is authentically portray a woman being driven to the cusp of suicide by male chauvinists.

Also love how you don’t ever see the executives in this film ever doing a single minute of work: they’re always trying to navigate some kind of personal moral morass, cheating on their wives, or getting their shoes shined. Funny also to think that the very same goofy mannerisms that make Lemmon so charming in this are also what make him seem so slimy nearly 30 years later in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

“No dream is ever just a dream.”

A nice match for The Apartment: rather than getting cucked by his job, Bill Hartford is getting cucked by his wife’s and his own imagination. The film operates almost like a dream: Cruise as Hartford is constantly beset by people who are either trying to have sex with him or who are trying to sell him sex, and yet he finds himself thwarted (or thwarts himself) at every turn.

I have complicated feelings about the ending, which I nonetheless love: I don’t think that final line is supposed to be just a laugh or a real solution. These really are the frustrated bourgeois: Cruise wants to really be a part of the upper crust, to be able to do what he wants when he wants to whoever he wants, and he has had his peek into how the other half lives: and he’s also seen that he’s run into the concrete ceiling of his own wealth and power. He should be happy, he should be able to connect with his wife…but Bill Hartford will always be haunted, I think, by his own fragile ego.

Been marching around saying Fidelio in that same smarmy, self-satisfied way Cruise does ever since.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

“Leannnnnnningggg, leannnnnningggg…”

“Does he ever sleep?”

Astonished and saddened to learn that this film bombed and its director was so discouraged he basically quit making movies afterward. Accusations included: too horrifying and evil, too little Christianity, not believable enough, etc. Never mind it was based on the true story of a serial killer, Harry Powers, I guess in 1955 America was still not willing to look itself in the mirror. Nothing has changed in that respect.

Robert Mitchum is terrifying and hilarious: he’s got all the charms The Misfit or the evil preacher of A Good Man is Hard to Find or Good Country People, respectively. And there’s the grandmother who talks too much and the credulous southerners with too much time on their hands. I imagine Flannery O’Connor could have sat through this biting her fingernails the whole time—she’d also have been gravely disappointed by the ending: too little blood.

On Discipline

As writers we’ve been inundated with self-helpy advice that encourages us to lower our expectations and to treat everything but the actual work as writing. The truth, really, is that to create great work you must be incredibly exacting. It’s not enough to write good sentences in a world that is full of shinier, flashier distractions. Good writing is exceedingly rare because truly effortful writing is rare. We have an attention economy that encourages people to push out more and more material to stay relevant and maintain momentum when good work is exhausting, demanding, its production rare for even excellent writers. Thus Adorno, again: “Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance. Affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples.”

One must not only want to make something great, but have a good reason for continuing. Passion, heartbreak, sadness, all of these are good fuel, but anger might be best.4

There have been periods of my life when I was exceedingly diligent and focused on my craft and my service to others and my politics, and others in which I have been extremely stoned on one substance or another. I believe I am entering another period of diligence. I give myself grace -- for several years after my heart surgery, I was casting about for a purpose, both terrified of living and of dying, and therefore waffling between self-destructive behavior and commitment to right life lived rightly. I believe I’m over that now, though.

On Satire

I have been thinking of Verhoeven lately, as inundated as I am in public (especially on the Subway) by advertisements that seem to be straight out of his oeuvre. The aforementioned UFC ad, for one, but also the ads that more or less promise to automate away your workforce, that promise an AI friend, the asks (Dying? Give us your organs!)

Perhaps some of his movies didn’t land so well as satires at the time (i.e., Starship Troopers) not only because the viewing populace wasn’t ready for them, but because they function better as terrifying premonitions. The rhetoric of white supremacy and fascism that undergirds Starship Troopers, the promises of a automated police force of Robocop that is in cahoots with organized crime: these feel, at times, like what we’re headed for, not what we came from.5

On Stuff I Plan to Read & Do This Year

1. Finish the Great American Novel

2. ????

3. profit

Books I plan to read:

Movies I Want to See

Magellan (how have I not seen this yet?!)

The Odyssey (who could miss an opportunity to see Christopher Nolan Batmanify Greek Myth?)
The rest of Kurosawa’s oeuvre (My partner got me Red Beard and Dodes’ka-den for Christmas, and I intend to prioritize those.)

Favorites from this Year?

Too many movies to get into, honestly. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

But my favorite novel was definitely On the Edge of Reason. Who wouldn’t love a book about a guy who can’t stop slapping rich assholes?

Till next time…

And we, of course, have always had our grifters with a heart of gold. Like Tom Sawyer, they're the true believers: if they cheat and steal, it's because they believe that the means justify the ends. They don't even conceive of themselves as grifters: someday soon, when they get their break, they'll pay everyone back.

Enter Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein's latest creation, Marty Mauser, the true believer of Marty Supreme, aspiring ping pong world champion. He's a grifter at heart — the first thing we see him do, as a shoe salesman, is try to trick someone into buying a pair of shoes a size too big in order to make an extra buck — but in the end he intends to get his by way of his skill. He endears himself as much with his scheming as with his bravado, even if that bravado is in service of a dream that is utterly farcical.

And boy is that dream farcical. If at the beginning of the film the viewer is naive enough to believe him when he says he's going to end up on the side of a Wheaties box, by the time he's playing ping pong opposite a literal seal, they ought to have been disabused of that notion. Despite the carnival of disaster that is constantly unfolding in Marty Supreme (who saw that bathtub collapsong, raise your hand. (I don't believe you.)), Marty is more competent than your average Safdie protagonist.

When I think of the Safdie’s, I think of Howie saying “this is how I win” while discussing betting on event completely out of his control with one of the best athletes in the world. A Safdie protagonist's plans, machinations, and flanking maneuvers, are always faintly ridiculous and carry the miasma of rotten reality testing: here's Connie, of Good Time, robbing a bank with the help of a brother with an intellectual disability, here's Howie, making three-way parlay bets on basketball games with money acquired by duping Kevin Garnett into buying a gem of dubious value shipped from Africa. Marty is, relative to these men, in control. He's a great ping pong player, one of the best in the world. Unfortunately, being second-best still isn't enough to make him a lucrative career outside of performing as a sideshow. Marty’s promise of being the face on a Wheaties Box, even if he believes it, is indistinguishable to others from his other lies in its presentation. It's a castle built on air.

And so there's little way around the fact that Marty is a grandiose narcissist so preoccupied with his own success and convinced of his own greatness that he will lie to others and manipulate them in order to achieve what he believes he's destined for. He believes he can will reality even when reality continuously smacks him around.

Okay, so that's definitional. What else is definitional is that of course it runs in the family. There's plenty of manipulation going on with the Mausers. His uncle calls in a cop to scare him straight and his mother either fakes being ill or causes herself a hysterical illness in order to ruin his chances of going abroad. That doesn't mean the family is without care: Marty does bring his mother home a present, for example. It is one of only a couple moments, I believe, in the film where he does something for someone else, in this case presenting his mother with a piece of a pyramid which he stole with a chisel while on tour in Egypt with the Globetrotters. After handing her the piece of rock (which recalls the titular uncut gem), there's a close-up of his mother, nodding in a fashion that indicates she's satisfied for once with her son. In fact it's one of the only times we see someone actually satisfied with what he achieves in any enduring fashion. (Tyler the Creator's character on the other hand, might be dancing for one minute with Marty over the money they won duping some yokels, but minutes later he's under attack and accidentally lighting a gas station on fire).

Marty’s gall is gorgeous (1to quote another film about an inveterate grifter) especially in light of the fact that it takes place less than a decade after World War II. Marty comes from a Jewish family with connections to survivors of the Holocaust. But Marty doesn't have a distinct sense of sacrifice or luck or even gratitude (which he only expresses when he must), and he's an athlete first, not a Jew (much as Howie is a gambler first and foremost). It's not so much that he's looking to assimilate: he's an athlete in the tradition of all great American athletes. He is entitled to success, as far as he is concerned, and he understands that to succeed, he cannot have truck with any thoughts of being less than the best. Failure doesn't even enter his consciousness, as he puts it. What Marty recognizes with every other grindset grifter and capitalist is that if one stops to think of anything other than maximizing their own success or accumulating capital, and especially if one stops to think of the consequences of their own actions and the way it might hurt others, failure is next, because the next guy might not have so much compunction. It's a mindset and a way of organizing society that makes conscientiousness equivalent to loserdom.

This is where Marty's striving becomes at best, amoral: after all, this is basically the same engine that runs capitalism: in a society where every man must fight for his stake, the ones who get to the top of the food chain are the ones who believe they can eat anybody and get away with it and just happen to be right.

And so although he thinks of himself as unlike Rockwell, the pen magnate who funds his trip to Tokyo in turn for throwing a match, he's not so different from him. Rockwell, a self-described vampire and pen salesman, played here by actual right-wing capitalist and reality television star Kevin O'Leary (who apparently came up with the vampire line himself), takes pleasure in winning too, and being able to buy his way into anything. Marty's dream, after all, isn't just to be the best in the world, it's to become the face of America: to end up on a Wheaties box, to have his own ping pong ball, his own suite at the Ritz. His dream is not of the white picket fence and a house for everybody that America promises, but the secret promise America makes to the elite: not a homestead, but a mansion, not a family of four and a Labrador, but an affair with an actress, secret societies and smoky boardrooms and never having to spend any time at home. Marty sees up close how Rockwell and his wife, Kay, live (and how Kay fucks, as a matter of fact) and decides even theft is above board, especially when one knows the game is rigged and that money earned from the dream we are sold is used to buy the secret dream. In the end, nothing exists outside the dream that is more important than the dream. Anything can be justified in its pursuit.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Marty's blithely dismissive reaction to the remarkably beautiful story his uncle tells at his own prompting (so he can better stare at Cate Blanchett while her husband takes the story in) about slathering himself in honey so he can feed his fellow prisoners at the Auschwitz. Marty has heard it all before and doesn't find it beautiful or remarkable. If anything, he thinks it's a weird anecdote that will baffle Rockwell long enough that he can make eyes at Kay. This more than anything demonstrates his moral impoverishment: sacrifice is something for suckers, for the desperate and those with no other choice. It doesn't matter to him that other people would do such things to save others. It doesn't interest him. But what the honey tale suggests is a world where saving and helping others is a reward in itself that requires no striving per se, but enormous personal risk.

Marty's life is predicated on the inverse: he continually takes risks at other people's expense, spending their money, busting up their cars, losing their dogs, while using their capital to strive for himself. He has the mindset of a rich person who is constantly living on the margins in order to capitalize later. What makes him only a hustler is that he won't be able to pay those people back, and what saves Marty from Howie or Connie's fate and makes him emblematic of the American dream is that he isn't completely without fellow feeling.

And so when Marty looks down on his own baby in astonishment, I was moved. And then, my second thought was: Marty would be a supremely difficult father to live under, if he even sticks around. While the course of the film has seen him already have to compromise his dreams, he's not the type to give up. He's not unequivocally the best at his sport, but more importantly, nobody gives a shit about table tennis. He's had to travel the world playing ping pong opposite a barking seal and the Harlem Globetrotters, making him the sports equivalent of a court jester. Table tennis seems unlikely to provide a steady income where he can live like he wants, something he seems unable to accept. Which in turn suggests that reality testing will be a problem throughout his life, and men with bad reality testing and gambling personalities tend to make bad fathers. Scheming is in his blood if only because he enjoys it (the action is the juice, to quote Heat): he will always be scheming, always thinking first of his own plans, perhaps turning into a man like Howie, a washed up loser with plenty of money who nonetheless is living on the margins, only thinking of his next bet and his next adrenaline rush.

