American Eccentrics, Hollywood Transcendentalism, and Progressive Politics

Academic feminist film criticism has brought some attention to the woman's film as a genre, but most widely-known woman's films gained their cultural prominence through the attention of men – gay men, who made a cult of Garbo and Dietrich, Hepburn and Stanwyck, and especially Crawford and Davis. It's an oddity of the history of Hollywood film reception that straight men hero-worship the male directors they've nominated as “auteurs” while gay men diva-worship the female stars. Moreover, to judge from the type of directors likely to be embraced as important auteurs by either the French New Wave critics or their American followers you might assume that the great American cinematic subject is “men being violent” (although sometimes this subject is under scrutiny, as in the films of Nicholas Ray and Paul Thomas Anderson). Perhaps the only prominent male critic to write about the woman's picture is Stanley Cavell in the 90s, and I have never seen this work cited by other critics, whereas I see his work on screwball comedy cited all the time. Douglas Sirk (taken seriously since the championing of Fassbinder in the 70s) is the single fashionable auteur who directed woman's pictures.

The “machismo” of the American film canon is all the odder when you consider that the gynocentric side of the war between Fieldingites and Richardsonians in academic criticism of the English novel triumphed over the androcentric side long before the advent of academic feminism, with F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) a pivotal salvo in the battle. Harold Bloom has often spoken of the “lines” of Richardson and Fielding and their separate supporters; Leavis wasn't fond of either, but his favouring of Austen, Lawrence, and honourary English novelist helped to put heroines at the centre of the English lit canon. But this is the English novel. American Romanticism and the odd “novel” that it produced is, as Leslie Fiedler pointed out, often conspicuously and purposefully devoid of women, although one must also contend with Hawthorne and that cultural misfit, his admirer, James.

I am not so much pleading for criticism of American films to adopt a more gynocentric approach as I am pointing out the arbitrary elements of canon formation, which in this case reflected the way that both American and French male critics (and Pauline Kael) thought about what it means to be “American.” Likewise, the gynocentric slant of criticism of the English novel reflects what critics came to think the novel should be about, namely interiority; although with Modernism an even more highly developed interiority is instead attached to the autobiographical protagonist, who will now be male when the author is male (as he usually is).

Given the present state of the American film canon, however, a corrective may be in order. With the field divided between a macho auteurism that favours movies in which women, if present at all to a significance degree, are relegated to the sidelines and traditional roles (however feisty they may be in them, as in the Ford and Hawks Westerns), and the seemingly endless fascination with film noir, a genre in which women are represented by the femme fatale, it can't hurt to bring more attention to the woman's picture and to the many interesting directors (such as Frank Borzage, William Dieterle, and frequent woman's picture director King Vidor) who have never become fashionable auteurs perhaps in part because they were not especially interested in masculinity as a subject.

A film critic friend of mine once told me that noir was the only genre of which it can be said that every member was interesting, and while I agree with him about the inherent interest of noir, I think the same can be said for the woman's picture if it can be considered a genre. Does a Hollywood movie become a woman's picture just because it stars a woman – meaning that women will watch movies starring men but not vice versa? It can sometimes seem so, although women can also be the stars of horror films (or, today, action films*) and the co-stars of romantic comedies and dramas. In the woman's picture, however, men are usually love interests or secondary characters. A woman's picture can star a man, however, like Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow, which puts Fred MacMurray in the same trapped middle-class position as Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows; just as a woman can be the protagonist of a noir (e.g. Ophuls's The Reckless Moment), although noirs with female protagonists are usually considered noir/woman's picture hybrids, which by rights should be the most interesting genre of all – and it's true. There is also a sub-genre of woman's picture, or woman's picture/noir, in which the male protagonist falls in love with a woman he's never seen in the flesh, who does not appear for the first stretch of the film (e.g. Preminger's 1944 Laura and Dieterle's 1945 Love Letters), which shows the influence of the Gothic on both genres and serves as a bridge between Wilkie Collins's 1859 The Woman in White and Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo.

I was prompted to reflect on these things after seeing a couple of interesting forgotten classical Hollywood, Nicholas Ray's A Woman's Secret (1949), with a screenplay by Herman (of Citizen Kane authorship controversy) Mankiewicz, and People Will Talk (1951), written for the screen and directed by the other Mankiewicz brother, Joseph. Joseph Mankiewicz is not a fashionable auteur even though as a writer-director and sometimes writer-director-producer he is an auteur a la lettre. Is this because he was so often associated with woman's pictures, such as his most famous movie, All About Eve? People Will Talk, released the year after All About Eve (and with its same producer, Darryl F. Zanuck), is a remarkable comedy-drama in which Cary Grant's eccentric, progressive, cultured, and magically benevolent Dr. Praetorius (that's correct) becomes romantically involved with a woman who's become pregnant out of wedlock (that's correct), for which she is neither shamed nor punished. It's evident that attacks on 50s conformism started early in the movies – a lot earlier than Sirk's 1956 All That Heaven Allows (a movie kindred in spirit), maybe as early as the great Mildred Pierce (1945). The tension between conformism and individualism in American culture is American culture, of course, and People Will Talk sometimes reminded me of a Mr. Deeds Goes to Town if the latter were populated by atheist intellectuals instead of small-town innocents.

Jeanne Craine is not as much of a feminist in this film as she first appears... but Cary Grant is.

As for A Woman's Secret, it seems to have slipped through the cracks of the canon because it made no impact at the time and does not fit in with the auteurist-friendly subject of many of Ray's later films, starting with the success of Rebel Without a Cause on: aforementioned masculinity. It's easy to see why A Woman's Secret did not set the world on fire at the time of release, and it's for the same reasons that it's so delightfully charming now. It is absolutely a screenwriter's picture, and Mankiewicz has no interest in any of the genres that it dabbles in, from woman's picture to murder mystery. The murder plot in fact makes no sense psychologically, and the two women it involves (played by Maureen O'Hara and Gloria Grahame) are shoved into the background and flashbacks while Melvyn Douglas takes centre stage as a world-weary author avatar.

Drat... I just had that rug cleaned!

The Svengali melodrama in which O'Hara and Grahame are embroiled could be a lot of fun, as it is in the Cukor-directed Gothic melodrama A Woman's Face (1945), starring Douglas, Joan Crawford, and Conrad Veidt. Mankiewicz, however, gives it perfunctory treatment, instead developing the comedic characters of the long-suffering elderly police inspector and his exceedingly eccentric, mystery novel-reading, amateur-detective wife, who finally, semi-inadvertently, provides the key (literally) to the mystery. The sharp-edged interaction between these characters, played by Mary Philips and Jay C. Flippen, is delightful; while Philips's character is a patented “batty woman,” it's evident that she chafes at her husband's mild/gruff, but withal complacent, patriarchal authority, and Philips gives her line readings just the right note of off-kilter menace to be laugh-out-loud funny, especially when she seizes an opportunity to declare, “I could have you committed, you know,” soon after missing his coffee cup and dumping a spoonful of sugar into his lap.

