Archives for 2005

And nobody blogs it…well, does it?

I’m supposed to be somewhere five minutes ago and will return to this desk later for more blogging. In the meantime, I can’t help but wonder…where, oh where, can I read about last night’s bloggy panel featuring my illustrious colleague and his equally fascinating cohorts? Surely some blogging fools out there were in attendance, right? From what I hear, we as a group like nothing better than to give breathless reports of each other’s exploits. Anyone want to gift the hinterland-bound among us with a little report, breathless or otherwise? Send word of any sightings to ogic@artsjournal.com, and be forever endeared to me.

UPDATE: James Marcus, whose excellent and excellently named criticism blog endeared him to me long ago, comes through at House of Mirth.

“She had always been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable domesticity they might see what was happening in the street.”

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

I stayed out too late and have to awaken every bit as early as usual. Thus today’s blogging will take place in the PM hours. See you then.

“I have said about that night that it was a night like all the rest, a night beginning so usually I wasn’t even looking when it happened. But going back over it now I can see in how many ways this was not in the slightest true. For one important exception, a heavy fog had folded us up into its cold grey blanket. For three days we’d groped and gasped our way through a London from which streets, pavements, cars, even buildings and people had been quietly erased. A London no longer a city but a great cold, glowing field where the refraction of the street lamps, unable to pierce the fog’s opaqueness, none the less lit up the vast loneliness with an eerie yellow glow.”

Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me

Arts & Letters Daily says this lovely, generous essay about the last lines of novels is by Philip Hensher, and I’m glad they say so, because the page itself gives no indication of authorship. I call the piece “generous” in the sense, simply, of “long,” because you know this same piece assigned by the NYTBR or most other American papers would never be permitted to run more than half this version’s nearly 2,000 words and would, accordingly, be much impoverished.

Hensher has a great and true premise: as much as we literary types love to recite and dwell on and argue about great first lines, the way a novel ends is a more interesting and revealing matter. There’s far more at stake. Especially after modernism, it’s hard to see the question of how to end as anything other than a great problem for novelists. How they tend to solve it may tell us something about the philosophical temperament of their time and place. Writes Hensher:

But there are two questions at stake here, in what Frank Kermode called “the sense of an ending.” One is how far a novelist believes in the end of a story, either through perfect happiness or complete catastrophe. The other is just the sense of a cadence; the sort of thing that sounds final, even if the novel’s concerns are provisional, incomplete. A novel with an unimpeachably happy ending may finish on an incomplete cadence, like Bleak House‘s “even supposing -“. Conversely, a novel where all the questions remain unanswered at the end can, more rarely, have a resoundingly firm cadence, just like [Henry] Green’s Loving.

(The Green novel ends, ironically, “Over in England they were married and lived happily ever after.”)

I don’t have a whole lot to add to what Hensher writes. He covers the topic admirably and, whew, comes up with a wholly satisfying last graf. Read the whole thing. But his piece did send me scurrying to various bookcases to see precisely how some beloved books left matters. And yet the problem with endings, one that doesn’t vex beginnings, is that in many cases you can’t share them without perhaps compromising a new reader’s experience of the book. The final line of The Turn of the Screw, for instance, is remarkable for its ambiguity and yet all too revealing. Here’s one that gives nothing away, is pretty bracing, and, I skirts all of the categories Hensher delineates:

Poor all of us, when you come to think of it.

It’s from Graham Greene, The Third Man, and it’s a long sight down a one-way road from “God bless us, every one!”

Regarding the incongruities of The Ice Harvest, which I took a stab at diagnosing below, Erasmus at Praise of Folly says it better than I could and clarifies why I felt this movie was a queasy shade of noir:

The problem with this film is that it fundamentally mischaracterizes the question at the heart of film noir, which is “what does the decent man do in an immoral milieu?” Look at Sam Spade, Orson Welles’s Michael O’Hara in The Lady from Shanghai, or Glenn Ford’s Johnny Farrell in Gilda. All these men are terribly flawed, but try and stick to some essential core of decency despite the crew of vultures, con men, maniacs, and femmes fatales who surround them. Spade ends up sending a woman he loves up the river, O’Hara staggers away from a pile of corpses, and Farrell (unconvincing happy ending aside) tries to keep his loyalties in order, often perversely so.