Nonetheless, it's touching to see how moved he is by the ostensible miracle of life. To hear Josh Safdie tell it, he was explicitly thinking of his own parents and his own child while writing it, about what a person's purpose is, and how a child can end up being a person's legacy in spite of all their striving. And yet anyone would wonder how competent father Marty would be. The films ends, in that sense, in media res: and like a lot of great in media res endings, the ostensible ambiguity can only be overcome if the viewer understands the narrative logic of the work of art. No, we don't know how Marty will respond to being a father, but everything that we have learned about him suggests that what comes next will not be easy for anyone involved.

But here's the thing: who can know? Marty did come back to Rachel, the young woman who we see him impregnating at the very beginning of the film. He said he would be there for her. He said he loved her. He's not yet a pathological loser like Howie. At the same time, even the baby looks at the nurse with a face that nearly asks “who the hell is this guy,” the same question that pretty much everyone who has encountered Marty has had to ask. Of course I can't seriously attribute that feeling to the baby (or at least I don't think I can), and yet you can imagine this child growing up to wonder that very thing about him. I think of Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse, as I so often do: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to but they do.”

The question is if Marty can live outside of the grift, if there is any authentic Marty, other than the one who pathologically steals and lies in order to pursue his dreams. Again, the film's narrative suggests not: the one gift he gives to his mother he frames by saying “we built that” (i.e., Jews, pyramids), when regardless of who built the pyramids, Marty stole this particular piece of it. And while Marty never expressed anything like this exactly, in a world where such unconscionable evil like the Holocaust is possible, who has any right to tell him he can't lie and steal a little to get to a place where he can protect and take care of those he loves?

And that's the possibly irrevocably compromised hope: that even if the dream is stolen, something legitimate can be built on top of it. Perhaps there's a part of Marty that can devote itself to another human being that hasn't been demonstrated yet. The question for Marty will be if he can live enough in reality to be present for anyone else, or if the glittering draw of riches and fame will ruin him. It's the question of our time, the problem that keeps me up at night about our doomed world: can we stop chasing our own riches and success long enough to realize that the only true salvation on this Earth will come if we band together to save each other?

FILMS

One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson

A very fun film that holds up worse under interrogation than its ostensible revolutionaries. The internal logic of the narrative suggests a surveillance state and crushing white-supremacist authoritarianism that is fast able to swallow up nearly the entire leadership of the French 75 and the miscegenating Colonel Lockjaw but mysteriously leaves Willa and Bob Ferguson untouched in the end even though they have a remarkable story to tell that would embarrass the Christmas Adventurers. Nearly all of the other characters are forced to betray their principles except the bumbling Leo DiCaprio, who is rescued time and again by people more competent than he. One could practically see PTA’s gigantic hand protecting Leo on the IMAX screen.

I suspect Paul Thomas Anderson did not want to end the movie in the way its own narrative logic suggested he would have to: as bleakly as Chinatown or his own There Will Be Blood. If he had, it would have been his stand-in and the stand-in for his own daughter who had to suffer. And we wouldn’t have been able to walk out of the theater feeling hopeful and dancing to “American Girl” (as some at my showing were). I also suspect PTA wanted to make a film that gave his viewers hope in a dark time. If so, he might have made that hope at least coherent.

Patriotism, Yukio Mishima / The Woman Who Wanted to Die, Kôji Wakamatsu

Watched as a part of a special screening of one of the only two remaining prints at Japan Society. Aroused such revulsion in me I almost threw up in the theater. The film blithely eroticizes fascism and honor, using a love for Imperial Japan as a narcissistic pretext for a grandiose suicide.

Mishima stars as himself, and although the suicide is supposed to be about and in the name of the death of his nation’s honor, what actually appears on film for the most part is Mishima’s own body, and an enormous amount of blood and guts. It wasn’t the blood that caused me to feel sick but the realization that fascism and patriotism are in the end nothing more than a tremendous narcissistic desire to glorify one’s own self—to create some symbol worth sacrificing one’s own inflated sense of self for.

The Woman Who Wanted to Die, which followed the screening directly, recognizes this narcissism as fundamental to Mishima’s aesthetics and project. Taking place (and filmed) directly in the aftermath of Mishima’s suicide, it follows two sets of lovers who are inspired by Mishima to commit ritual suicide, but want to forgo the ritual and don’t want to be seen as copycats (even if that’s maybe what Mishima hoped for). Without any real attachment to Imperial Japan, or really any values whatsoever except a desire to elevate themselves beyond loserdom through a romantic death, they drift from room to room, begging each other to commit suicide with the other. I think if I had not seen Patriotism beforehand this would’ve struck me as a breathtakingly nihilistic movie…but with Patriotism as an appetizer, it was realized as a tremendous satire of a society secretly obsessed with its own fantasies of supremacy.

Resurrection, Bi Gan

In this film’s world, dreams are what keep us from eternal life: they cause us to age and eventually die.

Who would want to dream then but someone who wanted to die, who had lived a life of crushed hopes and shame? And what would their dreams be but nightmares, deathwishes, fantasies of their own comeuppance?

Can’t recommend this enough. The colors, the cinematography: each shot is lovingly textured and considered. The ending felt like a tremendous stretch but it sent the famous chill down my spine.

The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho

A political thriller, in a sense, much like OBAA, but it is framed almost like Don DeLillo’s Libra. That is, we see Wagner Moura’s story through the computer screen of a student transcribing and migrating old news stories onto the web, rather than experiencing it exclusively contemporaneously. Unlike OBAA, which is a movie about a contemporary subject that hopes to give its audience hope (and accidentally etherizes them in the process), The Secret Agent argues that the legacy of authoritarian states is to destroy legacy: entire family histories are destroyed over vendettas, fathers don’t remember their mothers, and go unremembered in turn by their own children.

The horror, too, is eventually forgotten, but this is not mercy: it is what allows the horror to be perpetuated again.

Blue Moon, Richard Linklater

A film about a sentimental pervert cum alcoholic who hates sentimentality. His incessant self-regard is what keeps him from seeing the truth about his life: he is, in fact, loved, but it is his insistence on pretending that no one else can see his shame that keeps him from feeling that love.

Alternate title: Honey I Shrunk Ethan Hawke.

Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos really is the greatest auteur troll of his generation. This film is predicated on what I might call unmotivated withholding: there is no reason for the narrative to keep the truth about Emma Stone’s alienhood from us except to increase the narrative tension. In doing so, it also becomes nonsensical: the first half of the movie portrays Jesse Plemons and his cousin as lunatics, when in fact they are not, they are tragic heroes trying to save humanity. A silly film, but fun. Stavros makes his debut as a pedophile cop.

Oldboy, Park Chan-wook

A rewatch in anticipation of No Other Choice. A silly film at times, despite its gruesome violence.

As always Wook is at his best when he imagines the casual sociopathy and cruelty of the rich, who find themselves subjects to boredom when all their desires are satisfied and all that is left to them is to revenge themselves upon past wrongs. Stop me if that sounds familiar.

Safe, Todd Haynes

Was lucky enough to catch this at IFC Center. Introduced by Haynes and Moore themselves. Capitalism unwittingly chews up even its bourgeoise as it makes even the lives of the rich drab, meaningless. Facing an empty life, Moore’s character’s only comfort, milk, becomes poison to her.

BOOKS

Not a ton of books I’ve read recently, but that’s because I’m trying to work my way through behemoths. (Including Capital.)

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

“You want cause and effect? All right.”

What to even say here. Is it the erections causing the rocket attacks, or are the rocket attacks and the erections a part of the same swirling field of atoms? Damned if I know. A lot of good limericks in there, though.

N’gustro Affair/Nada/Three to KIll, Jean-Patrick Manchette

Three bleak little crime novels. The first is remarkable in that it is structured as a tape recording made by a patsy to a political murder (a fictionalization of the actual murder of Mehdi Ben Barka, which prefigured the Khashoggi killing); the second depicts an anarchist groups doomed kidnapping of an American ambassador to France. The third follows a man who accidentally makes himself the subject of a manhunt. Manchette has a serious sense of human beings as products of society: “Once, in a dubious context, he lived through an exciting and bloody adventure, after which, all he could think of to do was to return to the fold. And now, in the fold, he waits…Georges is of his time. And of his space.”

Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno

A life-changing text. Impossible to summarize or even digest in one read. Its continuing relevance in our own age or rising fascisms cannot be overstated. Here are a series of quotes. They may depress you or enlighten you. That’s up to you.

On wrong life:

“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

On ‘let people enjoy things’ culture:

“The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his own office.”

“There is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of exterminations so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain.”

“Cultivated philistines are in the habit of requiring that a work of art ‘give’ them something. They no longer take umbrage at works that are radical, but fall back on the shamelessly modest assertion that they do not understand.”

On revanchist immigrant politics:

“In losing their innocence, the bourgeois have become impenitently malign. The caring hand that even now tends the little garden as if it had not long since become a ‘lot,’ but fearfully wards off the unknown intruder, is already that which denies the political refugee asylum.”

On the boredom and pleasure-seeking of the ultra-rich:

“If people at the top are really bored, it is not because they suffer from too much happiness, but because they are marked by the general misery; by the commodity character that consigns amusements to idiocy, by the brutality of the command which echoes terribly in the rulers’ gaiety, finally by their fear of their own superfluity.”

On a culture absent of tenderness:

“There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no one shall go hungry any more.”

“Life has become the ideology of its own absence.”

On how the frog was boiled in Israel and Gaza, by way of Nazi Germany:

“Only the absolute lie now has any freedom to speak the truth.”

“When the National Socialists began to torture, they not only terrorized the peoples inside and outside Germany, but were the more secure from exposure the more wildly the horror increased. The implausibility of their actions made it easy to disbelieve what nobody, for the sake of precious peace, wanted to believe, while at the same time capitulating to it.”

“Every horror necessarily becomes, in the enlightened world, a horrific fairy-tale. For the untruth of truth has a core which finds an avid response in the unconscious.”

“So desperate have people become in civilization, however, that they are forever ready to abandon their frail better qualities as soon as the world does their worse ones the obligation of confessing how evil it is.”

“The sadism latent in everyone unerringly divines the weakness latent in everyone.”

“The outbreak of the Third Reich did, it is true, surprise my political judgement, but not my unconscious fear.”

On slippers:

“Slippers are designed to be slipped into without any help from the hand. They are monuments to the hatred of bending down.”

On faeces:

“The brightest rooms are the secret domains of faeces.”

“The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.”

On capitalism and state power and how we could live in a world where a president can just say out loud that he intends to invade Venezuela for oil:

“State power has shed even the appearance of independence from particular interests in profit; always in their service really, it now places itself there ideologically.”

“Difficult to write satire. Not only because our situation, which needs it more than any ever did, makes a mockery of mockery.”

“Among today’s adept practitioners, the lie has long lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know.”

“Fascism was the absolute sensation: in a statement at the time of the first pogroms, Goebbels boasted that at least the National Socialists were not boring. In the Third Reich the abstract horror of news and rumour was enjoyed as the only stimulus sufficient to incite a momentary glow in the weakened sensorium of the masses.”

“The immorality of lying does not consist in the offense against sacrosanct truth. An appeal to truth is scarcely a prerogative of a society which dragoons its members to own up the better to hunt them down.”

