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. 

No Intellectual Left Behind: Pauline Kael, Pop, The End of Literature, and the Rise of Fandom

On a whim I picked up the recent Library of America publication The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (edited by Sanford Schwartz), deciding it was finally time to fill a major gap in my film education. Don't get me wrong: I still have no interest in the vast majority of the 70s and 80s American films that were Kael's main reviewing fare, including the few I've seen, which is why I'm largely unfamiliar with Kael's writings although I of course knew who she was from the time I was a budding cinephile in my early teens. It's Kael's writing itself that's the gap.

And she didn't disappoint. In my first week with the book I read 25 of the 97 pieces included by editor Sanford Schwartz, and portions of as many more. My first impression was of Kael's extraordinary, and extraordinarily readable, invective, which lives up to the legend and then some. Her long essay on Cary Grant, for example, although not an attack, devotes more space and energy to criticizing Grant's failings as an actor (and even his appearance in some movies) than it does to celebrating his strengths. Kael takes us through Grant's fascinating pre-fame years as a music hall performer up to his flourishing on the screen in the screwball comedies of the 30s and then, instead of describing or analyzing Grant's performances in these films, detours into a (wonderful) two-page digression on the genre. Grant's Hitchcock roles are merely mentioned in passing, whereas we do get to hear about the ways he was “awful” in a number of films I've never heard of for a reason, and Kael's long consideration of his only serious acting role, in None But the Lonely Heart, finds more good things to say about Ethel Barrymore than about Grant. Despite the celebration of what we'd later learn, from Camille Paglia, to call Grant's “sexual persona” that ends the piece, I came away from it wondering if I'd ever be able to admire a performance by Grant again.

It's not just Kael's invective (combined with dazzling intelligence) that makes her so readable. Plenty of film critics like to rant when they hate a movie. But Kael, as Andrew Sarris put it in his understandable butthurt fanboy response to Kael's notorious essay on Citizen Kane, “Raising Kane,” takes a movie apart. Her negative reviews reveal the closest possible attention to what she thinks is not working in the movie, a degree of attention that critics normally reserve for movies they like. It's not exactly that she makes a convincing argument that a movie (say, Raging Bull or Blow-Up) is bad; her reactions are subjective, and she gives them point by point, without building a case. What's fascinating in her negative reviews is, perhaps, just that one rarely gets to see such a detailed analysis of how an artwork has failed, whether or not one agrees with Kael's assessment of a particular film. The analysis of what has gone wrong in a work is a lesson in aesthetics all its own, and it seems to have been Kael's peculiar gift as a critic. And it is a peculiar one. Woman or no woman, feminism or no feminism, as a writer Kael is undeniably aggressive, and sadism seems to energize her, as it did her contemporary, fellow Jewish-American critic Leslie Fiedler, and her spiritual heir, Camille Paglia (all three fascinated by sex and violence and all three admirers of Freud). (This is only one Kael, though: as the movies get worse in the 80s, Kael turns to pure gush, at least in the selections here, and it's much less readable. In the CityLights interview that's the only full interview with her I've found on YouTube Kael complains about Katharine Hepburn going soft in On Golden Pond, but that seems to be exactly what she did – although one of the movies she praises is Blue Velvet.)

In a New York Review of Books article on her self-curated book of selected writings, For Keeps, Louis Menard tried to address what he calls the “highlow problem” central to Kael's importance as a critic. Menard, writing in 1995, gives the example of a professor performing a semiotic analysis on a Superman comic, and then says: “The professor may go on to compare Superman comics favourably with Homer, but that is simply a failure of judgment. It has nothing to do with the difference in brows. You can make a fool of yourself over anything.”

This seems like a caricature: how many professors have ever compared Superman comics favourably with Homer? The central fact about semiotic analysis is that it ignores aesthetics. It was the perfect way to get popular culture into academia: based on its sociological rather than its aesthetic interest. Soon English departments would be following the Cultural and Media Studies model. The literary canon had already been attacked as politically incorrect, aesthetics a bunch of smoke and mirrors that served the vested interests of the dominant culture. Once the canon had been put on trial for the harm it had done women, colonial subjects, and minorities, it was difficult to justify why the standard works of Anglo-American literary studies should still be taught. The Cultural Studies approach took care of that: high culture, like pop culture, was significant for sociological reasons. Really, though, the canon is just a relic of the old way of doing literary studies: for the purposes of semiotic analysis, one text is as good as another. Courses in genre and popular fiction have already been introduced, and the logic of Cultural Studies dovetails beautifully with the new corporate-capitalist model for universities, in which students are simply consumers. Mostly they're going to pay to take courses in the sciences that may lead to careers, but a few might pay to study the things they love: pop culture and new media. To, basically, get an education by being entertained. Which isn't necessarily far removed from the attitude of the first students to take literary studies. I remember reading somewhere, probably on the internet, that when the novel was first introduced as a subject of university study, the old guard was appalled, since the novel had been considered a form of entertainment.

In “Notes on Heart and Mind” (1971), Kael was writing at the Pop moment that would lead to the present situation, against the Pop movement. She saw that intellectuals and even the “schoolteachers” whose idea of culture she'd rebelled against in her own youth with the help of the movies were buying into the notion, the creation of youth and marketers who were each following the other's lead, that Pop was art, and that the result was the destruction of literary culture: the loss of a sense of shame for not reading, for only loving Pop. Nowadays we might long for a time when intellectuals and college students still approached the “highlow problem” in aesthetic terms. I have long thought – from the time I was reading Paglia in the early 90s, when I was still in my teens – that the real reason liberal arts education abandoned aesthetics had nothing to do with political correctness: it happened because there was no way to do what Paglia suggested and take pop culture seriously while retaining aesthetic distinctions. There is simply no aesthetic theory that will cover both the high and the low, both the traditional arts and new media. To try to determine the aesthetic status of each new genre and medium, and each new member of it, except relative to other members, is a hopeless project, exhausting even to think about. And so academics, wisely, gave up and stopped talking about aesthetics.