As an ill-educated but strong-willed floozy, Gloria Grahame also delivers line readings that tease out the absurdism in Mankiewicz's literate and whimsical dialogue. Douglas is the flippant playboy from Ninotchka, but even more dissipated ten years on, with a touch of Oscar Levant about his piano-playing wisecracker – if Levant could ever be imagined as conducting an affair with a woman or as giving up his bachelor ways in the final moments. The Douglas-O'Hara extra-wedlock affair is another one slipped past the censors, suggested by a reference to her jealousy of Grahame and confirmed by his louche body language with her in a later scene. Blink and you'll spend most of the movie thinking he's her gay best friend.

Speaking of American non-conformists, it struck me on a recent viewing of the 1934 Anne of Green Gables that one of the greatest of them in literature isn't a citizen of the United States at all. In Canada, beginning with my generation it's been a rite of passage to grow up with the mid-80s made-for-TV movie starring Megan Follows, and it seems evident that the later adaptation's casting of Marilla and Matthew and especially Anne herself owe a lot to the 30s film. The latter, however, adds a romantic plot to the episodic novel, focusing in fan fiction style on Anne's relationship with Gilbert Blyth. The movie's Gilbert Blyth himself departs from the studious young man of the book with whom Anne intellectually competes to become a sort of teenage proto-John Garfield type; especially hilarious if one was a fan of the 80s movie's daringly effeminate Gilbert.

Jonathan Crombie's "daringly effeminate" Gilbert Blythe... Candrogyny strikes again?

But although the 30s movie doesn't stick to Montgomery's vision of the clash between Anne's imaginative and impulsive ways and the town's demand for decorum and propriety (brokered by Marilla, who appreciates both Anne's ways and the town's), there's an early scene in which Anne elaborates on her preferred way of praying, as opposed to the way she's been taught, that's shocking in its frank portrayal of the young adolescent's “pagan” animism and antidoctrinalism. Exalted by her Romantic imagination (Elinor Dashwood would never approve), Anne is in some ways more of a Transcendentalist even than Jo March, in a line of Protestant heroines that descends from Jane Austen and ends up in two superb woman's pictures that explicitly grapple with philosophical subjects in a Transcendentalist context, the great Bette Davis vehicle Now, Voyager and Douglas Sirks's All That Heaven Allows.

The Anglo-American noncomformist spirit has often been represented by heroines presumably because women have traditionally had to do so little to not conform to their social role**; because being female is already to not conform to the male-determined “norm” (hence the emphasis in the initial chapters of Anne of Green Gables on the mistake of ordering her instead of a boy); because women are encouraged to develop their imaginations and middle-class women traditionally had the (double-edged, as the non-Anglo-American example of Madame Bovary emphasizes) leisure in which to do so; because women are not encouraged to challenge their circumstances or environment, which makes it all the more dramatic when they do. See also the heroines of Theodor Dreyer, an auteur very much concerned with both spirituality and nonconformism. Another good example from cinematic history is Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth (1950), in which Jennifer Jones plays a peasant woman who identifies with her dead mother's paganism, who cannot find happiness with either the Baptist minister who thinks she's an innocent child of nature or the swaggering squire who satisfies her body but threatens her soul, and who scandalizes her community in her attempt to achieve fulfilment (compare Dreyer's Day of Wrath).

Since seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master I've wanted to compare it to Now, Voyager: both are “therapy” movies that use sea voyages as metaphors for spiritual journeys, and in both cases the protagonist must work out their relationship to male authority, represented by a guru/mentor. Since Now, Voyager, with its overt reference to Whitman, is about the process of becoming an individual (and shows how Transcendentalism might have special application for women, who historically have not been encouraged to think their own thoughts and lead their own lives), Davis resolves her relationship with male authority with relative ease (her mommy issues are another matter); in contrast, in The Master, Joaquin Phoenix seems to be offered charismatic authority as a solution to his “male” anger and alienation, and a finally unacceptable one. (His mommy issues, too, are another story, and one that, along with the central performances by brothers who ape James Dean's persona in remarkably different ways, makes The Master a fascinating companion to Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, which, come to think about it, is also about the search for/escape from a problematic male guru as much as about longing for the mother.) 

*I can't comment on “chick flicks,” the contemporary equivalent to the studio-era “woman's picture,” since I have seen very few of them. They do often appear to indulge in gender essentialism, but whether that's also true of studio-era woman's pictures and I simply overlook it because of their cultural context, or whether the few hundred woman's pictures that have any reputation are exceptions that challenged that context, is something I haven't studied. I know that some feminist film critics have embraced blockbusters with female appeal like James Cameron's Titanic, but that's further than I'm capable of going even though I'm willing to admit that theoretically Cameron's dopey, historically dodgy, and impeccably pop-feminist blockbuster could be the true heir to Gone With the Wind.

**Nowadays, on the other hand, it's probably easier for a boy or man to fail to conform to his gender role than it is for a girl or woman. This kind of nonconformism, however, has not yet been absorbed into our narrative consciousness. At the same time, it's hardly the case that women have total freedom to ignore conventional gender self-presentation. It's interesting to see self-declared feminist Janelle Monae – sporting Bette Davis's pompadour from Now, Voyager – bring female androgyny to a pop arena in which female bodily display and conventional attractiveness remain mandatory (hence the abuse Amy Winehouse took). Even in indie, where conventional sexiness is met with disapproval (hence the abuse that Lana Del Rey gets), there's a weird emphasis on long, flowing Pre-Raphaelite hair (Kate Bush, Neko Case, Florence Welch... heck, even Courtney Love in recent years... that's totally enough for a thing). Camille Paglia may have been right that Madonna was the most important feminist of the 1980s because she proved that sexiness and power were not mutual contradictory, but once the lesson of Madonna was absorbed by a new generation of women in pop that message became muddled: no one doubts that Beyonce, for example, is powerful (i.e. she's famous, wealthy, and in charge of her career), but unlike Madonna, she does not project an image of power (not even when she specifically manufactures one in the form of Sasha Fierce). Should she? What were the goals of feminism again? For women to be self-determining and financially successful or for women to be a threat to the status quo, a.k.a. scare the bejesus out of heterosexual men? And what do we make of the fact that despite the continued insistence on women's sexual self-display in pop music, most of Madonna and Beyonce's male fans are gay? It's a crazy world out there, kids....

"Mother... I'm not afraid!"

Critics, Artists, Idols, Fans: Camille Paglia's Intestinal Flora and Joseph Cornell's Cultural Detritus

In her brief heydey of the early 90s, my teenage idol Camille Paglia called out her teenage idol, Susan Sontag (“Notes on Camp” was published when Ms. P was 17, my age when my life was changed by Sexual Personae), for her failure to maintain her visibility and public centrality of the 60s. One can now say exactly the same thing about Paglia, although her seemingly wilful withdrawal from relevance has been less mandarin (the accusation she levelled against Sontag) than schoolmarmish. In fact, Paglia's failure has been far more conspicuous and embarrassing than Sontag's, since she herself gave us the terms by which to measure it, boasting prematurely in the first volume of Sexual Personae that its two volumes made it the longest book ever written by a woman... only for the second volume, on sports and pop culture, to never materialize.