“The fixed, inspecting, hypnotic and hypnotized stare that is common to all the leaders of horror, has its model in the appraising look of the manager asking an interview candidate to sit down.”

“It is the signature of our age that no-one, without exception, can now determine his own life within even a moderately comprehensible framework, as was possible earlier in the assessment of market relationships. In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object.”

“The constantly enforced insistence that everybody should admit that everything will turn out well, places those who do not under suspicion of being defeatists and deserters.”

“The optimism of the left repeats the insidious bourgeois superstition that one should not talk of the devil but look on the bright side.”

On the inevitability of doom:

“Zoological gardens...are laid out on the patter on Noah’s Ark, for since their inception the bourgeois class has been waiting for the flood.”

“So, when we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath.”

“He who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.”

“What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering, but its progress towards hell.”

On insight:

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.”

“True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.”

On happiness:

“To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.”

“Work while you work, play while you play--this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.”

“No emancipation without that of society.”

“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.”

On pornography:

“How intimately sex and language are intertwined can be seen by reading pornography in a foreign language.”

On Christmas:

“We are forgetting how to give presents.”

On Sunday:

“Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled.”

CHRISTMAS CONTENT

Blast of Silence.

See it if you know what’s good for you. Some thoughts I wrote down a year or two ago.

Until next time…

There are subjects that touch all of us: death, love, money. But death and love are the ones: as forces they are irreconciliable, irrevocable. We sometimes wish they were not real, we are so afraid of death that we don’t even plan for it and deny the possibility it might materialize suddenly. The same goes for the disappearance of love: one day you have it, the next it is ripped from you, like a limb by a grenade or a child by an unexpected force: a cancer, a government. We cannot imagine living without them because they give our lives something like meaning.

We want cause and effect, to paraphrase Thomas Pynchon: alright. We just want it to be gentle.

Ikiru is a movie about denial, and what happens when it can no longer be sustained. A compulsively punctual and tenebrous bureaucrat, Watanabe, with little ambition is its subject. He finds out early in the film that he has six months to live due to a terminal stomach cancer. He immediately realizes what he has never suspected: not only that he will die, but that he will die having wasted his life. Desperate to make good on these six months, he tries spending them partying and drinking, but finds that only leaves him with a hangover. He tries pursuing a young woman who is full of life, but she does not return his feelings. In fact, she regards him as a pervert, and is unmoved when he reveals that he will die soon. Giving himself over to others, building something that will last — a little park, just a little park — as it turns out, is the only path that will give him any kind of satisfaction.

What makes the film fascinating is that it does not end on the iconic shot of him on a swing in the park he built, the snow falling around him, singing. Instead there is quite a bit in its wake, including an extended scene at his wake, where his colleagues and superiors debate what his intentions were and if he was really responsible for building the park. In the end they agree that he was something of a saint, committed to doing good in his last days, and that they will do good in his memory. What the movie finds, however, is that they do not. They return to shiftlessness and pusillanimity, and even those who remember his deeds fondly find they cannot stand up to others. Which suggests that either systems are stronger than we are, and that it is only Watanabe’s impending doom that drives him to change, or that on some level he was a profoundly different individual. But we know the latter not to be true: we saw him before he knew he had cancer, and he was the shiftlessest of all of them.

It’s a disturbing thought, that we might be no better than our circumstances, which entail how we were raised, the culture we were brought up in, the ideas we are exposed to, and uncountable other causes. The mind — my mind, I should say — rebels at the idea that we might not have free will. Doesn’t moving forward with our days depend upon thinking that we have free will, after all? Mustn’t we act as if we do, as they say? But then, it’s not like every time I act, I think to myself “I must utilize my free will.”

My own engine is ineluctable and obscure to me. Much as Ikiru is a film about the last days of this man, it’s also about how helplessly interconnected we all are. We are not individuals, or not only individuals, we are a part of the same whirl of chaos that masquerades as systems, acting on other systems, and in turn being conditioned ourselves.

Ran, the other masterpiece I’ve been obsessed with to the dismay of anyone who has to have more than one conversation with me (because I keep bringing it up), is famous for its bracing direction and terrifying score, but it too is a movie about characters driven by motives that are not of their own making. When Hidetora, the senile fool warlord, gives up his kingdom to the eldest of three sons, his youngest, the only one who is well and truly loyal, counsels him that he and his brothers were raised in a world of betrayal and bloodshed. Giving up his title will be his doom. You raised us this way, now don’t expect us to act any differently, he chides. Hidetora doesn’t take his son’s advice, and his other sons, in entirely predictable fashion, turn on him and each other.

There are reasons other than purely personal ones for this film to resonate with me at this time. We are living in bloodthirsty times. The grandchildren of those who fought in the World Wars have been bred on fantasies of persecution and grievance, and a paranoid society sooner or later begins to eat itself. At these times the most depraved are the ones best prepared to seize power, and the laziest, most insufferably insouciant bootlicking bureaucrats are the ones who keep their jobs in the face of a government that seeks to place its boots on everyone’s neck: to a man, they love boots, after all. Ran and Ikiru have these characters in spades, of course.

But Ran’s fulcrum is senile Hidetora, the wellspring of so much suffering. He drifts from scene to scene begging forgiveness of those he wronged, shocked at the betrayals he is subject to, watching those he wishes the forgiveness of subjected to the blade he would no longer wield. He washed the plains in blood and betrayed countless others for the sake of power and glory, and yet his appeals to his youngest son at the end of the film are those of a gentle man: nothing more than forgiveness and the chance to tell tales is what he wants. Kurosawa, being Kurosawa, does not heed his plea. But what has brought him to this? His youngest son calls him a senile old fool, but his senility does not seem to be the source of his sudden softening: what could it be but the proximity of his death? Faced with the fact that he will one day die, he is determined not to die alone. Whatever he may wish for, he’s doomed by the atmosphere of distrust and betrayal he’s created. He worshipped at the altar of blood and when he wanted to abandon it for another god, it took its pound of flesh. Desire for power above all else can only create an existence that must be withstood. A world absent of fellow feelings eventually is nothing more than hell on Earth, as several characters observe. That human beings crave connection and love is taken for granted in most art, but I would submit it’s not true, or not necessarily. To paraphrase one of Kurosawa’s characters, some worship pain and suffering and feed off of it.

It’s common enough to assert that part of what makes art of the sort Kurosawa makes great is that there’s something ineffable about the best moments in these films, something that cannot be put into words although these scenes move us. I reject that proposition, frankly. We may not be able to put into words what moves us at first, but if we try hard enough, we should eventually at least be able to get under the rock of our own reasons.

Hidetora, clutching his son’s back like a child riding on a horse for the first time. Watanabe, on the swing in the snow, singing to himself. What Kurosawa’s films seem to argue is that life does not necessarily make fools out of us, but reveals us to be little more than children pretending to be grown-ups. Our aspirations are those of children, or are formed in our childhood, our desire for our egos to be petted are childish, are desire to be loved, is childish, our desire, even, to do something with our life before we die is first felt when we are young. Kurosawa does not judge these characters, in fact, it is when they appear child-like that they are most sympathetic. The cliche is that old age turns us back into children, but that cliche belies the terror that comes with that regression. The old can be childlike, yes, but they must also live with the awareness that their end is approaching. This paradox can be enlightening if we recognize that it’s precisely the approach of death that creates the regression. Death is something to look away from, something that, absent acceptance, needs blinders to ignore if they are to get on with their days, and since, as one gets older, death is everywhere, one must look away more and more. And the more one looks away the fewer responsibilities one can take on, the more one slips into childish sentimentality.

We spend so much time wondering how we should live without asking how we should die. To say that we are dying all the time isn’t quite right, I don’t think. We aren’t, first of all: we could die at any time, but we’re not likely to. And it would be impractical to live as if we could die at any moment. And yet we must live with an awareness of how the person we will become will look back on how we lived. It is only with death approaching that we must recognize the persistence of our own pathology, the profligacy and waste and laziness with which we’ve lived, the ugliness of our political commitments (or lack thereof), and the manner in which we’ve denied our end.

It is worse, of course, to be dying than to die: to die is nothing. It is the end of feeling. We say we had a good sleep not because we felt anything at all during that time but because of how we felt afterward. So it would be if death were a nap or hibernation. But we have no evidence that it is but a vague wish. Deep down, however, we fear it, nearly all of us: we fear it because we suspect we know what it means. We have seen what soft stuff we are made of.

My conversations with my mother circle this reality like a drain. There’s no putting off reality, it will come when it does. Nor does it make sense — when does it ever — to say that everything will be okay, because, of course, it won’t. She takes on outsized responsibility for the state of the world, apologizing for having left my generation with a bag of shit to hold, as if she personally ushered in an era of brutal revanchism, authoritarianism, and white supremacy. I can reason with her and remind her that isn’t her fault, per se, but then that revelation is soon forgotten and must be achieved again.

What astonishes me when I speak to her about all of this is that she is not preoccupied with how she will spend what time she has left. She is preoccupied with all she is forgetting. That is the past, I want to tell her! Live for now! And I do tell her. And then she forgets that I have told her that.

When I reflect, I realize that first of all, I have no idea what it is like to experience life the way she has to experience it. To wonder if each instance of forgetting is a sign of her decline or just the normal forgetfulness we all experience. To have to hand over responsibilities and duties that she’s handled her entire life because she’s simply no longer competent. To know that her intellect is intact, but that its light only reaches so far now, like a flashlight in a dark house she’s forgotten the contours of. I also realize that I do not take my own advice. I myself have dwelt on the past, and there have been times when I did not not change my circumstances even when they were destroying me. An awareness of death can transform us, lead us to live our lives differently: but a person may also stand on the tracks with a train bearing down on them and be paralyzed with fright. A person might even welcome their impending doom.

Not my mother. I hear how happy she is when I call: death is forestalled for one moment. Here is someone she loves, with good news, with more to tell. For a moment, she does not have to ask, is it too late? Is there still time? Time to change, time to become a part of something greater than herself? For a moment, of course there is. There always is, until there isn’t.

Just kidding!

The book is extremely compelling even (or especially) when it digresses, as Connell is a master of historiography, of pathetic little moments in desperate lives, and an extremely dry chronicler of even the most horrific turns of events (of which there are plenty, this being warfare). He carefully compares diaries of even the lowest soldiers to see where fabrications have been made by individuals and to dig out bizarre details and moments of heartbreak, bravery, triumph, drunkenness, lasciviousness, what have you: the entire demented circus of human emotions is in this book.

Reading it again recently, I realized that if we had been at war with the Sioux in the present day, of course such appellations as “terrorist” would have been deployed against them to excuse “Manifest Destiny” (read: ethnic cleansing and murderous revanchism). There is no shortage of dismemberment, of slaughter of innocents, after all, on ‘both sides,’ as it were, but Connell doesn’t fall for that easy, comforting narrative, and recognizes that the campaign white men waged against Natives from the beginning was both dishonest and deliberate: meant to engender hatred and increasingly grotesque violence in order to justify further conquest. It was a war that is strangest and most disturbing in that unlike most of the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, men were not seeking to conquer a land that had once been theirs, or that they believed belonged to their ancestors—rather, the territory they gobbled up was regarded as having been dropped in their lap by God in order to be conquered.