Modern screenwriters and directors seem to fundamentally miss this moral point, being beglamoured by the bad guys and missing the core drama of the good-ish guy trying to escape the maelstrom of connivance, malice, and murder. John Dahl, whom Erasmus loves, gets this. His Red Rock West is the perfect modern noir. Nick Cage’s ex-Marine Mike Williams drifts into Red Rock, Wyoming, looking for a job. He tells a white lie, letting a bartender think he’s “Lyle from Texas,” for whom he’s got a job. This fib plunges him into a web of murderous hatred from which he keeps trying to escape but keeps getting pulled back in because of his essential decency. It’s a terrific film.

Dahl also made The Last Seduction in which he created Wendy Kroy, the most fatale of the femmes who’ve graced the silver screen. Dahl’s brilliance in this film is exposing Kroy as the most evil of manipulative sociopaths–she literally has no use for people other than as a means to money or other objects of desire. She kills, steals, and frames others for her crimes. And then, in the end, in a gut-punch of an ending which leaves you gasping, she gets away with it. Dahl plays with the complicity of the viewer in the anti-heroine’s misdeeds, then pulls the rug out from under you in that she, a real villain, doesn’t get any comeuppance. Dahl doesn’t do a wink and let you think, “Oh, that scamp!” He gives you a genuine look at the triumph of evil. The Last Seduction is another work of profound moral mediations in an utterly compelling dramatic form.

This brings us to The Ice Harvest which shares the central problem of most “neo-noir” films. It’s all bad guys, without any moral quandary, and hence no real drama or plot, only incident in the game of last-man-standing among a bunch of low-lifes. The audience is apparently supposed to have some dramatic sympathy for Charlie Arglist because…well, principally because he’s played by John Cusack, whose winning hang-dog manner is likeable. As La Demanska notes, however, the character is an empty vessel. There’s no there there. He’s simply the least vile of the individuals on offer.

The second major problem is the ending, in which Charlie’s the last man standing, ending up with 2.147 million dollars, if I remember correctly, with which he basically heads out of Wichita, “rescuing” his drunken friend Pete (entertainingly played by Oliver Platt) from his horrible marriage to Charlie’s ex-wife. This is not an act of virtue, not least because their leaving town leaves Charlie’s two children (already scarred by his no longer living with them) without either their father or their stand-in father. The larger problem is that Charlie is rewarded for his coming out on top of the deadly game of Who’s Got the Duffel Bag?

…So, in the end, The Ice Harvest fails to glean anything from its characters’ experience. Still, the movie is very, very well made, well-acted by a talented cast, and set in an environment that rarely sees on the big screen: winter on the Great Plains. It intrigued Erasmus enough that he went out and bought the novel from which it’s adopted. Erasmus suspects (or perhaps merely hopes) that the novelist has a better sense of what’s really at stake in great crime novels–not money, but souls.

That’s what I meant to say! There’s more, so be sure to hop over and read the whole thing.

P.S. This entire post written, cut, pasted, and coded with a twelve-pound cat lying on top of my right arm. Some animals, that is, may have been overindulged in the making of this post.

The Ice Harvest may be the most misleadingly marketed film ever. It snuck up on me–the very first I heard of it was from Dave Kehr’s fairly new blog in November (thanks to Cinetrix for first word of DaveKehr.com). He wrote:

After all the failed attempts to capture the flavor of the great noir novelists like Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Charles Willeford, here is the film that finally does it, and without betraying the slightest sign of self-consciousness. This is no stuffed-and-mounted “homage” but a living, breathing film with a black heart and a sense of humor. Ramis demonstrates again how closely related comedy and suspense timing are, introducing his twists and reversals with the same dual sense of surprise and inevitability that sets up a great punch line. His control is perfect but his presence is imperceptible

I haven’t been absolutely forthcoming with you about my current state of mind and body, so here goes: I have a little problem called “reactive airways syndrome,” which is a kind of respiratory alarm that goes off whenever I let myself get run down and underslept. It started clanging loudly two weeks ago. As a result, I spent the past few days slumped on my couch in a slack-jawed semi-stupor, watching undemanding movies, doing as little as possible, and letting my batteries recharge themselves.

The good news is that I’m finally starting to bounce back, but I’m not quite there yet. In order to ensure a more perfect recovery, I’ve decided not to blog at all between now and next Friday, December 9, when I’ll return to the ‘sphere with the weekly drama-column teaser. I’ll miss you, but I know you’ll understand.

Have fun while I’m gone. Visit some of the other blogs listed in the “Sites to See” module. Come goggle at Maud and me on Tuesday night. And fear not: I shall return next Friday!

UPDATE: In addition to all those other cool blogs, you’ll find lots and lots of new stuff in the right-hand column to keep you busy in my absence. Enjoy.