Instead of that volume, we got two collections of provocative articles, plus a BFI monograph on Hitchcock's The Birds, in the 90s; in the new millennium, we've been gifted with one slender volume in each decade to date, the first on poetry, the most recent on the visual arts. Meanwhile Paglia has stuck industriously to her teaching gig at the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts (now University of the Arts) to which she once attributed the maintenance of her intellectual acumen (she's a real teacher, not like those celebrity academics and conference schmoozers) and, until recently, produced a rambling column for Salon.com that illustrates Paglia's decline from the late 90s to the late 00s, as steep as her previous decline from the early to late 90s. To use a Paglian analogy, Paglia's falling-off as a critic after Sexual Personae – composed in the 70s and 80s – is as striking as the difference between Lauren Bacall's glowing, fresh-faced appearance in To Have or Have Not, her breathtaking debut, and every movie afterwards, when the 19-year-old's baby fat melted away, leaving only the hard, prematurely matronly mask.  

As with To Have or Have Not, Sexual Personae has taken Paglia a long way, and she's as deserving a star as Bacall. And yet it gets worse, though not quite as bad, just yet, as Crawford and Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? By the way, how do you like this for a coincidence of the kind which Google can magically call up: Who's Afraid of Bette Davis? was released on October 26, 1962, 13 days after Whatever Happened to Martha's Baby?, Edward Albee's similarly-named play, also a bit of camp Grand Guignol about a couple of old hags tearing each other apart, opened on Broadway. Stuff like that makes me think that maybe there really is meaning and order in the universe. And that God is a drag queen.

My Little Monet

Miss P's latest, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars, hopefully bears a subtitle reminiscent of Sexual Personae's Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, but its poverty of ideas, imagination, and language is accurately represented by its thuddingly stupid title. Glittering images? Really? That's the best description of Western art that Paglia could come up with? (And although it doesn't say so in the subtitle, it's all Western art inside.) Because for me it conjures up not Bernini and Monet so much as Barbie and My Little Pony.

The title may be representative of the book's problems, but it's also the least of them. Pagsy trumpets in the polemical-as-usual Introduction, “This book is an attempt to reach a general audience for whom art is not a daily presence.” Well, goody gum-drops, but in fact Glittering Images (really?!??) can't decide whether it wants to be Art History for Dummies or revisionist in the manner of SP. So we get a really dull tour of the obligatory (Laocoon, The Death of Marat, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), but major artists are often represented by lesser-known works, and some choices, like Donatello's Mary Magdalene, are downright strange – though the Christian denial of the flesh here is interesting if you've already read Paglia's scintillating commentary on the pagan beauty-worship of the same artist's David in SP. Never was there a starker representation of Christian spirituality=ugliness (denial of the flesh and world) and classical spirituality=beauty (physical beauty as divine) than in the juxtaposition of these two sculptures.

In making her selections for GI, no doubt Paglia went through a dilemma comparable to that of the critics who have to come up with 10 Greatest Movies lists for the Sight & Sound poll and can only produce a mish-mash of consensus masterpieces, personal favourites, and perverse selections that they hope to bring to wider attention. The book's lack of a unifying purpose or thesis could be forgiven if the individual essays were brilliant; unfortunately, they're barely diverting. The prose and thought of GI (the title's sugary-pop-song-like adjective-noun combination is picked up in the chapter titles: “Living Letters,” “Solitary Watcher,” “Satin Knights” – that pointless “Knights in White Satin” reference is worthy of an academic conference paper title – “Swirling Line,” “Melting Color,” and on and on) bring together the weaknesses of Paglia's later works, Break, Blow, Burn and The Birds, without their relative strengths. GI has the same gift-booky format as B, B, B: Paglia writes short appreciations/close readings of great poems/artworks with said poems or paintings reproduced for handy reader reference. But whereas in Break, Blow, Burn, she really did produce close readings, if nothing else, the chattier essays in GI often seem to talk about everything but the images. Is it possible that the image-worshiping Paglia is actually much better at reading literature than she is at reading visual artworks?

For some reason the essays in GI go after a shapeless, junk-pile accumulation of facts – bits of historical context, gossip, and tangential “fun facts” like the history of the yacht that the daughter of the guy in the painting is “cavorting aboard” in a photo taken by the same guy who took a photo of the guy dancing the tango, which it sort of looks like he's doing in the painting (I shit you not). This accretive style worked in The Birds, since Hollywood movie fandom can support a gossipy approach in which every detail is precious. Moreover, in that book, Paglia was still paying close attention to the details of the movie itself; in GI, in contrast, she seems bored to death by the artworks, which are accorded about half the essays' pages, or less. I agree with the blogger, a fellow Paglia fan, whose review I found on some scary right-wing website, who said that at times the essays remind him of Wikipedia, only I'd say they're like a Wikipedia entry crossed with the book review of a diligent high school student who's spent more time on the research than the writing.

Like her former mentor at Yale, Harold Bloom, and at exactly the same age (mid-60s, which for Bloom was in the mid-90s, the time of the publication of The Western Canon), Paglia seems to have completely forgotten that paragraphs are supposed to have topics. Sentence follows sentence without progress of either sense or cadence, and at times the prose is so lazy it reads like a bad translation. There's no excuse whatsoever for a construction like “tension is felt from the unnaturally compressed space.” What's wrong with “the unnaturally compressed space creates a feeling of tension”? Not good enough for her? (Incidentally, Sexual Personae is such an influence on my prose that I can't put two words in a row without thinking about Paglia. Thanks to her and that other thorn in my side, my other teenage idol, Morrissey, I bleed alliteration and assonance. My style of criticism also owes everything to SP, in case you hadn't noticed.)

Also like Bloom since the mid-90s, Paglia's decided she's too good for not only footnotes but even a bibliography, which is a shame because it makes Paglia's various historical and biographical tidbits seem about as trustworthy as Wikipedia (we may be in the age of too much information, but at least all of it's uncertain), and also because the bibliography of Sexual Personae was a treasure trove of the classics of 20^th century criticism, such as Kenneth Clark's stylish The Nude, Arnold Hauser's two-volume The Social History of Art (to date I've only flipped through it, though I've owned it for nearly 20 years), the tomes of Kenneth Burke (way too dense for me), and Leslie Fiedler's marvellous Love and Death in the American Novel, which has influenced my thinking about the novel and film almost as much as Sexual Personae influenced my thinking about life. It goes without saying that Glittering Images is not in the league of any of these works, and the reason is that Paglia has no story to tell – about the representation of the nude body in Western art or the secret triumph of romance over the realism in the novel. No thesis; no argument; no story. She told her story in SP; here she points and says, “Lookit – art is neat! And did you know that in the 1920s people liked to tango?”