When I read about how the United States persistently violated its treaties and retaliated with an outrageous sense of vindication and righteousness when Natives fought back, I thought of the history of Israel and Palestine going back to the Nakba, of the “blockade” Israel ran on Gaza for years, of the manner in which Israel has persistently regarded land that was Palestinian as God-given, on the open-air prison Israel created in Gaza, of the October 7th attacks and the way that Israel has used that bloodshed to justify their genocidal campaign. Reading of the United States Army slaughtering entire villages and burning the stores of grain and the weapons they themselves gave to the Natives, it’s hard not to think of how the Israeli government and Netanyahu empowered Hamas over the PLO because they believed Hamas would be easier to justify a war against, of how ‘humanitarian foundations’ created with the help of consultants, are setting up aid distribution centers only to shoot those who approach them, of how the IDF bulldozes homes while Palestinians are still inside them.

To wit, a telegram between American generals, Sherman and Grant, reproduced by Custer himself, read “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing less will reach the root of the cause.” Connell notes, “if one word of this extraordinary telegram is altered it reads like a message from Eichmann to Hitler.” There are, of course, no shortage of statements of this kind from Israeli ministers. They have made no secret of their intent.

The history of warfare is one of vexatiously petty disputes and ridiculous grievance, of imagined threats and paranoid persecution fantasies. To quote Gary Indiana, “"It is, in reality, all the same war, everywhere and endless, subsiding in one place as it flares in another." The strong have always expected the weak to fight “fairly” and “civilly” even as they act with utterly callous and grotesque impunity. The concepts that justify slaughter have simply changed their names. “Savages” have become “terrorists,” “siege,” a strategy that most would agree is a brutal and inhumane, literally medieval, is still utilized, only far more abstractly: it’s a “blockade,” a “sanction,” “a pause on aid.” What persists is that the most desperate, oppressed victims are cast as animals, as inhumane, and as deserving of their own demise. They have it coming, in some essential sense, and thus they are not delivered swift, merciful deaths, but slow, cruel ones, characterized by terror and despair.

The passage that sticks with me, however, is not about any of that, at least not on the surface, but about the death of a pony:

"Captain Walter Clifford of the Seventh Infantry rode up into the hills for an elevated view of Reno’s defensive position and there he happened to see an Indian pony with a shattered leg—the leg swinging hideously each time the little animal moved. Flies swarmed on the wound. The pony came hobbling over and rested its head against the flank of Clifford’s horse. Clifford pulled away because nothing could be done, but when he looked around he saw the pony trying to follow. He rode back and again the pony approached, ‘this time laying his head on my horse’s rump, looking straight at me, as if pleading for help.’ Clifford held his pistol against the pony’s head and fired. ‘Lighting could not have finished him sooner.’”

Obviously the passage is a reminder that the victims of human activity are not just other human beings, but the creatures we enslave. But I have realized that the passage gnaws at me for another reason: because mercy is a concept that is almost entirely absent from this narrative except in this instance of mercy killing.

And this led me in turn, obliquely, to the realization that genocidal campaigns are never interrupted by well-meaning neighbors or concerned allies, they end because they are forced to end, or because the slaughter is finished—but they certainly never end because the perpetrators conscience intervenes. When it comes to the wholesale slaughter of another group of human beings, mercy is a concept that necessarily must be obviated. The story of all genocides is that some ludicrous unrealized utopian fantasy (Manifest Destiny, an Aryan Germany without Jews, a Israel that includes Gaza and the West Bank), has been frustrated by an “evil” that must be wiped off the Earth. Utopia, as the birthright of the righteous, is an end that justifies any means, and mercy is a weakness that will only be taken advantage of. Anything less than the most severe measures will allow the gangrene to spread, so the enemy must be terrorized into submission or eliminated entirely. And so there is no room for mercy, which demands at the very least you put your enemies out of their misery, like a horse with a broken leg, rather than deliberately prolonging their suffering.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

Only appropriate that I first review the movie that has a brow so low it might have been written by a Neanderthal.

First of all, they all had it coming!

I do find myself wondering what it is about the Final Destination Universe that no one, in the face of such abject horror, of such miserable, violent, gruesome ends, just ends it all with a bullet. Wouldn’t that be simpler than running around trying to avoid absurdly unlikely ends?

I can only conclude that suicide may actually be too dark for Final Destination: your average moviegoing schmuck relies on the tenacity and will to live of the characters if we are to identify with them.

Still, I found myself imagining a version of these films where death WON’T let them kill themselves, where it forces them to go the way it wants them to go. Hollywood, where’s my cheque?

On the Edge of Reason (Miroslav Krleža, New Directions)

Tremendous translation, tremendously bleak novel. After a life of bourgeois vapidity, of garden parties and specious nodding and smiling, our narrator, a doctor, hears an anecdote from a bourgeoise braggart: he shot four burglars trying to break into his cellar during a period of desperate social unrest. Unnerved, our narrator, for the first time in his life, speaks his mind, commenting that to brag of such a thing is “moral insanity.” This comment touches off an argument which ends with someone threatening someone else with a revolver (our narrator claims he was just holding a cigarette case).

Having spoke his mind for the first time in his miserable life, he finds that the politely depraved society which he has called a cozy home will not only no longer accept him, but wants to first counsel him into apologizing, and then to viciously cast him out. In response, he slaps about half a dozen men who have the nerve to confront or advise him. The way these scenes evolve and devolve is hilarious, as you come to understand that yes, he will again be slapping this man, regardless of whether he has sought to help or hurt him. And I, with my contempt for politely depraved bourgeois society…well, I found him sympathetic.

This, of course, felt horribly apropos…

Ran (Akira Kurosawa)

A film so well-shot, so well-directed, and with such a harrowing score, that despite moments that may have struck me as overwrought in another director’s hands, I found myself on the verge of tears. As an adaptation of King Lear, Hidetora, our Lear here, is not just a demented fool, but a former warlord who has soaked the plains with blood. It still manages to swim in the same rapids of heartbreak and tragedy as the play.

Betrayed by two of his sons, Hidetora makes foolish choice after foolish choice (as he is reminded by his fool) until he is stumbling around looking for a sword to commit seppuku with. This was funny the first time I saw the film, and horribly tragic the second time. (First time as farce, second time as tragedy?).

Kaede, the manipulative, vengeful wife who leads multiple sons by the nose (I should say prick) toward disaster, crushing a moth while pretending to be in tears, is another moment of sublime writing and directing.

Kurosawa can be quite…direct, his characters sometimes philosophizing in such a manner as to speak more to the audience than to each other, but I didn’t mind because in the vast majority of his cases what they had to say was profound.

Side note: the first time I saw this at IFC the audience was very well-behaved…the second time, I attended a matinee full of idiots probably brought here by that dull piece of pop culture trivia, that George Lucas was “influenced” by Kurosawa. Each seemed to think they were in their living room, chatting, laughing at inappropriate times, eating popcorn with their mouths open. I am guessing this is my own fault, and I should have suspected that a matinee would attract a mixed group of senile Manhattanites, Star Wars fans, antisocial unemployed people, and worst of all, grad students.

Glengarry Glen Ross (Broadway)

A mamet play featuring Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr, Bob Odenkirk…well, it turned out exactly as you might think. As deep as a fart joke. They turned what should be a tragic play about a bunch of assholes ruining each other’s lives into a comedy. Or I should say they tried to turn it into a comedy.

The result was so hammy, so over the top, that I found myself sitting there in silence as the audience around me giggled at the various insults and wild gesticulations. Here was Culkin taking an overlong pull at a red diner cup for cheap laughs in the middle of the famous Ricky Roma speech ( which Pacino handles with such gravity in the movie adaptation). Here was Odenkirk squawking and flapping his arms like a bird when things weren’t going his way. The only actors, really, to approach their roles with any subtlety were Bill Burr (ironically) and Michael McKean.

I came away, honestly, feeling as if the director had not understood the play at all, or had been so desperate to do “his own thing” that he abandoned what makes it special.

The pathos of the play is tied inextricably to the seduction that Roma and others exploit each other with: the manner in which Pacino’s Roma, in the adaptation, draws in Pryce’s Lingk suggests just how easily we can exploit each others’ loneliness, each others’ desire for a wider world, for adventure, for something to fill the void before the void claims us.

That pathos is completely missing from this latest run on Broadway. The men are caricatures—that Lingk is seduced at all suggests he’s an idiot, an utter deadbeat, rather than someone who has fallen for Roma (as almost anyone would when Roma gives the above monologue)—because Roma as played by Culkin is himself an idiot.

No one in the audience seemed to know what to do when Lingk paradoxically apologizes to Roma upon discovering that Roma has manipulated him—and that was precisely because that moment is supposed to be pathetic, a feeling which a clownshow has no room for.

Various works by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I’m writing a review of his latest, so be on the lookout for that. Won’t say much else here but I love a book where everybody dies, whether it be their own fault, bad luck, or some mixture of both, and Crazy Krasz always delivers. That’s the good stuff.

No Room at the Morgue & Skeletons in the Closet (Jean-Patrick Manchette, NYRB)

Manchette’s novels are debased noirs wherein not only nothing gets solved, but there was nothing to be solved, either: the damage is done. Rather than uncovering dramatic, grave political machinations, Manchette’s Eugene Tarpon, an ex-cop who has a dead protestor on his resume, is a inveterate bumbler with few social graces and even less understanding of contemporary culture—although he is a private eye, he hasn’t even heard of Philip Marlowe (much to a client’s despair). What schemes and depravity he does uncover are faintly ridiculous and pointlessly violent: heroin labs in monasteries, a brother murderously angry that everyone gets to have his sister but him. Tarpon’s victories come at an enormous personal cost, and often lead to the needless deaths of good people.

While delightful little crime capers, his novels are also reminders that the people we would turn to in desperate straits may not only be incompetent, but also only be alive by sheer luck. They do not cease to remind us that Tarpon’s continuing existence seems to hinge on a coin that somehow keeps landing heads-up, despite his various, fatuous errors. Considering just how much flagrant perversion and cruelty is happening out in the open in our world right now, these novels may read as quaint or apropos, depending on your persuasion.

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Two boyish psychopaths (calling themselves Peter and Paul) going house to house, murdering families for fun on a lake in Austria? This is evidently Michael Haneke’s idea of a good time.

What makes this film so hard to watch is the desperation of those under the thumb of these boys (a feckless man, his willful wife, and their earnest boy). For a movie thought of by many as a satire, it is, the vast majority of the time, much more like a tragedy: it does not shy away from showing the victims’ full range of feelings, from despair, to hope that they might survive, to love and horrid grief. It does give them (and us) moments where they seem like they have a shot, if you will, of surviving (you’ll get why I’ve italicized shot once you seen the film).

The bottom line is that their behavior feels utterly real. It is hard not to hope on their behalf, even as their helpless scrambling seems increasingly pathetic and useless.

Their tragic death throes stand in stark contrast to the fact that their puppeteer psychopaths act like they are in a movie with no consequences, where they can do as they wish with no threat of reprisal. They are believable as psychopaths, yes: they have few feelings but take pleasure in cruelty, they are impulsive, childish, and act without compunction.

But what makes the film so uncomfortable is not just that they are evil, but that the main psycho not only acts as if he were in a movie but stares right into the camera and talks to us. It feels sometimes as if he might walk out of the screen and sit down next to us. He seems to be utterly in control, treating the entire experience like, well, a game. And Haneke, in case you missed the point, really does make the extent of his control of the situation undeniable eventually, in a moment that is still enraging new viewers to this day.