But to stop talking about aesthetics is obviously unsatisfactory. On the one hand, it leads to the conclusion that we might just as well study Harry Potter as Shakespeare, comic books as Homer, movies or video games as literature. And as Kael insists in “Notes on Heart and Mind,” pop culture is not an adequate substitute for literary culture. “What must it be like for those who know and love only movies, and not literature as well?” she asks. “Even if they don't consciously miss it, surely the loss of the imaginative ranging over experience is irreparable.” It's a question I often asked myself while I was giving myself an education in film in my early 20s and grappling with the question of the relative merits of movies and books. The cinephiles I knew were extremely well-read, which is perhaps what prompted me to do the thought experiment. It seemed to me that while reading enhanced my experience of movies by deepening my understanding of human nature, the reverse wasn't necessarily true: watching movies didn't make me a better reader. Kael elaborates, “Movies are good at action; they're not good at reflective thought or conceptual thinking.... Movies don't help you to develop independence of mind. They don't give you much to mull over, and they don't give you the data you need to consider the issues they raise.”

On the other hand, semiotics is an inadequate substitute for aesthetics because it ignores the dimension of pleasure. Fan culture arose on the internet to fill that gap. It reintroduced the idea of pleasure in media while neatly sidestepping the question of aesthetic value. To call yourself a fan of a type of media, a genre, or a particular show, game, movie, or book, is to say something about the value of the work to you and nothing about its objective value. I think this is also why the term “cinephile” has gained such currency in recent years, as a way to describe people who may or may not be film critics, theorists, historians, or academics, but who, in any case, take a passionate interest in the medium. Kael was a pioneering media fan: passionately devoted to movies as a whole, not just a few good ones, with a passion exceeding her assessment of their aesthetic value. In contrast, Andrew Sarris, Kael's opposite number and frequent nemesis among great movie critics of the era of great movie criticism, used what he called “auteur theory” to take the line that the best movies of classical Hollywood cinema were artworks, electing a small handful of American directors and directors who'd worked in America to his “pantheon.”

It was Kael the populist, not Sarris the aesthete, who was the snob: who took a hard line on the distinction between high and pop culture, and saw the false elevation of pop culture to the status of art as striking a blow against aesthetic standards and literary culture. Perhaps she intuited that favouring a pantheon would mean throwing out a whole lot of junk, and therefore a whole lot of pleasure. Certainly the reasons for her defence of the “trash” element in American movies, outlined in “Trash, Art, and the Movies” (1969), were personal and complex. But the personal is the sociological. The young Kael had used movies to rebel against “schoolteacher,” which is to say middlebrow, culture; the grown-up Kael, the famous movie critic in her 40s and 50s, was still rebelling against those schoolteachers, Huck Finn style. In this she resembled other intellectuals of her era who were interested in popular culture, like the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, two years Kael's senior, whose notorious Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) appeared five years before Kael's first book, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), which put her on the map. For Fiedler, trash culture (i.e., mass culture) had more in common with high culture than middlebrow culture did, and it was middlebrow culture that was the true enemy of art. For Robert Warshow, too (the same age as Fiedler; his collected writings appeared posthumously as The Immediate Experience in 1962), trash culture could sometimes express inchoate feelings of popular dissatisfaction that were covered up by the upbeat official culture. All of these intellectuals saw in the trash of mass culture (particularly, perhaps, combined with the still-radical ideas of Freud) an alternative to the stifling, deadening view of art and culture current in official culture, as Manny Farber also did in his famous essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962). Of course this romanticization of mass culture as trash was in some ways as dangerous as its romanticization as art. It meant taking a condescending attitude towards both mass culture and the people assumed to be its audience, and one had the suspicion (Kael all but confirms it) that these intellectuals were using mass culture for the purpose of personal psychosexual liberation. (Then again, why is that not a legitimate use of it?)

Fiedler's infatuation with mass culture was such that in other books (I think it was in What was literature?: Class Culture and Mass Society) he argued that the idea of the “art novel,” as promulgated by Flaubert and adopted by the Modernists, had always been wrongheaded; that the novel was a form of mass culture entertainment, and as such it had been superseded by the movies and newer forms of pop culture. Unfortunately, the critic who takes an interest in mass culture as such inevitably becomes a sociologist: the kind of criticism Fiedler wanted, focused on where mainstream culture is at now, is the kind being practised in Cultural and Media Studies departments, and increasingly in English departments. And when the change occurred, mass culture lost its power as a radical alternative to a false idea of high culture. Now, it was the only culture.

I have sometimes been as hard on reading on this blog as Kael (in her prime) was on her beloved movies. One once thought that the story of the novel's journey from the disreputable upstart form it still was when Austen wrote Northanger Abbey to its current cultural enshrinement was a simple one of the overcoming of snobbery and conservatism, and that movies and other new media would follow the same course. But, in the first place, the piety surrounding reading makes me ill; makes me almost forget that once, as a child, I instinctively considered the intelligence of the reader to be the only worthwhile kind of intelligence – scorning math and science even though I could tell they were more highly valued by my teachers. I blame the drive for universal education for our pious attitude towards reading: children had to be taught literacy so they could get into college so they could get good jobs (back when that worked), and so it was decided that they'd have to be taught to love reading, and that the best way to do that was to encourage them to read fiction. And the more media technologies arose to offer competing forms of entertainment that required no mental exertion at all, the more persuaded we became that for children, or even adults, to read anything was a victory. Meanwhile the distrust of entertainment that had plagued the novel was projected onto electronic media instead. Compared to electronic media, novels had to be good, because they promoted literacy. But there is no virtue whatsoever in the simple fact of reading once you're past the age of, say, twelve, particularly if you're reading fiction. Reading is simply one of many forms of pleasure, no better and no worse than watching movies or watching TV or playing video games. You can congratulate yourself if you're reading something of any degree of literary merit, but not otherwise.

