Various Thoughts and Links

In lieu of a post dedicated to a single subject, here are some various thoughts, along with links to some interesting content.

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A recent conversation with some fellow film fans had me thinking about why I nearly always watch a film in its entirety, no matter how much I dislike it. I can't fully explain this impulse, only to say that some films shift in tone or have second acts that differ significantly from the first; I've certainly changed my mind about a film occasionally because of this. But I'm beginning to believe that I should exercise considerably more discretion over that little stop button on my DVD player's remote. Almost singlehandedly, Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted (2008) convinced me of the need to do this. I had been looking for some mindless entertainment after several long, overloaded weeks at work and thought this would fit the bill. Yet it contains such a streamlined, efficient core of rottenness that, feeling rotten after watching it, I wondered why I bothered to see it through. The film ratchets up the physical criteria for modern American action films, which, from a certain perspective, might mark it as an advancement, but in the process it angrily, and anarchically, throws itself against the establishment, the culture at large, and even the audience, and does so without irony or even self-consciousness. Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), enslaved to corporate America, learns how to fulfill his human potential by becoming an assassin, and then, once this is achieved, inquires emphatically what the audience has really done with their lives. Well, for one, I haven't gone around killing people, so that already puts me one step ahead (and, in all seriousness, even a Nietzschean would find the message in Wanted patently absurd). But the real issue is Bekmambetov's insistence on strongly emphasizing every ugly sentiment proceeding from his characters' lips, every exit wound produced by high-velocity ammunition, every exploding limb or face. The violent, careless abuse of bodies in this film is, I hate to say, nearly singular. Some horror films, including some I admire, are as graphic and yet not as spiritually enervating because they contain deeper implications about violence and the social order. I'd forget this film, except it stands as a watershed of sorts. From now on, I'll use that stop button more frequently.

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While I'm trying to enforce limitations on my film viewing, I'm hoping to do the opposite with my reading. In recent years I've had difficultly finishing novels I've started, and this year I've resolved to reverse this habit. To some degree, reading Thomas Pynchon's work for the first time has helped; I've enjoyed The Crying of Lot 49. Jeffrey Eugenides, who won the Pulitzer in 2003 for Middlesex, has helped even more. His The Virgin Suicides, on which Sofia Coppola based her first feature film (and more, I hope, on Coppola later), has aided me in getting beyond whatever barriers I've developed recently with novels. I couldn't set this thing down. While death lingers over it from the get-go (the very first page announces the suicides of the Lisbon girls), the humanism within the story and the brilliance of the novel's form overshadow its ostensible subject matter. The Virgin Suicides, in part, contains an implicit commentary on the strictures of suburban middle-class life, while it simultaneously evokes nostalgia for a bygone era and underscores the odd, symbiotic connections among siblings and families and between people and their environments. But I'm most impressed by Eugenides' decision to tell this tragic, bittersweet, and sometimes funny story through the retrospective vantage point of a collective narrator, a group of men who grew up in the same suburb, observing the Lisbon girls, and who now recount what happened to them. Eugenides' narrator is hardly omniscient; the men, whose identities as narrators coalesce almost as thoroughly as the girls' identities once did, years ago, provide no satisfactory explanation for events or complete answers to the questions raised in the process of reading. In all this, The Virgin Suicides underscores the limitations of memory, the challenges in organizing and making sense of the past, especially one filtered through literal distances: observations made from across the street, interviews conducted years later, disconnected pieces of evidence. The central tragedy exists not so much in the suicides of these girls (though they are part of it), but in the lives of the men who have been haunted by them, and who cannot exorcise their pasts because of these very limitations of memory and understanding. The book's final pages are particularly elegiac.

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Speaking of novels, it seems as if the posthumous epic of the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, 2666, is sort of the novel of the moment. It has received wide acclaim and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. At The Quarterly Conversation, Scott Esposito has a thorough review.

Novelist Zadie Smith has in my view become one of the foremost voices in literary criticism. Here she is on Kafka, on Forster, and on the contemporary novel (all published last year; I bookmarked them when they appeared and then got sidetracked with work).

I admit that I've never been much of a reader of John Updike's fiction, but I can't deny his place in American letters. Updike's passing from lung cancer last month has brought forth many remembrances, including a series by established writers on The New Yorker blog.  In addition, here are some by Lorrie Moore, Martin Amis, and Joseph O'Neill (all three via About Last Night), as well as one by Adam Gopnik.

Quiet Bubble selects his favorite comics of 2008.

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On to film: I've become very intrigued by Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector (La Question humaine, 2007), even though I haven't seen it. My interest is due in no small part to posts about the film at Long Pauses, Strictly Film School, and Film-Think.

Darren Hughes (of Long Pauses) has written about the 2008 Toronto Film Festival at Senses of Cinema. Rob Davis (of Daily Plastic and Paste Magazine) has written a wrap-up of the 2009 Sundance Festival.

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Finally, this is great: pianist Hélène Grimaud brings her characteristically broad, expansive sound to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. The formidable Vladimir Jurowski (a great conductor) leads the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. You'll need to register to see the entire performance. I don't know how long the video will be available for free, which is why I've already watched it several times. I've seen Grimaud live twice in Los Angeles, once playing Schumann, once playing Brahms, and her Ravel here bears the same kind of intensity she brought to those performances.

Comments

[Darren]

Michael, your description of the Eugenides novel makes me think you'd probably enjoy a book I just finished reading last night, Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. I'm also trying to make a better effort at finishing the books I start, and, I'm telling you, the task is a whole lot easier when you find the right novel. I've loved Ondaatje's writing for years. He blends fiction and memoir and poetry in stunning ways. This latest one is built around a really tricky collection of loosely connected lives. I'm honestly tempted to start rereading it tonight.

I've almost bought The Virgin Suicides several times. I think I'm going to read Virginia Woolf's Orlando next, but you've convinced me to put the Eugenides on my to-buy list.

[Michael]

Darren, thanks for the Ondaatje recommendation -- I've never read any of his work, but he's one of those writers whose names I've had on my mental to-read list for a very long time, and I'm honestly going to take a look into Divisadero. I've actually been going around and asking people for reading recommendations, and so I'm grateful for this one. From your description it sounds like something I could very well like, and that's what I'm after -- I want to be able to lose myself in novels again.

Let me add something about The Virgin Suicides -- I think it's a fairly rich novel. Its implications about American suburban life in the 1970s (during economic decline), for example, aren't belabored but they seep into everything, just as other elements do. I admit that I was hesitant initially because I wasn't sure how Eugenides would present the actual suicides, only to find that this book is about something else, and as I continue to think about the book more implications continuously come to mind, which adds to its richness. And speaking of rereading things -- I'm likely going to read it again in the next week or so. If you do buy it, I'd be very interested in your impressions.