Tangoing Art Deco Doctors and Soap Opera Brain Tumours

That section on the tango that I keep mocking is from what may be my favourite chapter, on Tamara de Lempicka's Portrait of Doctor Boucard, where Paglia makes a persuasive case for her personal candidate for The Only Female Artist Allowed to Exist, in place of feminist favourite Frida Kahlo, preferring Lempicka's “Garbo cheekbones” and “naked ambition” to Kahlo's “ailments, accidents, and surgeries.” It's clear that for Pagsy, Lempicka is the Madonna to Kahlo's Courtney Love, whom Pagsy's bashed in the past, even though unlike Mads, who thought Pags was a creepy stalker, Love read Sexual Personae and was influenced by it – and is much more of a companion to Paglia as a provocative 90s female celebrity.

The Lempicka chapter woke me up a little because for the first time in the book Paglia was making an original argument instead of throwing facts at the page to see what sticks. Or seemingly original, though it's clear that she was turned on to Lempicka by “Laura Claridge's riveting 1999 biography,” as she calls it. Portrait of Doctor Boucard, with its Art Deco melodrama and gaudiness, initially looks out of place among the consensus masterpieces, but as soon as Paglia mentions Mannerism and especially Bronzino it all makes sense.

The portrait is in the tradition of representations of scientists like Vermeer's Astronomer, but unlike that rapt, contemplative being, Lempicka's Boucard is an Adolphe Menjou society type who looks out of place in the lab and as though he barely has time to glance at his microscope. Paglia sees Boucard's twisty torso as a “forceful positioning” and compares it to the cavalryman in Gericault's Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge, but I see Beardsley's flighty creature of fashion, who shares not only the doctor's angular, distracted stance but also his enormous shoulder pads, which androgynizes Beardsley's woman as the fanciful flowing “lab coat” androgynizes the Boucard of Lempicka's portrait, even as it anticipates the iconic trenchcoat of Bogie's hardboiled detective.

Boucard is also a soap opera doctor, like George Brent in Dark Victory, who falls in love with his patient, Bette Davis, a wild, spoiled rich girl who discovers she's dying of a brain tumour. What does the image say about science – if anything? The doctor as hero as dashing figure of idealized masculinity (blending assertion and suave passivity) out of a Hollywood movie or magazine ad? And speaking of the accomplishments of Boucard's profession that brought new prestige to the medical profession in the 20^th century, the Lempicka chapter also contains the single most hilariously self-parodic, po-faced sentence in the book: “Boucard was a biochemist who had become a millionaire through his development and marketing of Lacteol, one of the first probiotics, which restored intestinal floral to patients with severe diarrhea.”

RESTORED IT, YOU GUYS.

George Lucas's Vulgar Aestheticism

Paglia starts off the book, in the intro, by talking about the disastrous state of the fine arts, and that theme is what gives it any shape it has, although it only comes into play towards the end. The way Paglia has told things, Jackson Pollock was the last artist to be widely perceived as a genius, an attitude of the public towards art that died with his premature death. The Pop artists who followed, by necessarily embracing popular culture, put an end to traditional fine art. In the postmodern art world, there are no central figures or styles; there is only pluralism. Although Paglia does her earnest best to make the general reader (me) understand Conceptual, Minimalist, and performance art, flooding the essays with the names of artists and descriptions of works, I came away thinking that postmodern art is a lot like postmodern science, i.e. quantum physics: the artists are all working out their highly cerebral and insular art problems in their art, whether they set it in the landscape or street or interact with the audience or not, and no non-artist cares about or can understand what they're doing.

All of which leads up to Paglia's “controversial” final-chapter nomination of George Lucas as the greatest artist of our time. Not just our greatest visual artist, mind you, but our greatest artist, period. And while this appears to be based on his entire Star Wars franchise, Paglia courts ridicule (to borrow her phrase about Lennon and Ono's Bed-In interviews) by illustrating the chapter with an admittedly extremely Paglian image of the volcano planet from Revenge of the Sith, a movie that nobody went to see except hardcore Star Wars geeks.

The basis of her nomination is, it appears, Lucas's “pioneering boldness and world impact,” this boldness a matter of embracing technology... like Ingrid Bergman and Bob Dylan. Yes, because using CGI in films is exactly like using an electric guitar in popular music, and Ingrid Bergman (whose Persona was one of the main inspirations for Paglia's concept of “sexual personae”) is a great filmmaker because... he made films, not because of his subject matter or style. Paglia spits out information about Lucas's technological accomplishments like nails, and what she has discovered about his detailed attention to what we now, in the Fandom Era, call “world-building” is indeed impressive: Lucas comes off as a genuine craftsman as well as computerized special-effects visionary. I say “visionary” because as of this moment, and for better of worse, CGI has taken over film, in the sense that the mass audience is only interested in CGI spectacles; but this too shall pass, like all pop crazes.

Paglia reports in the chapter that Lucas isn't interested in either dialogue or plot, and that may be exactly the problem with the Star Wars prequels. It's fine to be essentially an abstract filmmaker whose overwhelming focus is the visuals, but the mass audience, including myself as a child, originally fell in love with the characters of the franchise – charmingly acted, imaginatively updated archetypes. Film acting itself is more about what can be communicated without words, but that requires a director who is interested in working on, and capturing, performances. And there's no way to care about what happens to the characters in a film without plot. Although I haven't seen them due to the little bit I've read about them, based on that little bit it seems likely that Lucas's Star Wars prequels will go down in history as kitsch spectacles of frequent great beauty due to the enormous craftsmanship of the ILM team, that were however sunk as works of even popular filmmaking by the billionaire-genius's self-indulgence.

Moreover, what Paglia calls Lucas's “mission statement,” “Movies are a mass of objects moving across a large surface,” sounds like something Leni Riefenstahl might say. Our current epic CGI filmmakers are Riefenstahl's heirs, and there's as much to deplore philosophically as there is to admire technically. A certain kind of epic wants to get away from the human, and CGI helps in that process – a point made by J. Hoberman in a recent NYRB piece about Jackson's The Hobbit. And although I take Paglia's point about the cross-sections tie-in books' “contribution... to the visual education of children around the world,” when I was going to pick up one of the beautifully-illustrated children's guides for my eight-year-old nephew one Christmas, I put it back on the shelf after reflecting that after all, it's a glorification of war, with exceptionally detailed, realistic weaponry. I accept that children are interested in violence, but I can't put my own authority behind the idea that war is cool; on the contrary.

In the end Paglia convinces that fine art is in a bad state without convincing that pop culture is in a better one. If there are any artists with global impact at the moment, they probably are the CGI epic filmmakers; so if you want to equate global impact with aesthetic significance and vice versa, that's what you're left with. The “death of the artist” staged by Warhol, who tried to keep his own hand (literally and metaphorically) out of his work as much as possible, and continued by postmodern artists through other theories, together with the insular games and shock-value provocations of postmodern artists, have caused the public to lose faith in art and artists. That doesn't, however, mean that anyone other than Star Wars geeks has faith in George Lucas. And the idea of a “greatest artist of our time” was always a myth anyway, albeit one that has currency when art and the public have a healthy relationship with each other. I have no idea who the greatest artist of our era might be; if there is a single one, I have not heard of him or her. I would probably choose David Lynch as the greatest living filmmaker. INLAND EMPIRE is as abstract and plotless as anyone could wish, but it's also all about Laura Dern's performance (conveyed mainly through silent sequences or absurd, fragmented dialogue, though Lynch also does give her a pivotal, theatrical marathon speech), profoundly anchored in the human through the director-actress collaboration, exactly like Bergman's Persona, an exploration of identity that Lynch has been drawing on extensively in his most recent work.