What to make of this? The person who introduced the film at Alamo Drafthouse said Funny Games is hard to watch because it “implicates the viewer,” but I think that’s a little trite. The movie isn’t hard to watch because I’m really enjoying watching someone get killed, or because I’m comfortable watching the violence. Perhaps some people come away wondering if they should enjoy horror movies and crime procedurals as much as I do, but I don’t think that was Haneke’s thrust either. If Haneke wanted to do that, after all, it would have been as simple as making the gore and death as horrible as possible, but he almost entirely forgoes the blood and gore, as a matter of fact. You do hear the desperate fighting and screaming of people in extremis, yes, and that does force you to consider how horrible such a death would be. But countless other horror movies have made death seem terrible.

What the movie instead does that other films won’t is make its psychopaths boyish and polite, two white boys from the city in golf uniforms. They are blithe and cruel for the sake of cruelty. Hollywood rarely goes here, as far as I know: its evil is compulsive (like Hannibal Lechter), monstrous and inhuman (like Michael Myers in Halloween or Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre), or it is supernatural (as with Final Destination, Nightmare on Elm Street), or it is brown and foreign or alien (insert whatever iteration of Hollywood Vietnam/Iraq/MCU schlock you want here).

But these two Viennese boys…they just enjoy killing and torture. Watching the entertainment that America and Disney pumps out, it would be easy to forget people like this exist. And yes, they will get away with it.

What makes the film uncomfortable is not just the violence, but imagining yourself in the family’s shoes, knowing that people like these boys do exist. What makes the movie uncomfortable is knowing there are well-organized sociopaths out there who may not try to get away with exactly what these boys do, but who do enjoy causing suffering in other ways, who find ways around society’s rules and mores to play their games. What makes the film uncomfortable is knowing that people with hearts as cold as these boys run the world, our country, and the countries we claim as allies. In an age where the United States is building an “Alligator Alcatraz” and Israel is shooting starving people who are merely seeking flour to make bread with, yes, films like this are an antidote to the heroin our culture usually serves up.

(A funny note: Haneke originally wanted to make the film in the United States (can’t imagine why he’d do that! (I’m being sarcastic, of course I can, the States is the world capital for sadistic white boys)) but couldn’t secure the funding, so he based it in Austria instead. A shot for shot remake, which I have not seen, stars Tim Roth and Naomi Watts. Hoping to see it soon.)

FINALLY: I am reading the new Helen Dewitt right now, out from Dalkey Archive in September, and it’s fantastic…so hang in there for that. I’ll be writing a review.

Mickey 17 (dir. Bong Joon Hoo)

Really feels like Bong Joon Hoo got the Academy Award bucks and decided to go full Hollywood here. This one’s about as subtle as an SNL sketch, and just as unfunny, I found myself trying to chuckle at various moments and failing. One measure of the complexity of a film might be in the variety of contradictions and neuroses that abide in its characters and situations, but this movie needed there to be two Robert Pattinson’s in order for there to be anything like an internal emotional dilemma (i.e., I know I should be this way but I want to be that way).

A man in the row in front of me fell into a sleep so deep that when the movie ended he was folded forward like a question mark, and not even the lights coming on or the people around him leaving stirred him. Perhaps the movie quite literally bored him to death, I don’t know.

(Why was Robert Pattinson doing that voice of rank dweebitude? Why were not one but two women attracted to his dweebitude? Why is anyone still casting Mark Ruffalo in anything?)

This one gets one nonplussed Bill Pullman.

Takeout (dir. Sean Baker)

Baker’s first, but has all the characteristic Sean Baker moves: the desperate scrambling for money, the act of kindness from the unexpected source, the endless sadistic parade of humiliation that the protagonist must suffer through before there can be any catharsis. Moving ending even if the drama that necessitates can be seen coming from a mile away.

I’ll give this one Bobby Bacalla playing with trains.

Herscht 07769, by László Krasznahorkai

Accusations of brodernism and facile formal play aside, this reads more like a nihilistic Jean Patrick Manchette crime novel than it does other single-sentence novels like William Gaddis' Agapē Agape or Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, and it should be read as such. It’s an easy read, a fable, a tad ridiculous at times, but also more thoughtful than it’s given credit for and a grim warning…I liked it!

This one gets one Vince McMahon on the verge of creaming his pants.

Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee

Maybe the best thing a novel can do is humble its reader. Astonishing ending, each section a marvel of affect and effect.

This one gets one Jane Canary crying due to her own self-disgust.

Temple of the Dog, by Temple of the Dog

I really should have outgrown this stuff by now, but Chris Cornell’s maudlin wailing imprinted upon me at an impressionable age and it will probably only grow old for me when I do.

This one gets one Eddie Vedder standing in some weeds.

Possession (dir. Andrzej Żuławski)

Already said much of what I want to say about this one here. This movie is just pure romance, in my opinion.

Me, Going to and Giving Literary Readings

As a matter of fact, I’m there right now.

Blue Velvet (dir. David Lynch)

Not as terrifying or as heartbreaking as some of his other efforts, but still a very good film with many moments of sprezzatura and hilarity. Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan are kind of an awkward pair, and that’s occasionally funny, but Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper make the movie.

I felt vitiated enough that this one gets a Cooper having some coffee.

The New Final Destination Trailer

I’m sorry, but anyone who gets FD knows the films are about the terror of realizing you are trapped in a fatal fait accompli. But if you break a glass near an ice bin, you should empty the ice bin. If you don’t, and you make a drink with that ice, and you get a piece of glass in your drink, well, that’s not a fait accompli, that’s just stupidity.

This gets one Ralph Fiennes saying that it sounds like it was your own fault.

Setting up my spittoon when you have bronchitis

Unparalleled experience, in my opinion.

Universities Collaborating with ICE and the Trump Administration

History will remember your cowardice! I hope! It seems like everywhere institutions are choosing their bottom line over doing the right thing. Or worse, they’ve decided the people being deported without due process probably had it coming.

I’m sure these reluctant collaborators imagine this is Okay because one day soon we will wake up from this nightmare, and the wronged will receive justice, but of course, they are desperately wrong, and their concessions are indistinguishable from collaboration, and each one allows this administration to turn the heat up on the pot of boiling water that our oleaginous, idiot frog of a democracy is squatting in a little bit more.

In A Silent Way, by Miles Davis

This is utterly soothing. Perfect thing to have a think too. Might put it on right now.

Until next time,

Evan

Over the last four months or so, when I’m not doing my job or avoiding working on my novel, I’ve been rewatching Mad Men. I’m hoping to write about it in greater detail, but a few preliminary notes:

The show has several formal elements in common with The Sopranos and Deadwood, unsurprisingly. Amalgamation and fucking capital, to borrow a phrase from Deadwood, is a constant threat to the Sterling Cooper, just as it was to the glorified crew in New Jersey and the saloons and brothels of Deadwood. Nothing good can last, and there’s always a bigger fish. And that fish tends to be even more dead-eyed, vindictive, and megalomaniacal than the show’s original villain.

And so while the engine of the show’s conflict rests on these battles between sharks of relative strength, it’s the junior colleagues, the civilians, the wives and children, the soldiers, and the prostitutes who do the principal share of the suffering while the men strive for greatness. In the first episode of Mad Men we see Don Draper trying to sell cigarettes despite their obvious link to lung cancer; by the end of the show, someone near and dear to him is dying of that same cancer: he doesn’t seem to make the connection, though. When he calls up his colleague in order to enumerate his failures, that doesn’t make the grade.

That’s not to say we don’t see Tony Soprano suffering (how sad he is when his favorite comare sleeps with the city councilman), Al Swearingen nearly killed by a kidney stone, or Don Draper on an epic bender precipitated by his philandering (or rather, his philandering being discovered by his daughter, the one person who he seems to feel he owes anything to). But their suffering is self-created, their self-pity their own. Their suffering is not a fait accompli, the suffering of others is. And that’s the important point: they obviate their feelings of shame through their persistent striving for thrills, orgasms, and riches, and when that doesn’t work anymore and the feeling just won’t go away, they find someone else to blame it on and take it out on them. None of these men believe that there’s an afterlife waiting for them where they’ll reap the rewards of their good deeds, if anything, they seem to live in a world where God is dead, the end is nigh, and the only thing to do is to try to get their nut while they still can. Does their lifestyle make that end nigher? Yes, probably, but who would want to live with shame nipping at their heels as they do? As Don is counseled in the very first episode, we have a death drive: but Don rejects that thesis, insisting it won’t sell cigarettes. He’s right, it wouldn’t, but he’s a smoker himself: and if there was ever a man who wanted to destroy himself, it was Don Draper.

These would seem like important reminders in our current political and social climate if we weren’t already swamped in reminders that an oligarchy of dead-eyed sociopaths has grabbed each and every one of us by the pussy and/or balls. Elon Musk, a man who seems to believe he’s living in a simulation (making the rest of us NPCs he has no reason to feel bad about exploiting), is treating the Federal Government like it’s a game where he tries to cut as many “costs” as possible, with the endgame almost certainly being a stock market crash in which he snatches up even more wealth. His other telos would seem to be to cause as much human suffering as possible. Donald Trump is egging him on gleefully, ready to pull the plug on Elon, Matrix-style, when the country discovers that the field has been salted and the only thing they’ll be reaping is dirt. It’s Manifest Destiny taken to its logical conclusion: I get mine, and you get to hold a bag of shit.

Yet, whereas Draper and Swearengen and Soprano seem to have their moments of doubt and shame, men like Musk and Trump don’t. It’s almost as if in creating ‘well-rounded characters’ that literary-minded viewers could sympathize with, our foremost writers and directors failed to anticipate that the men who would lead us would actually end up being such caricatures of themselves that Saturday Night Live (hardly high comedy at the best of times) has resorted to having their impersonators simply quote them. The world we’re living in doesn’t remind me so much of Mad Men or the Sopranos as it does a Verhoeven movie.

It seems almost impossible to the average progressive mind that these men could be popular, given their clear vapidity. Why can’t other people see that these men are caricatures of themselves? Trump may be funny, but he’s also a boring, rambling old man, and Elon is a black hole of charisma, stuck in memes from 2012. And yet they are seen as paragons of strength by many young men.

There’s a myth that the sort of men who worship Trump and Elon Musk are just lost souls, ashamed of their weakness, poverty, and sexual incompetence, who have been sold a bill of goods for which there’s no actual corresponding commodity. They’ve been promised strength and honor, and if people were just nicer to them and stopped blaming them for all the world’s ills, well, then progressives could reach them.

This fable ignores just how intoxicating violence, and especially violence against women, is to these types of men. They never feel stronger than when they are hurting someone else. The simple fact is that acts of contrition, taking responsibility, being accountable and kind, is not intoxicating in the way that violence is. That’s why we have endless iterations of first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo, and no video games where the goal is to visit your mother in hospice care when she’s dying of cancer.

Once someone becomes addicted to rage and externalization, it’s not clear to me that there’s anyway back. “Why don’t you give it up?” Melfi, Tony’s therapist, asks him at one point, and Tony dismisses her out of hand, continuing to explain to her various machinations and flanking moves. He likes the rush. He enjoys the game. There’s nothing else to him anymore. He wouldn’t be able to live any other kind of life.

That seems like an important reminder in these times: we’re not going to convert these people are turn them away from the fire they’re warming their hands at, nevermind trying to court the twelve Liz Cheney Republicans who still exist. We’d do best to defend those who are vulnerable—trans people, queer people, immigrants—and prepare for the worst.

I plan to write more on this later, so I’ll stop there.