But Kael was right, of course: pop culture is not a substitute for literary culture. As Kael feared it would, and as Paglia, in the 90s, crowed it did, pop culture won: it had youth behind it, and the intellectuals, fearing they'd be left behind, and the marketers. Paglia, too, thought we needed Apollo as well as Dionysus, but she still believed the Humanities could be reformed; she didn't anticipate that the final blow to English departments would be not imported French theory but homegrown corporate capitalism. Bright young people are, I think, drawn to Cultural and Media Studies because it means they can bring together the two sides of themselves: the literary-intellectual side that loves thinking about ideas, characters, structure, conventions, and meaning, and the media fan side. They get to apply their intelligence to the things they most passionately love – exactly as Kael was doing in her criticism. One of the best pieces of criticism I've seen online was an analysis of the player character in a video game. It didn't make me want to play video games, but it was a fascinating read. The division within the individual between the intellectual and the fan within the individual may be part of the modern condition. It's there in Northanger Abbey, in the character of Henry Tilney, Austen's spokesperson for rationality, who believes in acquiring information and knowledge, but who's also a passionate fan of trashy Gothic novels. There are the things that are good for you, and there are the things that are fun; the mature, educated individual tries to strike a balance between them, without turning into either a pedant or an idiot.

Kael's great common-sense insight in “Trash, Art, and the Movies” is that we don't have to justify enjoying the things we enjoy: certainly not by claiming that they're art. Nor do intellectuals have to justify writing about the things they enjoy. Our enjoyments deserve the application of our intelligence, and our intelligence certainly deserves contact with the things we enjoy. The banishment of aesthetics from literary studies has resulted in an arid dichotomy between intellect and pleasure: I think of the Shakespeare professor who confessed to our graduate class that she was a “fan” of Shakespeare, but that she removed her fan hat when she put on her scholar hat. Pleasure, in this view, is an irrelevance to the intellectual; certainly it conveys no information about the value of the object of study. (Subjective value is no value.) But many bright young people take pleasure in intelligence. They can't turn off their intelligence when they're being fans (and wouldn't want to). Kael's criticism belongs to the ongoing history of the intellectual's pleasure in pop culture, as an intellectual – not as someone who's slumming.

It's a way of healing an internal division that is only felt by intellectuals, including self-made intellectuals like Kael, who was born on a chicken farm and failed to graduate from Berkeley. The alienated intellectual, adrift in a world of popular culture that they're part of and not part of. Perhaps it's especially felt by self-made intellectuals, who grow up immersed in popular culture and only discover high culture later; who are aware of being part of and also apart from mass culture.

Kael wanted to have it both ways, obviously: to be the intellectual who devotes her criticism to pop without taking pop more seriously than she thought it deserved. She opened the floodgates, inspiring, among many others, Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces. We never really came to a cultural consensus about whether pop was art or not; instead, “art” dropped out of intellectual discourse. Paglia brought it back, briefly, but never explained the aesthetic programme that would allow one to make distinctions between the value of art and the value of pop – and it didn't matter, because while she dropped out of sight, more and more books of criticism were published on pop culture that were accessible and non-academic, although doubtless informed in most cases by the writers' higher education. The interest of intellectuals in pop culture sped ahead of our ability, or desire, to figure out its worth. For previous generations of intellectuals, the value of mass culture was its role as the nemesis of middlebrow culture: it had never gotten to the point of middlebrow values that individual artists and intellectuals had gotten beyond. But what value can we claim for mass culture now, when it's the only culture?

Except that of course we can't even speak of “mass culture” anymore, since there is no mass audience. When the high-low distinction could no longer be sustained, we became divided up into loves, into “philias” (of which reading, at whatever brow level, is just another); or in marketing terms, into demographics. (There's a “mainstream audience,” but that, too, is just another demographic.) And in a kind of internal cultural relativism, we try our best not to think about the objective value of what we love or what others love. If in academia, subjective value is no value, elsewhere it's the only value. We get pleasure from identifying as fans of one or another media product as we once did from identifying as members of subcultures. And as it turns out, intellectuals have a particular proclivity towards fandom: as yet another English professor identifies himself or herself as a fan of Tolkien, or, these days, Rowling, all I can think is that there's a geek streak related to the intellectual gene that bypasses literary taste and judgement altogether. (Not to say that Tolkien and Rowling aren't good: I don't know, I haven't read much of either; all I know is that the passionate love of English professors for pop fantasy authors doesn't have a thing to do with their literary merits. I've met graduate students who have this sort of geek-relationship to canonical authors, too, like one student who read nothing except Shakespeare and everything about him. Many cinephiles, most of whom are male in my experience and observation, seem to have such a relationship to Orson Welles; hence my “butthurt fanboy” slur against Sarris above. Online fan culture invented the terminology, but not the phenomenon. A lot of academics and even general readers seem to have such a relationship to Dickens.)

In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye anticipated the direction that literary and media studies would go in: he thought that criticism would only become a science (which is to say, a legitimate discipline) if critics devoted themselves to figuring out what literature was by structurally analyzing it. This is the work being carried on, informally and often wittily, by the contributors to TV Tropes.org, who extended Frye's inquiry to electronic media entertainments. Frye thought the critic had no business evaluating literature, but not because he thought that aesthetic values were illusory or that the critic was a sociologist, for whom trash might have more significance than art. The literary critic only worked on art. However, no matter how informed the critic's tastes, they could never be knowledge, and Frye wanted criticism to be a body of knowledge about literature; and also, aesthetic judgements go without saying. “The critic will find soon, and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet to work with than Blackmore. But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he will want to spend belaboring the point. For belaboring the point is all he can do: any criticism motivated by a desire to establish or prove it will be merely one more document in the history of taste.” As, for example, with Menard's imaginary professor who claims that the Superman comic is as good as Homer: if Menard is trying to assert with this example the superiority of high culture, it's curious (and insulting), because the aesthetic assumption goes without saying, and if critics were going to spend even the second Menard does making that point, it would be a complete waste of time.