I'll give Pags the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume she made her pronouncement about Lucas because it's more apt to generate interesting debate (about art, pop culture, and technology) than yet another critic saying what amounts to, “Oh, uh, great living filmmakers? Um, David Lynch, he's pretty good. Yeah, him.” Unfortunately, saying that George Lucas is the greatest artist of our time in 2012 is sort of like saying that Walt Disney is the greatest artist of our time in 1942. The only new thing Paglia has brought to the argument, which in itself isn't stupid (although for my own part I do not care), is this “great artists of the technological age embrace technology” crap, or, the “art cannot be good any longer unless it uses the latest technology” position, which is indicative of the actual thought that Paglia has put into the essays in Glittering Images: exactly none.

These Fragments I Have Shored 

Joseph Cornell is not among Paglia's artists, a perhaps surprising omission given his fan-worship of the female stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, which Paglia shares, and his frankly devotional, religious attitude towards them and to other female performers, of which Paglia would approve. Wouldn't it have done more good to acquaint newcomers to art history with a work like Cornell's Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall (1946) than to include Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962), which is as familiar to even those with no interest in art whatsoever as the Mona Lisa? But Paglia seems ignorant of Cornell, not even mentioning him in the context of Eleanor Antin or Walter De Maria's boxes, although Cornell was making box art decades earlier.

As detailed in Deborah Solomon's Utopia Parkway – the evocative title comes from the distinctly unromantic street in Queens where Cornell lived for decades with his widowed mother and disabled younger brother – the reclusive, celibate Cornell spent his spare time scavenging flea markets, dime stores, Woolsworths, and second-hand bookstalls for cheap mass-produced objects and images and texts for his extensive dossiers on 19^th century ballerinas and opera divas and glamourous Hollywood actresses, which he then brought into odd, graceful, mysterious juxtaposition in his collages and boxes. Besides female performers, other motifs of the boxes over the years included birds, sky charts, hotels, and Cornell, who did not draw or paint, also appropriated images from the paintings of the great masters.

Cornell shared Warhol's interest in machines, but whereas Warhol saw machines as impersonal, passive recording devices (hence his aspiration to be one), Cornell's machines are interactive and, like Duchamp's masturbatory chocolate grinding machine, productive of pleasure. At present, wed to our innumerable digital devices as we are, I think we see machines in terms more of homely Cornellian amusement than of futuristic Warholian anxiety.

Cornell also beat Warhol to making avant-garde movies, first editing forgotten, discarded films with results like the dreamy, hypnotic Rose Hobart (which incurred the wrath of Dali, who, to the dismay of the nervous and timid Cornell, swore that the American artist had stolen the idea of how to make a surrealist film out of his brain), then collaborating with underground filmmakers who shot footage under his direction. But Cornell's relationship to pop culture, unlike Warhol's, was essentially romantic: Warhol reproduces the experience of being assaulted by garish images of sex, violence, and product, a world in which Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Campbell's Soup (or Jennifer Aniston, Justin Bieber, and iPods) are our intimate familiars whether we like it or not; Cornell, in contrast, is interested not in the big, triumphant brands, but in the discards and detritus of pop culture. Cornell loves pop culture transfigured by the pathos of its own transience. The destiny of pop culture, for Cornell, is the opposite of the destiny of art: to not last, and therefore to inspire a Proustian yearning for the past. Part of his project as an artist is to recover the irrecoverable – like Proust, except that he has projected his personal memories onto impersonal objects and beautiful, glamourous movie stars, who, as the appellation suggests, are as distant as constellations. And this pathos touches Cornell as well, the ultimate collector-fan who lived only through pop culture. Cornell anticipated not only Pop Art but also our internet Age of Fandom and the nostalgic hipster appropriation of the mass culture of their youth.

Cornell, Hipsters, and Twee Aesthetics

Cornell, however, is entirely without self-protective hipster irony; he belongs to the line of pop-loving major American artists with a broad strain of childlike naivety, which includes Warhol and David Lynch. Notably, all three were religious, though none of them Protestants: Warhol was raised Catholic, while Cornell found Christian Science as an adult and Lynch Transcendental Meditation. Lynch's twisted version of American pop culture is his surrealist reimagining of the “innocent” 1950s and early 60s of his youth: like Cornell, he's a fan of “teeners” (Cornell's Lynchian word for “teenagers”). Also like Cornell, he's fascinated by performers (usually but not always female) and performances, and is as much of an obsessive connoisseur of diner pie and coffee or a chocolate milkshake at Big Bob's as Cornell was of Automat pie, soda pop, and luncheon rooms where he watched the drab young waitresses with empathy, desire, and perhaps a wistful sex-crossing identification. (In her chapter on Manet's At the Cafe, Paglia suggests that the artist may empathize with the careworn, dreamy working girl staring into space on the left bottom of the painting.) Unlike Warhol and Lynch, however, Cornell never succeeded in making his own curious personality into a brand, possibly because by the time of the full ascendency of the mass media in the 1960s he was already a Beckettian depressed old man.

I see a continuity between Cornell's sensibility and the anti-ironic “twee” strain of hipsterism that's perhaps been most successful in indie music, where it's epitomized by bands like Animal Collective and of Montreal, the latter of which essentially is the elfin Kevin Barnes, whose pop sensibilities are matched only by the aggressive manic-depression related in his autobiographical lyrics and his Kate Bush-like natural affinity for the theatrical and avant-garde. The nature themes of Animal Collective, which seem like they're on the border between environmentalism and the nerd orientation, made notorious by the internet, “furry,” also rhyme with Cornell's concerns. Cornell stuck to birds – like fellow mother-dominated, candy-munching, reclusive object-maker Norman Bates – but his younger brother Robert, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy, and for whom Cornell felt a twinlike closeness, made drawings of an imaginary world of animal characters that sounds like the children's books envisioned by Jerry Lewis's unbearably twee, infantile, comics-addicted character in Artists and Models (1955), Frank Tashlin's pre-Pop satire of pop-crazed America in the form of one of its most characteristic products, a Martin and Lewis vehicle.

In Artists and Models, Martin and Lewis play bachelor best buddies, an aspiring artist and aspiring writer, who are practically wed to each other and who have an older-younger brother relationship of caretaking and dependency similar to Joseph and Robert's. It's as if the eccentric, unworldly Cornell brothers occupied the same twee fantasy world, of which Robert's was the even more regressive version. After losing his brother Cornell made collages of some of his drawings, which Solomon, in common with the rest of the art world, dismisses as possessing value for Cornell only. The hero of Robert's animal universe was The Mouse King, and in Artists and Models Lewis poses for Dorothy Malone's successful commercial artist as his own mouse character and spends most of the film's climax in a cumbersome, huge-bellied mouse costume, female-identified through his comical “pregnancy” like the archetypal clown. (And that, folks – the symbolic femininity of clowns – I learned from Sexual Personae.) Cornell-like, Lewis's character is stuck in a perpetual adolescence due to his sexual fixation on a fantasy-woman from his comics, the Bat Lady, which leaves him unable to respond to real women.