What else I’ve been enjoying when I haven’t been fretting:

• This album by Truly, a band from the 90’s formed from members of Soundgarden and the Screaming Trees. It’s like My Bloody Valentine and Nirvana had a baby. The most accessible song is probably “Leslie’s Coughing Up Blood.”

• A twitter mutual got me into listening to Sun Kil Moon again (thanks, I’m vaguely depressed now).

• My dog really likes Miles Davis. When I play “In a Silent Way” he starts bopping.

• Etenmann’s Softees? I’ve been having three of them a day and have never felt better.

  

• I finished Kafka’s The Castle recently, a novel which can be most concisely summarized thusly. The book is not laugh out loud funny in any way, but the idea of a book about a man who cannot find his way into a big building, instantiated in the form of a novel which itself struggles to let you into the serpentine machinations of its various characters, is conceptually pretty funny.

• I’ve also been enjoying sleeping ten hours a night. Would highly recommend!

• Now for some more Mucinex…

The first is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the movie that first made me afraid of becoming an academic when I saw it a high school English class. Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) and George (Richard Burton) play a decidedly wet middle-aged couple, whose hatred for each other and spiraling drunkenness plays out in a series of depraved and cruel games. Their victims are, first of all, each other, and second of all, a young couple, Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis), new in town and to the university. Both couples are deeply needy and lonely, estranged from one another, their marriages born out of convenience, and their manner of coping heavy, heavy, heavy drinking. Both couples have had fantasies of having children that have bled into their real lives. The games unfold late in the morning, until the sun comes up and the cruelty is all played out, the dirty laundry stinking up the musty apartment, and revelations about the extent of each couple’s respective delusions make stark just how deranged these people are, and crucially, are allowing themselves to be. The older couple pretends, (and here’s the big spoiler), privately, to have their own son, who is the only bright spot in their life. They quarrel over the course of the film over who is at fault for his deficiencies, and it’s only at the end, when George says that the boy is dead, that it becomes clear that the boy never existed at all. And the younger couple have had their own fantastical pregnancy (“She went up, and then she went down,” as Nick puts it soddenly). These games and delusions are distractions from their pain and its sources, which are their pride and unwillingness to do what would be the kindest thing of all: leave each other. Each marriage is conceived as one of convenience where George hopes to get to be chair of the history department and Nick gets to reap his wife’s fortune. Martha and Honey seem to both know that their husbands are exasperated by their feelings and resent the men (rightfully) for their callousness and selfishness.

There’s a moment in the film when Martha is raging at George about his failures to achieve and provide, and George, unable to take the assault on his character, breaks a bottle, and then, of all things, goes over to Honey and starts dancing with her, starting up the song that gives the movie its name. He spins her in circles and circles singing it, clearly still agitated but no longer in a rage at Martha. The dance ends when Honey announces that she’s going to be sick (she’s had a lot of brandy), and George goes out of the house to sit by himself on a swing with the bourbon. Martha later accuses him of trying to make Honey sick, but George denies it forcefully. The act of dancing with Honey, of reprising the song (which he’s cribbed from Martha and earlier admits is funny), seems to be means of distracting himself. It’s a moment that is enormously endearing, because whereas elsewhere, the games the couple play seem to be meant to inflict pain, this dancing is just childlike avoidance. In general, these people’s lives are such black holes of misery that they cannot avoid making their games about that misery, and they only know how to terrorize and be cruel to each other. (See when George gets a gun from the woodshed and pulls the trigger on Martha, only for an umbrella to come out rather than a bullet). To be humiliated is to want to turn that feeling back on others. To humiliate, then, is also to invite at least domestic warfare. In this case, George seems to be crying uncle, or in this case, wife. He only wants to be left alone. He doesn’t want to hurt her back. Later, of course, he will, he’ll want to hurt her quite badly, he’ll even attack her.

The solution to their problems, if there can be one, is not to play games or have children, it’s to stop treating each other with such cruelty. But the movie doesn’t have a simple message of kindness, it’s not suggesting a panacea, if anything it suggests that these people are trapped in their own characters, in their habits of thinking and habits of coping, stuck behind their respective masks. Which is how they can be sympathetic even as they also are drunken, cruel, and disorderly. We understand that their behavior is, in some sense, beyond their control. They are like a car spinning out on ice, a rocket with an O-ring failure, a sinking ship. Nothing but luck is going to forestall disaster. Whether the disaster is of their own making or their mum and dad fucked them up seems nearly beside the point. There’s no point in trying to change the boards on the ship of Theseus if it’s hull is shattered. They are what they are now.

Then there’s Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which is just as dispomaniacal as Woolf. It follows Geoffrey Firmin, a British Consul, for one day, the Day of the Dead, in Quauhnahuac in 1938, alongside his wife and brother and another man who has cuckolded the Consul (you heard that right, his brother has unmanned him). The book is an inversion of Joyce’s Ulysses, in some respects: a cuckolded man abroad, rather than at home, actively destroying his life rather than pining for halcyon days, and ending in disaster rather than a gesture of, if not hope, at least love. As the day unfolds, the Consul gets drunker and drunker, trying at times to stop himself from drinking, giving in at others (“the necessary, the therapeutic drink”, he tells himself once; at other times, he insists he’ll switch to Mexican beer soon, which he believes if “full of vitamins.”). It seems, frankly, like he’ll die if he keeps drinking the way he is, and his doctor tells him as much.

The book pulls off something difficult: we expect the Consul to meet tragedy because of his drinking and refusal to meet his wife halfway. She has come, after all, to Quauhnahuac because she still loves him and wants to rescue him, but on some level he regards her continuing love and pity for his condition as an assault on his pride. The presence of his brother does not help matters, as he cannot help imagining him with her. And yet it’s not his fate to die directly from drinking, (here comes the spoiler, you whiners) it’s his fate to die because of his lack of foresight and the viciousness of the fascist military police, who have become convinced because they find a letter of his brother’s, a communist, in his jacket, that Geoffrey is a communist (an “espider,” they say). The Consul seems to wonder over and over again if he can change, and if he wants to, just this once, if he can fix himself, get over a “bad case of delirium tremens”, only for it to be the changing of the world around him that does him in. He rants, in fact, about how societies have eaten each other up over millennia, and that the fascists can’t be any worse than the kings and queens of yore, only for the fascists to show him in the end just how bad they are. “Christ… this is a dingy way to die,” he remarks.

I suppose these two pieces have stuck with me because they illustrate one of the central paradoxes of alcoholism and of human free will in general: to escape the traps we set for ourselves, we have to have the foresight not to set them in the first place. More crucially, we must want to escape our problems, we must believe that we can. And we can be as clever in devising our own disaster as we can in any other endeavor, if that disaster is what we want. There’s a sense of freedom that comes with finally destroying our lives. I think of the line from a Robert Stone story about an alcoholic: “Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret.” A festival of regret. We will celebrate our own disaster and undoing, if that’s what we think we deserve.

Other Things

-I published a review of Percival Everett’s latest novel, James, which I was sad I did not enjoy, over at Los Angeles Review of Books. Please read it if you get a chance! Zain Khalid also wrote a review I admired (mostly, yes, because he agreed with me) for Bookforum.

-I watched Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel the other night, and uh, well, I guess it reminds me of Uncut Gems in a way, but somehow manages to be ten times more upsetting and anxiety-provoking. Good baseball/crack cocaine movie, though.

-Have been listening to Jeff Buckley for the first time since high school (don’t worry, I’m fine). Lilac Wine fits with the theme of this post and is one of many great tracks off Grace.

Meanwhile, human technological advancement appears to be all at once a tower of Babel and a black hole. Excesses like artificial intelligence, which provide real but totally unnecessary increases in the much fetishized productivity, cost staggering amounts of resources, and more creatures go extinct, more forests are wiped off the face of the earth, and more people scramble to migrate to the parts of the world that are still livable, only to find that even the ostensibly liberal political class is telling them not to come.

And yet still the art that dominates the market currently tells us that if we just love each other enough, if we just vote, if we just read things that bring us to empathize with people unlike us, somewhere, someone else will act in such a way as to make a difference. Or at least our deaths will be redeemed. Meanwhile, things get worse. There’s hardly a substantial artistic movement out there that seeks to warn or disturb us. I’m not naive: of course there isn’t. The books, the movies, they wouldn’t sell, and art is no less a product to the economy than toilet paper, and it’ll be used as such if things get bad enough. Nobody wants to see ordinary people getting slaughtered unless there’s a message of hope. Maybe if a chainsaw-wielding maniac with a pervy dad is doing the killing, your average American can dig it, but even then it’s marginal.

Meanwhile, nearly everyone is trying to get theirs while they still can, the future being as uncertain as it is. There’s a cadre of idiots who seem to think if Elon would just try lithium or whatever, they might be able to go to Mars when the Earth finally catches on fire, but none of these people seem to have grasped Total Recall. Still others believe we’ll have nuclear fusion in time to save us from catastrophic warming of the globe. We’re promised over and over again that technology, which has gotten us to this place, will save us. This ignores that a powerful and substantial political faction are actually apocalyptic accelerationists, the ones who want America to defend Israel not because they care a wit about Israel, but because it might mean Apocalypse Now. The dominant cultural product is there for us to escape from our lives and our futures, or to tell us we’re doing our best, not to make us feel more alive or put us in touch with forces and feelings that might actually make us want to change our lives.

So I’ve become a little obsessed with books and movies that want to warn us. Threads is a movie that wants to warn us. The movie begins with ordinary British folk in Sheffield going about their days as saber rattling in the Middle East and abroad turns finally into full-blown nuclear warfare, and Sheffield, is of course, hit. Denial turns to panic turns to agonizing death or at best scrambling for survival in a nightmare of dust, radiation, and murder. The movie’s final shot is a tremendously depressing, literally a stillbirth, suggesting the end of humanity as we know it. But the scene I return to in my mind is at the movie’s fulcrum, when the bombs are just dropping. A man and his pregnant fiancee, who have largely been in denial about the new World War that appears to be fomenting, have been fighting more and more, and on the eve of disaster, he goes to get drunk and eventually to get laid with, well, someone else. When the bomb drops, he’s fucking in the back of a car, or at least on his way to fucking. Talk about coitus interruptus, he looks up to see the city lighting up through his car window. Next time we see him, he’s running through the streets, trying to find his love. He collapses before he can. His mistake, of course, is not just denial, but trying to get his while he’s still got a chance. There are others in the film who choose to stay with their loved ones, or who hide out in basements to try to avoid the apocalyptic fallout. Their fates are no less horrifying and arbitrary, which is what keeps the film from being a morality play where those who succumb to the temptations of flesh are the ones who must suffer, and you might have been saved if you just had the good sense to keep your prick in your pants. Even the preppers die in Threads. But there are those who at least get to die in the arms of the ones they love, and those who do not. As art, it recognizes not only our contingency as mortal creatures but our entire society’s contingency. Rather than skipping ahead to the post-apocalyptic landscape so we can watch people carry the light (or whatever), Threads reminds us that no one gets out alive, not even civilization.

Possession, a movie whose production was so famously difficult that one if its leads contemplated suicide, asks: what if a troubled marriage on its way to a divorce was made whole or at least exciting again by a tentacle monster? It’s a deeply unsettling film, bizarre and perverse and very, very funny.

The scene I want to look at is well into the movie, when Mark, played by Sam Neill, has already begun to accept that he has been replaced by a tentacle monster, that his wife is making love to a tentacle monster, and also that she is feeding it the men who have dared to hurt her, and he is actually finally there to observe her doing so. At first he seems to look on in horror,

and must look away, and even covers his face with his hands, and then, something shifts… He looks a second time.