I think what Frye is saying in his section on value-judgements and criticism in the “Polemical Introducton” is not that aesthetics belong to the history of taste, but that the critic, or critical consensus, can always be wrong: there are objective aesthetic values, but although the critic must proceed on the assumption that his judgements are correct, he can never be certain that they will, in every case, coincide with the true value of the work. Perhaps the most generous assumption we can make about our present situation is not that assertions of objective value have disappeared, but that they have become implicit. Academics may have a purely sociological interest in popular culture, but media fans, cinephiles, and popular music fans do not: they love what they love based on their implicit aesthetic judgements of it, although they may be aware that their love exceeds its objective worth. To even bring up the fact that the Superman comic isn't as good as Homer, or the Patti Smith album as good as Beethoven, or Citizen Kane as good as Hamlet, isn't interesting: what's interesting is what's going on in the comic, album, or movie that interests them. More importantly, if you wanted to establish or prove that Patti Smith was, or was not, as good as Beethoven, it would be impossible. And that is where the sense of exhaustion comes from when one even tries to compare high and low culture: there is only private intuition and cultural consensus (or prejudice); there is no way even to begin proving anything.

With pop culture, then, we have nothing to go on but our educated intuitions (educated through experience and knowledge both of the medium and of the traditional arts). This has always been the case with the arts, but we pretended otherwise because our intuitions were institutionally sanctioned, often on a moralistic basis masquerading as an aesthetic one (the Arnoldian influence). Now that academia is no longer in the business of telling us what's great (or telling us that anything's great), we may have to continue to feel our way along this way with popular culture. This is what what so exciting for me about watching movies as a young cinephile: even though I was following a loose canon of sorts, only watching those movies with some kind of critical reputation, each time I watched a new movie I wondered whether I was going to encounter a work of art (what I considered a work of art: whether I would have a profound or simply enjoyable aesthetic or emotional experience) or a piece of garbage. This is not a question that arises for the reader of the works of the literary canon: one does not rely on one's judgement to nearly the same extent; the question is whether I'll like it or not, not what it's worth might be. And even in cinema or pop music, critical consensus exerts its pressure: I won't dismiss a movie or album the critics love unless it's a new work; I will, however, base a defence of a movie that critics don't like on my subjective judgement. (This never happens with pop albums: I'm just not a passionate or knowledgeable enough fan of pop music to assert that it's good if critics don't like it. On the other hand, I don't take pop music criticism as seriously as I take film criticism: if critics don't like an album, I may shrug and go, “Well I do,” but I don't get excited about it.)

If English departments disappear and literary studies become part of Media Studies, and if the sociological approach continues to prevail in the latter, this may be a good thing insofar as it means that canons will no longer be institutionalized; they will remain apocryphal, and therefore ignorable; we will all be thrown back on our own judgements. It would be even better if this new Media Studies adopted Frye's approach (the TV Tropes approach) and made criticism into something closer to a science, which is what English departments have wanted all along anyway, leaving aesthetic judgements to the individual. But that brings us back to the problem Kael raises about pop's replacement of literature: without a traditional liberal arts education, where are we going to get the intellectuals who are capable of making these implicit aesthetic judgements?  

The Carnal Book

Tim Parks's New York Review of Books blog post in defence of electronic books is as interesting for the comments as his thoughts. Parks argues against the “fetishism” promoted by the book as we have known it for roughly 2000 years – the physical codex. (The e-book, besides being non-physical – although electricity is physical, but we'll leave that aside – is closer to a scroll to a codex despite the e-reader's “framing” of it in a way that's familiar to us from what we know as “a book.” It's a scroll disguised as a codex.) As we all know, we display books on our shelves as much to show off our taste and intelligence as for strict storage and easy access. The e-reader denies us this peripheral pleasure of being a reader, and other peripheral pleasures such as sensuous engagement with the book as a physical object (its smell, feel, and weight) and the cover design.

The most striking part of Parks's argument – and its major point – is that reading is the closest we get to a purely mental art form. My question is whether this is either true or desirable. Parks claims that e-books get us closer to this “essence of the literary experience,” and compares it to “the moment when we passed from illustrated children's books to the adult version of the page that is only text.” My first objection here is historical: in the 19^th century, which everyone agrees was the Age of the Novel, novels were frequently illustrated. The novel therefore offered some of the pleasures of the not-yet-invented movie, TV show, and graphic novel; and maybe it was the advent of the movie that did away with this convention. But certainly adult readers were not considered childish for wanting some pictures in and amongst all those words; or if they were, novelists and publishers indulged that childishness. What's maybe remarkable is that the general public is willing to read novels without pictures now; although with the exception of a few phenomena – like the Harry Potter and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series – bestsellers today are a lot shorter and less wordy than bestselling 19^th century novels. The 19^th century reader, then, had a much higher tolerance for words but also wanted pictures. Was reading more, or less, of a purely mental experience for them?

The electronic revolution has seen the curious mixing-up of media that were previously distinct, making it difficult to say what the “essence” of an artistic medium is. Now that movies and TV shows are available on DVD, you can select the “chapter” you want to go to and possess them as discrete objects and display them on your shelves, even as books and music are heading away from that direction. Previously movies and television were the least object-like of the art forms: like a painting or sculpture, they were viewed, but unlike a painting or sculpture, there wasn't a discrete, original object that could be owned. Prints of a film are multiple, and they are not “the film.” They are even less “the film” than the multiple copies of a book are “the book,” because if you own a copy of a book you can pick it up and read it any time but if you own a film print you can't do anything unless you also have a projector and screen. And the DVD of a film is not “the film” in the way a copy of a book is “the book” either because films are intended to be projected on a cinema screen, not watched on a TV. The relationship between film and DVD is more like that between a painting and its reproduction in an art book – except, again, that there is a discrete physical object that is the painting but there is not a discrete physical object that is “the film.”