Solomon, whose psychology is very basic, views Cornell as a tragic figure of thwarted sexuality and independence, and there's little doubt that his was a Jamesian unlived life, though it's hard to say which caused which, his fear of direct experience or his unusually vivid fantasy life. Whichever it was, I find it hard to share Solomon's head-shaking view, even though it's clear that Cornell's depressive tendencies killed him relatively young, a fate he shared with a twee artist of an earlier era, the manic-depressive, nature-loving late Victorian religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was a celibate like Cornell but unlike Cornell was probably homosexual in orientation. In his early 60s Cornell suffered several losses: his brother died, then his mother, as well as the drug-addicted young waitress who may have been the great love of his life, although they never had a relationship. In a movie melodrama-like conflation of Of Human Bondage and Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, the young woman, together with her boyfriend, robbed the naive older artist of several of his boxes. Far more selfless, or masochistic, than either Leslie Howard or Edward G. Robinson, Cornell reluctantly pressed charges only to turn around and post her bail, and she repented and left the boyfriend only to end up murdered by a mentally ill acquaintance. Bereft of the two family members, brother-twin and mother, with whom he'd merged his identity and shared a home for his entire life, and the fallen woman he'd hoped to rescue in an imaginary Victorian scenario, Cornell shriveled up emotionally and lost his will to live.

Cornell practised what Paglia would call the masochistic feminine art of self-affliction; like the young Morrissey, whose private Catholic iconography of British northern women and androgynous male movie actors was displayed on The Smiths' album and single sleeves, Cornell made himself into a female Victorian invalid, like Henry James's sister Alice. Cornell's difference from constitutionally similar artists like Morrissey, James, Kevin Barnes, or Emily Dickinson, with whom he identified, is that at no point – as far as I can tell at this preliminary stage of familiarity with his work – did he release his aggression, either in his work or in his life. Instead he seems to have renounced it completely – the impossible, for a Paglian like me, even if that renunciation did help to kill him. Cornell seems to have channeled deviant, serial killer-like impulses of obsessive collecting and compulsive arrangement of his materials into an effervescent creativity from which all traces of the impulses' violence have been erased. This is in stark contrast to David Lynch, whose startling habit of examining animal carcasses out of curiosity is in keeping with the obscene violence in his work, which is locked in Manichean battle with his eccentric vision of innocence. As in Henry James, the price in Lynch of imagining innocence is imagining its violation.

To bring us back full circle: Cornell's last major celebrity crush/Muse was Susan Sontag, perhaps because she was the first pop-age female intellectual, posing languidly in publicity photos, radiating celebrity glamour. Since Cornell, as Solomon points out, preferred female celebrities with a touch of androgyny to them, creating Garbo and Bacall “portrait” boxes and turning Hedy Lamarr into a Renaissance pageboy in a collage, it's no wonder that he was so thrilled by Sontag, with her combination of “feminine” flirtatiousness and sensuality, on the one hand, and “masculine” severity and intellect, on the other. Sontag was an icon of that brief, brilliant period when a wide public remained interested in a high culture that was being invigorated by popular culture and that was, itself, part of popular culture, before high culture became so interested in pop culture that it lost interest in itself.

Coda: My Growing List of Men Who Look Like Samuel Beckett or Each Other

April in Review: Cinephiles vs. Movie Geeks, Nostalgia for the Filthy 1950s, and Posthumous Bolano

I only have time for a post per month now, in this white elephant of a blog. In this month's post, detailing what my brain has been up to in April, The Beatles are now as old as Mozart; Doris Day sings about stalkers; and Roberto Bolano makes me hallucinate.

Aesthetic Prejudice

The other day I came across this children's reference book, published by Doris Kindersley, on Great Musicians, which pictures The Beatles on the cover, along with smaller illustrations of Mozart (that's the little guy in the periwig, right?) and Billie Holiday. It occurred to me that this was the best answer to the high-low conundrum posed in my last post. With time it doesn't particularly matter in what sense an artist is considered “great,” or whether that sense is decided at the time or at any point afterwards. Less than 50 years after their advent, The Beatles are now “classics”; they have been canonized; as part of their education, children must be taught about the contributions of the great rock musicians and of jazz musicians as well as classical musicians to culture. To children who would not have heard of any except through their education they must all look the same: 50 years ago or 250 years ago, it's all old.

I'm not saying The Beatles don't belong there, either; I'm simply curious about the process by which pop culture gets incorporated into the cultural canon, since it's not by a rationally-formulated critical consensus based on a systematic, comprehensive aesthetic theory. For example, I've noticed on the internet that movie fans frequently come in two flavours these days: “movie geeks,” who are interested in contemporary movies (going back to, say, the 90s); and “cinephiles” (or movie snobs), who are interested in “the classics” (or, Hollywood and European cinema up to the mid-60s) and Modernist and avant-garde cinema up to the present, and tend to scorn geek favourites. It would be easy to argue that movie fans who are interested in classical Hollywood cinema are not interested in contemporary movies because the two have almost nothing in common: classical Hollywood movies were based on popular (and often dreadful) novels and plays and influenced by theatre; contemporary Hollywood blockbusters are based on comic books or YA series and influenced by video games. But then, classical Hollywood movies have nothing in common with Modernist and avant-garde movies, either, and “cinephiles” (myself, for example) tend to be open towards both, whereas they are less open towards contemporary blockbusters (although this, like everything, is generational, and probably changing). So why do the snobs appreciate both but scorn comic book adaptations? (For my part, despite being a superhero comics fan as a child – yeah, I know, that's no geek cred at all – I disliked The Dark Knight because it was heavy, ponderous, hard to follow, no fun – not even the Heath Ledger parts – and had none of the basic, dramatically powerful psychological interest that the superhero genre – including such extensions of it as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and some manga – shares with Greek tragedy. From the favourable reviews I glean that The Dark Knight was a “morality play,” but I can't be that bothered about superhero moral dilemmas, so if the introduction of weighty moral questions into comic books is considered an advance in the form, I apparently prefer it in its immaturity.)