He walks around the scene so he can observe at all angles.

He seems to be fascinated at least, approaching aroused. And his second appraisal made me revisit his first. What looked like horror at first may have just been fascination, so abject he felt he had to look away.

Regardless, he looks away for less time than he spends looking.

It’s another instance of observing an unfolding disaster, I suppose, but it has a fundamentally different charge from Threads. There we have a man finally realizing he is caught in a web, and there’s no escaping, here we have a man realizing that if he’s caught in a web, then he might actually like being tickled by the spider. There’s joyful participation in the suffering of the world, and then there’s this: if he possesses his wife, and the tentacle monster possesses his wife, then who’s making dinner? As it turns out, Mark is. He brings them more food in the form of detectives and men who’d like to possess her themselves. Eventually they are replaced altogether by the monster.

I suppose what I’m getting at is that obsessed with protecting and possessing those closest to us, we can become accomplices in our own destruction and the destruction of others. It’s no accident that the closing shot in the movie is (spoiler) their oft-neglected boy drowning himself in a tub as war begins in the background.

If these movies sound bleak, that’s of course because they are unrelenting in their vision of the destructive possibilities of the human animal. There is, of course, hope out there. Hope in the form of love, hope in the form of political movements that ask us to look out for each other and protect the most vulnerable people, but what these movies do for me is temper my hope. Hope unalloyed becomes delusion or worse, out and out cynicism when our lofty expectations for change aren’t met. What’s difficult is accepting that the world may very well be fucked, and trying anyways to mitigate the horror and pain and do something worthwhile for the people around us with the time we have left while the wildfire grows and spreads.

COMA

I was lecturing to a lecture hall full of half-awake freshman at the so-called University of Florida at eight AM, on failure analysis, or at least about to begin, when I received a text message from my sisters, Dad in a coma. Hurry home, Georgina, Wilhelmina, and turning to my students quite calmly, not feeling really anything at all, I announced, a failure analysis is an analysis of a failure. Two or three of the twenty or so students in the lecture hall wrote this down quite dutifully, as if I had said something profound, when of course in fact I had said absolutely nothing at all. In fact, as I began to lecture on failure analysis, I analyzed my own failure to say anything of any value to these students who were paying thousands of dollars so I might be paid a pittance for my expertise, but did so in my own head. While I was speaking about failure analysis out of my mouth, I was thinking about my own failures in my head. So often what comes out of our own mouth may sound perfectly logical while simultaneously it is turned into a orgy of self-flagellation in our own heads. I was so totally preoccupied by own my failure, which was not just a failure to say something profound to my students (as the more I thought about it, I realized that was a given, as the class itself was stupid), but to say something profound anywhere, in any of my writing. I had been trying to write about my relationship to my father, or my lack of a relationship to my father, figuring this was universal, and had been trying to do so for years, but I had never managed to say anything resonant or vital, and now he was very nearly dead. I thought, selfishly, as I talked to my students about the regulatory and capitalistic contradictions that brought about the Boeing Max disaster, that now that my father was dead, I would finally be able to write something resonant and vital. I would name it I’m Glad My Father is in a Coma, or perhaps something more concise, not realizing at the time that there was already a book titled I’m Glad My Mother Died, and being positively allergic to the possibilities of any accusations of plagiarism or even influence, determined to write something wholly original, I would have abandoned the idea for the project immediately if I knew, but I didn’t know, not having told anyone about it, having, in fact, just conceived of it as I was discussing the totally preventable Challenger disaster. So often, I told my students, these disasters are preventable, but happen simply because of deadlines and funding and greed. People who are afraid to lose their jobs push to finish projects and launch planes and shuttles because they want to keep their jobs, but of course the irony is that when the planes dive straight into the sea or explode spectacularly with a school teacher aboard, as the Challenger did, they end up losing their jobs. I was not actually sure if this was true, in fact, the second it came out of my mouth, I realized it was probably more likely that the engineers who tried to blow the proverbial whistle lost their jobs than it was likely that the executives at NASA or Boeing suffered any consequences whatsoever. So I extemporized, revised aloud. I told my students to write down an example of a wholly preventable failure from their own lives that ended in catastrophe, and emphasized that it need not be mechanical but could be personal, emotional, pet-related,etc., and then showed them a video of various corporate apologies, master classes in misdirection and circumlocution, and directed them to write their own apology with the sole requirement that it have the tone of a sincere apology but took no responsibility whatsoever. When I had done so, and they were scribbling away, I looked at my phone some more, seeing another message from my sisters, We can see you have read receipts on, are you going to come home? A question so presumptuous, a question that assumed I would act the prodigal son, and of course why did it matter if I came home? He was in a coma. It would not matter to him if I was there, I thought, typing out just such a message and sending it to my sisters. Georgina replied almost immediately, the nurses say sometimes coma patients come back to life when the person they’ve harmed the most returns to forgive them, to which I replied, the last thing I want is for him to wake up, and then deleted before sending, because although I meant it, at heart I am a coward. Instead I replied, so now that we know what the nurses say, what do the doctors say? To which Wilhelmina replied you have always been cold. You are a cold son to your father. My sisters have always doted on my father is the truth, I thought, wringing my hands and licking my lips angrily, they have doted on him hoping he will give his entire ketchup fortune to them, ketchup executive that my father is. They are even now creating a paper trail with these text messages to show to my father when he wakes from his coma, which surely he will, having all the persistence and stick-to-it-tiveness of a sociopath. In fact, if I were to return to his bedside (which I resolved in that moment not to), it would better be to pull the so-called plug than it would be to wake him up by whispering my forgiveness, lest the tentacles of his ketchup empire extend into the far reaches of the world. My sisters lived in a Hallmark movie, a movie where a couple of words at an opportune moment might save a person’s soul, while I lived in a noir, where a lifetime of deprecation and denial finally led to a moment of tragic weakness and ultimately death. There are people who believe life is a Hallmark movie and people who believe life is a noir, there is no in between, I realized. Feeling a rush of unnamed emotion much like a tidal wave, and hating rushes of unnamed emotions, I evacuated the feeling immediately, and announced this to my students, life is a noir, and added, you are dismissed early, my father is in a coma, and one of them, who I had already pegged as having a nose so brown it must have been perpetually in someone’s ass, asked are you alright professor, to which I said, it’s adjunct lecturer, not professor…

In case you missed it, I wrote about Deadwood over on Dirt, and specifically about “Calamity” Jane Canary, everybody’s favorite fuck-up. I had lots of thoughts about what Jane calls “the difference…. between the coward and the lapse of momentary fear” and I highly fucking recommend you go over there and subscribe so you can read those thoughts. But I’m gonna talk about Jane more here out of my own free will.

There’s a great scene I didn’t get to write about on Dirt, one of my favorites in all of Deadwood, where a drunken Jane comes upon a smallpox-stricken small-time grifter, Andy Cramed, who has been dumped in the woods to die by his fellow racketeers for fear he’ll spread the virus. Watch.

Okay, some context: When Jane first sees him, she is sopping with whiskey and guilt that she wasn’t there to save her best friend. Andy, who is delirious from fever and lack of water, has been muttering over and over “I apologize,” begging God to put him down. While we’re not privy to what he’s apologizing for, we can venture it is mostly in reference to his life of being a shitheel.

I’m interested in why Jane responds as she does. The first thing she does, of course, is hit herself on the head with her waterskin, as if to punish herself or chase off the thoughts of her own shame at failing her friend. And the little speech she gives to him, which is more for the audience and Jane than it is for the delirious Andy (“My best friend died. The man I had my best friend feeling about in the world. Took you as he found you… thought the best of you… sweet to me!”) has always given me chills.

It’s not just that Jane is sad she’s lost her friend, what I hear Jane saying is that the one who remains — herself — cannot and will not take herself as she finds her, think the best of herself, or be sweet. She doesn’t think she deserves it. She too would like to apologize, but to whom is she supposed to apologize? Her best friend is dead. When she finishes, Andy apologizes again, and Jane looks again at her waterskin, which, if you haven’t guessed, does not have water in it but whiskey. What she wants to do is take a drink and obviate herself entirely. No more feelings, no more living, is the instinct.

But to do so would be to abandon the shitheel who is on the way to decomposing at her feet, and Jane can’t do that: that would be to give up not only on herself but to abdicate the one thing she cares about, her own sense of right and wrong and responsibility, so it’s at this moment that Jane has one of her little epiphanies: “maybe you’d rather have some water.”

Andy cannot hear her because he’s delirious from dehydration and covered with smallpox boils, so he apologizes again, and then we get the sudden shift in tone in the scene — Jane nearly leaves her feet to shout “shut the fuck up” as she strides off. Which goes to show that while she may have resolved to help, she won’t stand to be reminded of the music in her own head.

So, of course, helping Andy doesn’t save Jane from her feelings, or her addiction — why should it? — and it is several episodes later, when the smallpox is running wild through the camp, that Jane is approached by the Cochran, the doctor, who is looking for anyone who might help with the sick. Having been already exposed, Jane is one of the few people who can without risking themselves harm.

“My best friend died,” she protests, and he shouts back, “and he ain’t coming back! Now will you help me?” In other words, you can only control what you can control. You’ve got this desire to help others, and what can you follow other than your own intuition? The world may not earn your respect or trust, but yourself — that may be under your own power if you can will it.1

Anyways, go over to Dirt if you want to read more…

Made on a miniscule budget of around twenty thousand dollars, the movie is populated with actors who are friends and family of the the director, Allen Baron, who would go on to direct several other movies and plenty of television. Baron wanted Peter Falk as the film’s star, but Falk took on a role that would actually, you know, pay him, and Baron figured his own mien would do the trick.

Baron looks a little like an attenuated George C. Scott: his jawline peters out as it meets his neck, and his brow isn’t so much a coastal shelf as it is a sandbar. He’s a little worn out, but the overwhelming impression is of a guarded man who would like to batter fools harshly.

The movie is shot in black-and-white, accompanied by a typically noirish jazz soundtrack, and most outrageously by a voiceover that is wonderfully hammy2 and strangely affecting. Some critics complained at its release that the voiceover was too self-serious, but I think self-seriousness is fitting, given Frankie’s inarticulate rage at the world around him. He’s a private sentimentalist, Frankie is, and the voiceover gives us access to that side of him too: most precisely to the loneliness that obtains in anyone who must enjoy their Christmas in New York alone, hunting a mobster, of course.

Christmastime gives Frankie room to reflect, is my point. It’s not uncommon for Frankie to pause over a scene, say, a Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, or a orphanage outside his window, and for the voiceover to utter vaguely but plangently “remembering.” A writing workshop might ask for Baron to show, not tell, at these moments, but sometimes asking the viewer to load their own blanks works too. It worked on me. (A voiceover was hammy enough; flashbacks would have killed the movie.)

Frankie’s a loner, as the voiceover reminds us every time he enters or leaves a social situation. City to city, he goes, whacking, and he doesn’t enjoy the company of just about anyone he meets — he hates the man who gives him the job he hates, the guy who sells him the gun (who keeps rats in his apartment as pets and will later threaten to rat Frankie out), and of course, he hates the man he’s supposed to kill. Hate, we’re told, makes the job easier. Frankie “always” comes to hate his targets by the time it comes to do them in. Convenient! Dickens never had his orphans become hitmen, as far as I know, but I suppose it beats begging for soup.