It all gets pretty philosophical. Parks reduces the literary work to “the sequence of the words.” We could say that a movie is the sequence of the shots and synchronized sounds, except that we also have to add the director's intention for it to be projected on a cinema screen. As any cinephile will point out (including famous directors like David Lynch), it makes a difference if you watch a movie on your tiny iPhone screen. Just as it makes a difference if you're standing in the Sistine Chapel looking at Michelangelo's ceiling or seeing images of it in an art book. Then again, defenders of the physical book believe that it makes a difference whether you read the sequence of words in a physical book or on an e-reader. A book, however – whether physical or electronic, scroll or codex – is simple a convenient depository for a story or poem made up of words, which could also be spoken aloud or stored inside one's head. As Parks puts it, a poem is the same poem and as much a poem if you say it in your head or read it on a page. This is not strictly true, since writers – “borrowing” from other media – can also be interested in the spatial arrangement of words on a page or even the visual impact of characters (see The Waste Land, e.g., for both). But it is relatively true.

The idea, then, is that a painting is made of paint, a film is made of film (or video, increasingly), music is made of sounds, but a work of literature is made of words – not paper and ink – and words are as much words if they are in our heads, on a page (or screen), or spoken aloud. There is a medium of paint, a medium of film, a medium of sounds... and a medium of words. There is a medium of paper and ink, but that medium is drawing or design. The nagging flaw in Parks's argument, I think, is that he is talking about the nature of the medium of literature, whereas people who are troubled by the switch to digital books are concerned about the nature of the experience of reading. You are experiencing the same work whether you read it in book or digital form, which cannot be said about watching a film on a movie screen versus watching it on your iPhone. But that doesn't mean your reading experience is the same. The things that have been lost in the switch are not intrinsic to one's experience of a work of literature, but they are all part of a certain reading experience, and as such none of them are “extraneous” to that experience. For people who love books, reading means an engagement with that kind of object, not just engagement with the words on the pages. It's comparable to the protests that accompanied the switch from vinyl to CDs and then the mp3, except for one crucial thing: recorded music had only been around for about a century before the CD replaced vinyl; the vinyl record itself had only been around for less than half a century. The codex has been around for two millennia; the printing press for over 500 years. It's little wonder that our association of both (non-dramatic) written material and reading with the book – the printed and bound codex – is so fiercely strong.

No one was ever going to confuse the end of vinyl with the end of music, but that is what we have done with the end of the book and the end of literature – or that even more precious thing, “reading,” which we culturally fetishize a great deal more than listening or viewing. It's a bit curious that we do, since in the age of electronics we can get knowledge and experience narrative by listening and viewing as well as by reading. Our reading fetish belongs to the Protestant heritage of the West: the ability to read the Bible for oneself meant not having to rely on hearsay and to undergo the private, interior, meditative process of interpretation and reliance on one's judgement. I don't think Parks would disagree that his insistence that reading be a “grown-up” activity, where “grown-up” means as divorced from the physical as possible, has something puritan and iconoclastic about it (he uses the word “austere”). The fact that I, for one, don't have the least qualm about giving up physical books disturbs me a bit about myself, and I certainly wouldn't want to congratulate myself on it, although I prefer my attitude to the one that equates the end of the book with the end of reading (and thereby culture and society). Perhaps the e-book is the final, or latest, development in a process whereby reading became increasingly mentalized, a development that may say more about one strain of our culture than it does about “the essence of literary experience.” We have to be careful when we attach the concept of “maturity” to the development of an art form; next we could find ourselves arguing that the world graduated to a new maturity when prose overtook poetry, with its more overt appeal to the senses, as the most popular form of literature.

We must, rationally, insist on the distinction between book and text. But to understand the confusion between them – and the hysteria over digitization it has generated – we could, perhaps, think of the book as the incarnation of literature. In fact this is probably the subtext of Parks's title, "E-books Can't Burn" (the spirit is immortal), and the mysterious response of a commenter that the fact that a book can burn is what makes it valuable (the flesh is mortal). 

Gender, Misogyny, and Body Humour/Horror in the 70s Films of Elaine May

I had a little Elaine May film festival last week, rewatching Mikey and Nicky and A New Leaf and watching The Heartbreak Kid for the first time. I'd been avoiding The Heartbreak Kid because of its Neil Simon screenplay – a former playwright, I believed the longstanding critical consensus that Simon was a middle-of-the-road comedic playwright, which didn't appeal to me, and gave him a miss. I also have my moments of skepticism about auteur theory and, since I knew May as a writer-director from Mikey and Nicky and a writer-director-performer from A New Leaf, I wasn't certain that she would be able to assert herself over the material as a director alone. In fact, I liked The Heartbreak Kid somewhat more than A New Leaf, though it still has to take second place to her suis generis (although, or because, it's a Cassavetes imitation) masterpiece, Mikey and Nicky. (Regarding what this means to auteur theory, Grodin's account of the filming quoted in the article I linked to above suggests that the director and actors had a great deal of input in what we see onscreen, to the official screenwriter's chagrin.)

I've watched A New Leaf three or four times now, and my problems with it remain: Walter Matthau seems miscast as the main character, an upper-class cad who speaks like a character from Oscar Wilde, occasionally via Joe Orton (as in a line about a hostess's “erotic fixation” with her carpet), although I can't be sure because I've never seen Matthau in anything else. (I may have watched Grumpy Old Men when it came out when I was a teenager.) The movie neither satirizes anything recognizable (what do fortune-hunters mean in the 1970s, and what did fortune-hunters who prey on clumsy, socially inept botanists ever mean?) nor quite succeed in creating its own world. Nevertheless, it has its pleasures (May's physical comedy as the heiress) and points of interest (the Matthau character's repulsion at women and the idea of marriage, and his initially unconscious discovery of a purpose in life as he reluctantly finds himself taking care of his helpless wife), and the subversiveness, suspense, and irony would have been greatly increased if the film hadn't fallen victim to censorship, as Jonathan Rosenbaum recounts in the excellent piece that introduced me to May as a director. (I had previously known her as half of the 50s satirical improvisation-based comedy duo she formed with Mike Nichols, who more famously went on to direct films).