One huge difference between the play-or-book-based movie and the comic-based movie or the movie based on a YA or sci-fi or fantasy print franchise is that it is often assumed by cinephiles that the movies, by some mysterious alchemy that no one has ever systematically formulated, aesthetically elevated trashy novels and plays: although themselves (arguably) a kind of trash, classical Hollywood movies transformed the detritus of the traditional literary arts into a kind of art (“American art,” like rock and roll, although the British quickly appropriated the latter as they never managed to do with the former). Whereas now the source medium has overtaken the adapting medium; the former comes with devoted fans who are disturbed if the movie is unfaithful to the source (or who sometimes view both movies and books as “products” of the franchise to be separately considered and possibly enjoyed on their own merits). David O. Selznick anticipated the future of moviemaking when he adapted the pop classic Gone With the Wind into an epic blockbuster, realizing that he had to please the novel's rabid fan base. What I wonder about are movies like The Notebook. If many film critics are willing to consider the Bette Davis soap Now, Voyager, based on the bestselling novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, a “great woman's picture,” why isn't the same respect extended to contemporary woman's pictures based on bestsellers? Really, I'm asking the question of myself. I love the woman's pictures of the 1930s and 40s starring Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck, but I wouldn't even consider watching a contemporary movie in the same genre. Maybe I should put my irrational prejudices to the test by comparing The Notebook (which I've never seen) to a couple of well-received “postmodern” woman's pictures that I disliked, Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven and Stephen Daldry's The Hours. But I'll probably just rewatch Now, Voyager instead.

Like A Good Girl Should

My YouTube find for this month is this Doris Day song, “A Guy Is a Guy,” which conjures a creepy stalker scenario in a manner reminiscent of Morrissey's unsurpassed masterpiece of lyrical economy, “Suedehead." According to the fascinating, and also blessedly brief, Wikipedia entry, the 1952 song, written by Oscar Brand, was a cleaned-up version of a bawdy song, “A Gob Is a Slob,” sung by WWII soldiers, which was in turn based on an early 18^th century British song, “I Went to the Alehouse (A Knave Is a Knave)." I don't know about you, but I don't want to know anything more than this about any of the songs; as with the Day and Morrissey songs, I prefer to let my imagination run wild based on the few provided evocative tidbits.

Brand's version ends respectably with marriage, which made it appropriate for Day's squeaky-clean image. But then, as with other great American pop icons of the 1950s and early 60s, Day's image is a lot more complicated than the way it was officially presented and is now recalled – incorporating the shadings found in this song, for example. Pillow Talk (1959), with Rock Hudson, is the tragedy of Clarissa and Lovelace reimagined as a sex farce that's all the smuttier for its surface cleanness, showering the viewer with double entendres and treating them to scenes like the one where Hudson and Day, in split screen, talk in their respective bathtubs with their naked feet seemingly pressed together (and tubs seemingly joined). The prurient battle-of-the-sexes question, unchanged in the over two centuries between Clarissa and Pillow Talk despite the new female independence, is whether Day, the single career woman guarding her virtue, will be tricked by Hudson into giving it up, or whether she will domesticate him into marriage. The audience, naturally, roots for both while fearing for Day even as we now that she will, by the code of the time and rules of the genre, win in the end.

One of the strangest pop culture artifacts of the 50s I've ever come across is this Colgate Comedy Hour performance by Jerry Lewis of a song called “Never Been Kissed,” which also slyly undermines his squeaky-clean image (which the song appears to celebrate) with a bawdy, and possibly queer, subtext. In the performance, Lewis trades on his juvenile/asexual/queer image (a “queerness” that wouldn't necessarily have been associated by the majority of the audience with then beyond-the-pale homosexuality) by selecting elderly men as his backup singers and giving them the names of elderly women. Then, as he gives his trademark deconstruction of performance through lip sync, he uses them for a running gag of turning to them indignantly whenever the comic sound introduces the chorus and he thrusts his hips forward (anticipating, before The King had even appeared on Ed Sullivan, Morrissey's queerification of Elvis's dangerous pelvis in his Top of the Pops “Shoplifters of the World Unite” performance), as though suspicious of their designs on his rear end. (Anality is a key feature of some of Lewis's best comedic deconstructions of class and gender, as in the spike over the college's sign that spears the telephone repairman, the ultimate victim of the electric nervousness beneath the Lynchian placidity of all-American Milltown, in the opening sequence of The Ladies Man,, and the outrageous bit of business in The Disorderly Orderly, directed by Frank Tashlin, in which Lewis as the clinically hysterical, menial orderly of the title plugs a vacuum into his ass to perform his hospital chores.)

The narrative of the song itself involves a racy woman who pretends to be virginal; Lewis's gender-crossing identification with her is evident not only in the way the song fits his official persona but in the brief flirtation with cross-dressing when he dons a wedding veil to narrate her wedding. In the curious denouement, the fallen woman who's found a way around the double standard gets her just deserts when it turns out that she's “married a man who has never been kissed” – in other words, a man like this one?

The American 1950s, as the last moment when innocence was valued in pop culture icons, is a rich and strange era for the student of pop culture to examine. As pop culture has become more permissive, it has also become, paradoxically, cleaner, since restrictions on permissible sexual content (and, ostensibly, on permissible sexual behaviour) no longer tempt performers and writers to subversion, with the result that, overall, there's less convention-flouting content in mainstream pop culture. When Beyonce tells her ex that if he didn't want her to go out and flirt with new guys he “shoulda put a ring on it,” she's relating a narrative that many women of her generation can, apparently, relate to, but there's are no additional layer of meaning, no examination or satire of sexual mores or gender roles. Somehow we're sexually freer than ever, yet at the same time more conventional than ever.

Roberto Bolano, Ghost Author

Reading Roberto Bolano's posthumously published novels since 2666 sometimes inspires in me the fantasy that these are in fact the works of ghost writers who are playing around in the vast, vague field of “the Bolanoesque,” as V. C. Andrews's ghost writer has continued to churn out novels employing the themes she established in the two series and one stand-alone novel she wrote or started before her death. What do Andrews, the trashy Gothic novelist, and Roberto Bolano, the darling of the literary avant garde, possibly have in common? Well, they both became famous as authors late in life, Andrews at the age of 56, with the publication of Flowers in the Attic in 1979, and then died young, Andrews at 65. (Bolano, as I understand it, became famous in the Spanish-speaking world with the publication of The Savage Detectives in 1998, when he was 45; he died at the age of 50.) They were also both obsessives in their fiction, Andrews's circling around themes of incest, rape, family romance, and a traumatic female coming-of-age, Bolano's around themes of rape, fascism, and the idea of art. Andrews's ghost writer, Andrew Neiderman, can perform variations on her themes but can't capture the claustrophobia of her fiction – of her Gothic imagination. (As a female Southern writer whose experience outside her family and imagination was severely curtailed by incapacitating illness, she reminds me of Flannery O'Connor – in her different literary mode.)

My fantasy is no doubt encouraged by the fact that Bolano has two English translators, Natasha Wimmer and Chris Andrews, which exacerbates the wide stylistic differences in these posthumous works. The first two I've read are The Third Reich, translated by Wimmer and apparently written in 1989, and Monsieur Pain, translated by Andrews and apparently written in 1981 or 1982. The first is an exercise in seeing how little event a novel can sustain, the second an invention-packed surrealist riff on the death of a poet by hiccups in Paris (and half the length of the first). It should come as no surprise that I preferred Monsieur Pain.