But wherefore the hatred of everyone else? That’s easy, of course: if they knew what he did, they’d be appalled by him. Secondly, when he’s on a job, any recognition could mean doom. One of his “danger signals” occurs (these danger signals are announced with much fanfare by the voiceover at moments where his senses are heightened to the possibility that he might be found out) when he runs into an old orphanage friend. He doesn’t need any more attention on him than he already has: it doesn’t do for a hitman from out of town to be found to be in town, after all.

But the old orphanage friend reintroduces Frankie to one person whose company he can actually imagine enjoying, Lorrie, someone Frankie clearly once had a crush on, and invites Frankie to a party (“You hate parties,” the voiceover reminds him when he we cut to the party, where Frankie is smoking in a corner). Frankie obliges.

But he accesses a more enjoyable version of himself, winning a race against his old friend to see who can push a peanut across the floor with his nose the fastest.3 Clearly impressed, Lorrie invites him over the next day to her apartment. She asks him where he’s been all these years, but he’s evasive, strutting around the room before letting out a hilarious “Cleveland.” He won’t be direct with her about what he does; instead, he tells a sad story. He was “working in a parking lot” is the lie he chooses, but the owner the parking lot got blown up by some racketeers.

“Why?” she asks him, astonished.

“Why?” he retorts, almost shouting, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “You just don’t ask questions like that, that’s why!” There’s two meanings here: one is that why is privileged information, and anyone in possession of the reason for a crime of that sort becomes a potential rat and therefore a target. But there’s also the deeper, ethical why, which Lorrie appears to be asking after. Frankie’s response — its volume and vehemence — seems to suggest that to dig any further would be dangerous for his own sanity.

Seeking to deescalate the situation, Lorrie puts on some music and asks him to dance. Within about five seconds he is kissing her violently. She recoils, tries to push against his shoulder, but he’s clutching across the back of the neck, hard enough to keep her from being able to move. She almost starts to pull away and down, like a dog escaping its chain, but there’s no way out that way. When he pulls away, she says “That was some dance,” her affect flat and ambiguous, somewhere between frightened and placating — and then he’s clutching her by the back of her arms, so she can’t move, pushing her backward while she begs him to stop. She tries, hard, to get away, shouting his name and saying no, and he persists for about a second or two while she begins to get frantic. Then, suddenly, she jerks her arm, and he seems to give up on the assault, and she hits him once, not hard at all on the neck, and throws herself on the floor.

He begins to apologize. He adds ineffectually that “sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.”

She gets up, buttoning her shirt, as if it were not the assault that offended her so but what he’s said, and tells him, halfway to crying, that she thinks he’d better go. He apologizes some more, begs to stay, promises he “won’t get rough anymore,” that he just “just got carried away,” adding please several times. The performance is believable: he really does seem to believe the person he was just moments ago was an accident of circumstance rather than of a piece with his primary self: murdering, hateful Frankie Bono.

Lorrie gathers herself, touching her fingers together as if in thought, and, regaining control of the situation, says placidly “suppose we have a warm-up on the coffee,” like she’s extending a peace offering, and pours him another. Then, she seems to get stuck, as if remembering what happened, before pouring herself another. She then very deliberately walks away from him, into the kitchen, where there are many pots and pans and a table and a couch between them.

She doesn’t know Frankie is a killer, but she is dealing with a man, after all, and is trying to avoid a dark result. She’s recognized Frankie’s explosive anger, and to get through this encounter safely she recognizes she’ll need to give him the stern but kind mother routine.

“You know, you’re really an attractive guy,” she says, and asks how come he isn’t married — the question doesn’t seem sarcastic, she’s calm and straightforward and nearly disappointed.

“I don’t know,” Frankie says, staring at the floor, agitated and ashamed, almost as if he’d been called into the nun’s office to account for beating on one of the other orphans. She suggests that what Frankie ought to find himself is “a girl, or someone,” she suggests vaguely, “…someone you could feel good with, someone who could make you feel at home,” tossing off the last phrase with a shake of the head, as if Frankie were pathetic. Home is the word that twists the knife: Frankie is an orphan, yes, like her, but she’s made a home for herself. She likes herself. She likes other people. She feels at home in the world.

(The scene recalls The Third Man. When Harry Lime attempts to seduce Anna, she takes the same tack. But contrast Lorrie’s lament with how Anna says “you ought to find yourself a girl” in The Third Man: brightly, as if she really can imagine someone falling in love with Holly.)

I’m not that guy, he seems to be saying to her, and she is saying back as kindly as she can: if you aren’t that guy, why are you alone? And why are you acting like that guy? The whole drift of Lorrie's speech seems to be what exactly is wrong with you without her ever directly asking so. She’s disappointed in Frankie; she knew him well enough back then to worry he’d turn out like this. Undergirding the whole scene is Lorrie’s poise in extremis — men acting violently and foolishly doesn’t astonish or shock her. She’s more depressed by the situation. And when she gathers herself, it’s not to admonish Frankie, but to usher him out of the apartment as kindly as possible, making sure he doesn’t give in to another impulse.

And that’s the thing: he’s a man who one minute appears to intend to rape her, and in the next, he’s apologetic, begging her to let him stay. He’s not a man who asks himself why he does what he does. The voiceover is entirely absent here, it’s worth noting.

“Drink your coffee,” she admonishes him, in a tone suggesting he’s terribly drunk, though both of them know he is not, “and then you’d better better leave. I’m tired.” The final word is pronounced with warmth, and she puts her hand to her chest as if exhaustion were really the issue. She is giving him an excuse to be gentlemanly one last time, to leave with his dignity.

I return to the question she asks him at the beginning of the scene: “why?,” and Frankie’s response, “you don’t ask questions like that.” I’d like to venture that refusal to ask that sort of question is actually precisely Frankie’s problem. “Why do people do awful things to each other?” is exactly the sort of question a murderer like Frankie avoids, and by avoiding it, he creates the loneliness he both craves and hates.

“I have reached the end of my clip, and my gun is empty. This is simply what I do,” Frankie would like to say, per Wittgenstein — but his confusion in the scene, the paradox between his raging and apologetic self, would suggest there are further justifications for him to exhaust, further contradictions to explore, before he attains anything resembling self-knowledge. Yes, what a surprise, the hitman doesn’t know himself, and yet his frustration with his lack of control over his own impulses is palpable and even affecting. His attraction to Lorrie, his choice to even go to the party, reveals a yearning to live differently that he will never pursue because at the end of the day he won’t examine his own behavior. If he asked himself why, he wouldn’t be able to stop: he’d realize there was really no good reason to go on doing what he was doing except to bring himself closer to destruction. 4

You might imagine that the sort of person who turns to shooting people for money hates the work, hates themselves, and hates what they’ve become — you might also imagine that contradictions abound in all of us, and that the sort of person who shoots other people for money might enjoy what he does more than he hates himself. So might Frankie’s affronted response to Lorrie’s why may have a third cause: she shouldn’t ask why men like Frankie do what they do because she won’t like the answer. Frankie encounters Lorrie as the man he wants to be — someone who can feel at home with someone else, someone who needs other people — and the person he’s become by virtue of his choices: vicious, impulsive, someone who enjoys doling out cruelty.

Sometimes we imagine that a dose of compassion is all most of us need. We should be careful about how we use it, and what we think it can solve. Lorrie extends her compassion to Frankie to get him out of her room, not to try to change him. Without knowing he’s a murderer, she’s figured out exactly what kind of man he is.

OTHER THINGS I’VE ENJOYED LATELY:

• Terry on close listening and Rachmaninoff and sex as a place you go and database logic is well worth your time and thought.

NEXT UP: I’m going to try to write about two movies of disaster. The Devils and Threads. Both feature men up to their hips in women. They don’t see the end coming despite ample warning. One’s got nuns, the others got radiation sickness. One’s got hysterical pregnancy, the other’s got irradiated miscarriages. It’s a double feature for the apocalypse!

2

Here’s someone else who’s Hammy

And yes, the below contains spoilers, you philistines.

I want to write briefly about one moment in the movie that is seemingly incidental to the movie but indicative of the character of its protagonist, the scribbler with too much drink in him, Holly Martins, who imagines he will play detective and unearth the truth about his good friend Harry Lime. He’s been told Harry was killed in an accident, and was a racketeer, and sets out to prove he was murdered and that Harry was the upstanding man he always believed he was, because Holly is at heart a fantasist.

The moment I’m interested in is late in the movie. Holly has been trying to woo his dead friend’s lover, Anna, who is due to be deported, promising her that he will prove Harry was murdered, and has only just been shown such a preponderance of evidence that proves Harry was a predator and louse — whose racket was to set up a medical charity as a front to sell diluted penicillin, including to children with meningitis — that he has decided to up and leave Vienna forever, taking his humiliation with him as his only baggage. But Holly can’t leave without trying to woo Anna one more time and shows up at her door, drunk.

Anna still loves Harry. Not only has she shown no interest in Holly, she also sees right through him, and his wooing is so woeful that she proceeds to weasel out of him that he has been meeting with the police, that he has seen the same evidence of Harry’s louse-itude she has, and of course she immediately identifies that he is drunk. Before the scene is over, he himself acknowledges that he doesn’t “stand a chance” with her.

But before Holly’s control of the moment unravels entirely, we hear him knock on the door, and when Anna asks who it is, Holly, off-camera, responds “me” in a high-pitched, nervous tone that is rich with diffidence. Imagine a mouse squeaking, if you will. When Anna doesn’t respond — though she has gotten up to turn on the light and let him in — Holly, still off-camera, revises his introductory remark, whispering in the most sultry, susurrant manner he can, “it’s me.”

The moment is funny and revelatory of what is perhaps the most endearing aspect of his character: Holly is aware of who he really is (others describe him variously as a “fool” and “born to be murdered”) and how he comes across, and wishes to be otherwise so badly that he often convinces himself he is. In post-war Vienna, he’s no war hero, he’s a writer of Westerns, which the movie argues is one of the most pathetic things a human being can be, and he’s come to Vienna hoping to change his own life. He hears how he is himself speaking to Anna and wants to revise the moment, as he probably wishes he could revise each and every step of his trip, which has been futile and taken with arrogance.

He is not trying to be a better, braver man at Anna’s door. In fact, he’s trying to be Harry, even now that he knows who is friend really is. He is trying to show her that he is someone other than he is: more seductive, more confident, more dashing. He does not realize his revision cannot rescue his first opening; the whimpering “me” has already given him away, as has everything else he has done in her presence. He doesn’t clock, either, that he is still imitating Harry in spite of what he now knows about his former friend.

This first revision, ineffectual as it is, sets up another, larger one, later in the movie. When it turns out Harry is alive (surprise!), he will abandon his project to prove Harry’s innocence and totally commit to helping the police take him by setting up a meet. Anna will think he’s a coward and a rat for doing so, but Holly sees it as the one fine, even moral thing he still has left to him to do. He puts his life at risk and is the one who puts his old friend down, having helped to corner him in a sewer.

In doing so, he must know he has pushed Anna finally away, and yet, in the closing shot, we see the same old Holly and the persistence of denial, which imagines if he acts dashing and hops out of the car that is supposed to take him to the airport, she will stop, forgive him, and fall for him. He, the writer of cheap novelettes, still thinks he will get his happy ending. He imagines that Anna, who earlier reflected that Harry was “better off dead,” will see the righteousness of his action.

She walks right on by.

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