Like A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid is a dark comedy about a fastidious man, whose point of view the audience occupies, who is revolted by his wife – here played by May's daughter, Jeannie Berlin – and wants to get rid of her. The deeply uncomfortable moral dilemma on which the plot turns is that the protagonist, Lenny, meets the woman of his dreams on his honeymoon, even as he is discovering all of the things he hates about his new wife. Does he do the morally and socially conventional thing, or seize his chance and ditch his new wife?

Two things render the direction of The Heartbreak Kid masterful: first, May's neutrality with respect to the characters, which nudges the audience's sympathies but leaves a great deal ambiguous as well; and, not unrelatedly, the marvellous performances she gets out of Charles Grodin as Lenny, Berlin as Lila, and Eddie Albert as the father of Lenny's dream girl (played by a breathy, vague young Cybill Shepherd). May encourages identification with Lenny's disgust with his gauche new wife's tics – her insistence on singing along with the radio loudly and tunelessly, her clingy behaviour, her need for reassurance, her gross eating habits (chocolate bars in bed after sex, egg salad all over her face) – while leaving room for us to wonder whether Lila's really that annoying or whether Lenny is a bit of a jerk with an overwhelming case of post-marital jitters. “Bit of a jerk” becomes “enormous jerk” when Lenny ditches Lila, who's ended up with a horrible case of sunburn after refusing to take his advice and use sunscreen, to pursue Shepherd – a coy, sadistic WASP cocktease in half-Temple Drake fashion, who first appears, epiphanically, above Lenny in a halo of sun and fine blonde hair, hovering above him as he lies on the beach, informing him that he's “in her spot” like a bitchy toddler.

The Heartbreak Kid deals more directly and openly with WASP fetish (still going strong, without self-awareness, in Eugenides' The Marriage Plot of last year) than any other film I know. The dream Lenny decides to chase, thrown into relief by his disillusionment with marriage (which is to say, mundane closeness to another human being, perhaps the theme responsible for the choice of "Close to You" as ironic pop commentary), is that of marriage to the blonde WASP bitch goddess and entrance into her exclusive world. It's not just a question, then, of whether or not achieving his life's dream is worth committing the morally vile act of leaving his wife for another woman on their honeymoon (although that's how he sees it, in the speech he gives Lila), but whether this dream, in particular, is worth the cost. It's not, of course, but that doesn't matter. What matters, dramatically, is Lenny's absolute conviction that he knows what he wants now, which overrides ordinary moral concerns, and his determination to get it – which overrides the objections first of the shallow Shepherd, who understandably thinks he's crazy, and then of her overprotective father. He gate-crashes the WASP elite through the sheer force of his belief that that is what he wants to do; never mind that this world is depicted as satirically, and revealed to be as repulsive in its own way, as Lila. In Lenny's eyes it is, and remains, sheer glamour.

I then watched the 2007 Farrelly Brothers critically derided remake of The Heartbreak Kid (or as much as I could get through before I was too bored to go on), which made May and Simon's achievement seem even more remarkable in comparison. For the record, I thought Dumb and Dumber was hilarious when I saw it as a teenager (and a teenage cinephile, though just getting started) and also liked There's Something About Mary when I saw it the year of its release. I don't recall much about the former, but the latter I remember as spectacular humiliation slapstick given a vulgarized shock-comedy update: to win his ideal (WASP) woman, Ben Stiller has to be subjected to an endless series of excruciatingly painful accidents and humiliations (although in the notorious cum-in-hair scene, the ideal is desecrated – or, perhaps, brought down to the adolescent Everyman protagonist's level – by receiving a humiliation of her own).

Another reason I was reluctant to watch the original Heartbreak Kid is that I generally dislike 70s movies, timebound in a decade whose cinematic and sartorial style grates on my optic nerves (including the few I make exceptions for, mainly horror films like Don't Look Now, Carrie and Videodrome). But May's film has a classicism and restraint that makes it seem timeless, unlike the remake, which seems absolutely bound to its era – which says nothing good about American comedy in the first decade of the 21^st century. It's not even the worst of the remake's crimes that the Farrelly Brothers jettison the original's satire of social climbing, although it does render the remake incoherent. The protagonist, now called Eddie, is a 40-year-old bachelor who seems unprepared for the reality of marital life, since he breaks up with women for minor infractions like not sharing his taste for dumb comedy. Whereas the original starts with the Jewish wedding of Lenny and Lila, here we get a bunch of pointless background, including a meet-cute (with a typical gratuitously vulgar twist) where Eddie tries to stop a man from stealing Lila's purse and ends up with a pair of her panties. (The gratuitous vulgarity – designed for instant cheap laughs – continues when Eddie and his dream girl meet cute when she mistakenly thinks he's renting a porn video.)