In a review of Monsieur Pain in The Guardian, Ursula Le Guin (a literary connection that heightens Bolano's genre-bending incorporation of sci-fi and fantasy elements into I guess what we have to call his avant-garde fictions) objects to the “surrealistic devices” of the novella, calling them “overly cinematic.” Her phrasing made me wonder how a novel can be overly cinematic, while her observation made me further reflect on why I – in common with many reviewers – want to call Bolano's writing cinematic at all. In his Guardian review of The Third Reich, Giles Harvey notes of the far-spaced and abortive “events” of the novel, “As in a film by Antonioni, what we are left with – what we are forced to get by on – is atmosphere,” and, I think, correctly pinpoints why the novel is unsuccessful: the menace that Bolano seemingly intends by the events is not communicated to the reader. We know that the author feels they're portentous, but the atmosphere isn't there on the page.

I also thought of Antonioni while reading The Third Reich, as well as - another “atmospheric” Modernist filmmaker, Roman Polanski – particularly his early work about relationship angst between eccentric couples, Cul-de-sac. But Antonioni and Polanski are still interested in meaning, whereas in The Third Reich, Bolano seems to be on a quest to erase any trace of meaning as he writes. Bolano's Nazi obsession shows up in the titular war game that the protagonist, Udo Berger, plays with the scarred burn-victim pedal-boat purveyor with whom Udo has become inexplicably obsessed, but the reader never learns what, if anything, is at stake (actually or symbolically) in their game, and the anti-climactic climax, centred on the pedal-boat structure that also has a great and mysterious meaning for Udo (but not the reader), is equally baffling. Maybe Bolano is going after something like Jane Bowles's achievement in “Camp Cataract,” which is also full of symbols that only have meaning to the eccentric protagonist, but whereas Bowles's story builds up to a crisis for her isolated, neurotic protagonist, Bolano's tendency in The Third Reich is to defuse the crises that seem to loom around every corner. It almost seems like the classic writer's error of not being able to bear anything too awful happening to one's characters – combined with a sensibility that supposes that horrors are everywhere, lurking in the most mundane details.

While reading Monsieur Pain I thought of Polanski, again (The Tenant, this time, though only briefly, related to one episode where Pain interacts with the woman next door in his apartment), and of avant-garde cinema generally, especially Lynch. In what I guess can be taken as the novella's climactic scene, there's an episode where Pain encounters an apparition in the labyrinthine corridors of a hospital at night that so strikingly parallels Laura Dern's corridor wanderings towards the end of INLAND EMPIRE and her encounter with a figure there that it contributed to my hallucination that I was reading the work of a ghost writer (writing after INLAND EMPIRE, that is) who was checking off the list of references that make up “the Bolanoesque”: David Lynch, check. And earlier in the novel Pain reads Bolano's oft-mentioned favourite book, Schwob's Imaginary Lives, which also seemed suspiciously on-the-nose. As far as being “overly cinematic” goes, again with shades of INLAND EMPIRE, at one point Pain goes to see a movie that seems to anticipate Rivette's avant-garde deconstructions of melodrama in the 1970s, although the novella is set in the 1930s (and the name “Rivette” occurs separately in the novel); Bolano blends the dream-like, absurdist narrative with his description of the dream-like, absurdist film.

What makes Bolano's writing “cinematic”? All I can come up with for an answer is that his imagination draws on tropes that have been explored by avant-garde and horror films (or both) rather than prose fiction. At least in his minor novels, he seems to be more influenced by film than by other writers, despite having a greater passion for reading than any other contemporary novelist I'm aware of. As for his major novels, 2666 made me think of Lynch, although I couldn't pin it down to more than a “shared sensibility,” and The Savage Detectives employs the documentary form for its middle section. Does this influence mean that Bolano's writing is “overly cinematic”? That – all I can make of Le Guin's comment – he isn't taking advantage of the elements specific to the novel? Le Guin seems to think that narrative or “story” is an essential component of the novel, but Bolano's quarrel with conventional narrative can't be the reason his work is cinematic, since many would make the same claim about film. Unless, again, what she's thinking of is that film has been more open to experiments with narrative than the novel (although, since I know very little about the experimental novel, I don't know whether that's true). And that is presumably because film – like poetry but unlike the traditional novel – can be a (non-narrative) series of images. Since these images are directly visual (not visual images rendered in language, like the images of poetry), many have been tempted into making pronouncements about the relationship between movies and dreams, which seems to make film an ideal medium for surrealist experiment. However, although one may prefer a conventional narrative or a story that plays with narrative (or either, as long as they're done well), there's no inherent reason why a novel, which is to say, a long work of prose fiction, has to have a conventional narrative. Story can be a process of making meaning; or a long work of prose fiction can do something else entirely while defeating our desire for story to make meaning. There is no guarantee that the frustration of the reader's desire for meaning will result in something profound; but then there's no guarantee that the fulfilment of the reader's desire for meaning will, either.

For more on the extremely interesting political background to Monsieur Pain, which I was unaware of while reading it, and which earns Le Guin's grudging respect, see the Quarterly Conversation review by Stephen Henighan, “Fascism, Art, and Mediocrity.” I am, however, taken aback by Henighan's confident assertions about what Bolano has to say about “mediocrities.” I would be hesitant to confidently assert what Bolano feels about anything, certainly based on his fiction; perhaps Henighan is eager to demonstrate to those who feel the way Le Guin does about experimental fiction that Bolano can be interpreted – and easily. But I have no idea where Henighan is coming from when he writes, “Art dies two deaths here: in the form of Vallejo, who is killed (perhaps) by fascism, and in the more painful – literally – death that is suffered by Pain, who fritters away his creativity and enthusiasm in a life of increasing irrelevance.” As though there is some kind of lesson to be learned from the novel, or Pain's (hallucinatory) experience; in fact, Henighan actually speaks of a “lesson” in the last line of the review.

I think all of this is sheer projection on the part of the reviewer, although it goes to show that deliberate, elaborate ambiguity does not necessarily stop readers from feeling that the meaning and interpretation of a story are secure. I think that Bolano is interested in his mesmerists, as he's interested in his Nazi writers of the Americas and war game fan culture, because he's fascinated by fringe figures, interests, and practises. Bolano's eccentric fringe figures aren't failed artists – or, for that matter, for the most part successful ones – but figures for the artist, at once mundane and fantastic, possessed by their obscure obsessions. However, Bolano doesn't do much with Pain's interest in mesmerism; like the Polish curse in INLAND EMPIRE, it's simply there as part of the atmosphere of irrationality and horror. Whatever its political backdrop, the novella itself is a series of set-pieces of surrealistic horror, and Bolano's attempt to bring together the backdrop and Pain's bizarre adventures in his encounter with a Harry Lime-like figure seems halfhearted indeed. Le Guin is far too generous: this really is all a bunch of nonsense, and compared to his best works, which are virtually indescribable in their originality, it comes off as derivative, almost like an homage to capital-S Surrealism. Apparently the hiccups and the intervention of the mesmerist are factual (there was a real Monsieur Pain), which shows the sort of real-life surrealisms – the absurdities and mudanities – that tickled Bolano's imagination in connection with the atrocities of history and the lives and deaths of great poets.