May leaves it open to the viewer to both sympathize with and feel revolted by both Lenny and Lila. It may be ambiguous whether Lila is really that irritating and disgusting, or whether we're seeing her through Lenny's neurotic viewpoint, but when he leaves her to recuperate from sunburn in the hotel room on their honeymoon while pursuing another woman, there's no way not to sympathize with her. As in Mikey and Nicky, May proves herself a master of creating and sustaining discomfort in the scene where Lenny dumps a shocked and devastated Lila at a restaurant, speechifying at her about the importance of living one's life. May spares the audience none of the excruciation of the outrageous premise. Yet we are never pressured to either condemn or condone Lenny; nor, at the ending, are we decisively guided to think that he'll be either hollowly happy or fittingly unhappy. He's got what he wanted, and if that's what being happy means, he'll be happy – or perhaps “happiness” is immaterial. As he mingles with guests, repeating the meaningless, rote phrases of the unsophisticated Midwestern business elite he's entered (even to a couple of kids he ends up with on the couch at one point), we understand that this world is risibly dull from his New York perspective, as if Hildy Johnson went to live with Bruce in Albany after all, but neither May nor Simon tip us off that his marriage with Shepherd will be either blissful or otherwise. (Despite this comparison of the choice Lenny makes to the choice Hildy doesn't make, I think Jonathan Rosenbaum is incorrect to suggest that Lenny leaves an "overpowering" woman for, presumably, a less threatening one – although he's right that The Graduate must be read this way. I don't think May and Simon suggest at all that Lila is “complicated” or more interesting than Shepherd's character, who is not treated especially unsympathetically, as Lila is not treated especially sympathetically. If Lila is overpowering, it's only in her insistent corporeality, not her personality, which is rather meek when she's not singing. Lenny doesn't leave the right woman for the wrong woman, or vice versa; he leaves a woman for the woman he thinks is the right one – the irony lies not in the fact that she's really the wrong one, but that she's neither right nor wrong. She is also just a woman.)

In the remake, Lila isn't simply gauche and irritating – she's a monster: both stupid and crazy, as well as jobless, with a former coke problem that's left her with a deviated septum that causes liquids to spurt from her nose and scarily aggressive bedroom habits (the cheap homophobia doesn't stop, as everyone from pubescent boys to his new wife in bed accuse Eddie of being a fag, pussy, etc.). Anyone would be within their rights to get an immediate annulment, so why the movie takes time to set Eddie up as overly picky is mysterious. Eddie then falls for a definitely less "overpowering" woman: sporty, laid-back, not-insane Miranda, who, in the movie's sexual subtext, appeals to Eddie because her sexual differentiation is less pronounced. (The movie's adolescent homophobia is due to Eddie's adolescent homophilia: sexually aggressive women make him feel emasculated, whereas what he really wants is a “pal.”) There's no moral dilemma: obviously, Eddie should leave the nightmare and marry the nice girl. But since there's no moral dilemma, there's also no movie – no point to the plot, except as a vastly mean-spirited (to both of the female characters, no matter how negatively or positively portrayed) farce premise. But even describing the movie's plot as choosing a nice, subdued, boyish brunette over a sexual blonde hottie (this version's Lila) gives it too much credit for coherence: Lila is never set up as Eddie's false dream girl; she's just the girl he happens to meet in the street and marry, who happens to be hot and blonde, and then happens to turn out to be crazy.

I gave some consideration to my reaction to the Farrelly Brothers' remake of a classic satire, because I would go to some lengths to defend Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis's similarly maligned loose remake of the Preston Sturges classic The Miracle of Morgan's Creek as Rock-A-Bye Baby. Although Tashlin is widely regarded as a satirist by his revisionist cinephile fans, there's no doubt that Sturges's biting satire of small-town mores, including taking aim at single motherhood and premarital sex, is completely jettisoned in the remake's remoulding of the material into a Lewis vehicle, and a great deal is dumbed down and sweetened up – including going to the length of cutesy songs and broad ethnic stereotypes. But Tashlin and Lewis replace Sturges's satire with something equally interesting, employing aspects of Lewis's persona that Tashlin was even more interested in exploring than Lewis in his self-directed films (with the exception of The Ladies Man): a subversive attack on gender essentialism from a male perspective that predated second-wave feminism by five years (if you date that from the publication of The Feminine Mystique). Lewis's character, Clayton Poole, goes to court to prove that he can take care of female infant triplets by himself, arguing not that a father is as good as a mother but that you don't need to be a woman to be a mother – which brings him up against the prejudice of a small town's biological essentialism on the sacred subject of motherhood. What's more, Tashlin and Lewis don't just tailor the material for Lewis's gender-transgressive persona, but offer an intelligent reading of a neglected aspect of the Sturges film: the problems of a widower raising two teenage girls, which is how one of the girls manages to go wild and get pregnant out of wedlock.

In other words, sometimes it's possible for a remake of a classic comedy to stray from its source and offer an apparent dumbing-down that has its own interest. Maybe 50 years from now, the Heartbreak Kid remake will look like a brilliant, subversive take on gender politics and a shrewd exploration of its source's subtext. Right now, however, at least to me, it looks like the best exploration, or exploitation, of whatever comedic persona Ben Stiller has happened in Zoolander, which played on the Jewish movie comedian's tension between narcissism and self-loathing that Stiller inherited from Lewis, specifically in The Ladies Man. But while I liked Zoolander, it's not half of half the movie The Ladies Man is.

I don't object to gross-out comedy in principle, either. During the 90s, up to and including the first American Pie movie, some gross-out comedies had a sweet charm that shone through the body fluid jokes (a type of comedy revived in the enjoyable Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, in combination with the new stoner comedy that took over in the 00s). Although admittedly, as someone who's idea of great movie comedy is Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Tati, and the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, the best I can say for any movie comedy of the 90s or 00s is that I didn't hate it. I also didn't hate Meet the Parents, where Owen Wilson stole the movie from Stiller in a performance of daffily winsome charisma reminiscent of the screwball heroines. However, aside from his likeable comedies with Jackie Chan, the case of Owen Wilson proves that no performer has enough eccentric charisma to survive the terrible writing and direction of the standard modern movie comedy – such as the tedious Wedding Crashers. I'm sure I'd be happier with the state of contemporary movie comedy, and the things it gives interesting performers to do, if I could like Wes Anderson, but unfortunately, I find his precious quirkfests at least as unfunny as mainstream gross-out comedy. To be sure, I've only tried The Royal Tenebaums, but from what I've heard it's an accurate sample of what the rest is like. The answer is not quirky indie comedy; the answer is better mainstream comedy.

As someone who's tried, and hasn't always hated, dumb gross-out comedy, I think I've got the cred to say that the obligatory inclusion of crass body humour in mainstream comedy, however necessary it may have seemed to catch up with modern sensibilities, has been detrimental to American movie comedies, which have totally foregone the virtues of subtlety and restraint. In The Heartbreak Kid, May can still get comedic mileage out of the mild exaggeration of traits that provoke disgust in partners, like sloppy eating habits, with the piece de resistance being Berlin's sunburned appearance, covered in blisters and cream. The inclusion of urine, farting, diarrhea, and, since There's Something About Mary, semen jokes hasn't become obligatory yet. And remember this was the 70s, where “restraint” wasn't a trait prized in movies, particularly in the horror genre for which the decade is perhaps most remarkable, where bombast and boundary-transgression flourished in movies like Carrie (which took on menstrual blood), The Exorcist (vomit, snot, and pus), Videodrome (stomach vaginas), and Eraserhead (unidentifiable baby-things).

The 70s was, notably, the decade of horror films based on abject femininity, which, as Kristeva famously argued, blurs the boundaries that separate bodies and categories, as well as the decade of Anglo-American radical feminism. This is the context of May's three 70s films, all of which feature a male protagonist as the primary audience identification figure, although he is a sort of unreliable narrator, whose vile behaviour makes him as repulsive as the female character (or, in Mikey and Nicky, characters) he victimizes. In the two comedies, the female victim is a figure of abjection to whom the male character objects on that basis, and in The Heartbreak Kid, May's combination of classicism and the subject of disgust is faintly reminiscent of the sensibility of Cronenberg in Dead Ringers. Since both deal with abjection and boundary-blurring, a study comparing body humour and body horror would be interesting, and the ur-text might be Jerry Lewis's Nutty Professor, a comedy-horror film that brilliantly examines the unnerving abjection of the Lewis persona, with its source in the unruly body. Female biology is abject by definition, at least from the normative, Apollonian male perspective that Cronenberg deconstructs in Dead Ringers; but the male adolescent body is equally unruly, and the adult male is capable of identifying with it – and the shame associated with it – at any point.

With Mikey and Nicky, May suddenly, violently swerved from comedy, although the film (with its titular allusion to “Mike Nichols”) also seems to be a more direct attempt to grapple with the idea of a friendship so close that it blurs the boundaries of identity than her dark comedies about heterosexual couples. Playing one of the most unpleasant main characters in cinematic history (at least outside the annuls of villain protagonist), Cassavetes gives an uncompromising performance, all edges and jittery nerves; what May does to him, and gets him to do, in this film may be comparable to the tales of “sadistic” male directors getting performances of arresting self-exposure and emotional rawness from their actresses, from Dreyer and Falconetti in Passion of Joan of Arc to Lynch and Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr. and Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE. Since the paradigm, or myth, here is gendered, it's worth noting that although he's the most aggressive, volatile, and violent of May's unpleasant male main characters, Cassavetes' Nicky is also the most “feminized,” which is to say pathologized: he's an hysterical, paranoid hypochondriac who's obsessed with, and openly terrified by, the idea of his death. And only in this film does May exhibit no sympathy – through performance, context, or otherwise – with the character who is betrayed and victimized by the person closest to them. The viewer may be magnetized and riveted by Nicky, and the question of who first betrayed whom and how may be left ambiguous, but the ending leaves no doubt that the writer-director, at least, thinks he gets what he deserves – however horrifying the actual act of betrayal remains. In other words, it's only in the film where May imagines herself strictly as a man, rather than dividing identification between a male and female character, that she fully indulges her masochism.

Despite this personal loathing for (and adoration of) her main character, May's direction in Mikey and Nicky, as in The Heartbreak Kid, is remarkable for its neutrality: she unflinchingly records the things that are unpleasant (physically, socially, morally) about her characters and their environments and leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions. (This seems to be the main point of continuity with her prior career: many of the Nichols and May sketches damn the characters with speech that's a mixture of the closely observed and the gracefully stylized.) In Mikey and Nicky, May extends the ambiguity of her direction to the writing: just as we don't know who's really responsible for what went wrong between Mikey and Nicky (only that Nicky has got to be a difficult friend to have, between his sadism and his neediness: Peter Falk's Mikey cares for him maternally, as Matthau does May in A New Leaf), we don't know whether the woman Nicky goes to visit in an extraordinarily uncomfortable scene where he has sex with her over her protests while Mikey twiddles his thumbs in the other room is, as Nicky claims, a neurotic whore, or whether she's a sensitive woman whom he's set up by sending his friends to her to try it on with her (or what his motivations might be in that case). “Who betrayed whom” and “who is the victim of whom” operates on every level of the film.

There's also an extraordinary scene where Nicky goes to see his estranged wife and baby before he dies, in which the actress playing his wife (Joyce Van Patten) is broken down by the end of the brief scene – her only appearance in the film – to a point of acute emotion rarely seen in any film. (Apparently May got the film taken away from her, and released in its unfinished state, after shooting almost three times the amount of film taken for Gone With the Wind. While this is clearly insane, and sounds like she would never have finished it if it weren't taken away, performances like these make it seem like it was worth it.) For a moment the viewer is left to wonder if Nicky and his wife don't “really” love each other after all; maybe she's the one he “really” needs, not his girlfriends or male friends, and this sort of primal bond is worth the anguish of their relationship (which, May indicates, includes his physical abuse of her) for both of them.

It's the extraordinarily intense nature of the emotions in the writing and performances that gives this impression – but the psychological conclusions that begin to form in the viewer's mind are swept away when Nicky next goes back to visit his “girl,” with whom he has a similarly intense encounter. While May (or is it just me?) clearly revels in the unapologetic swaggering masculinity that allows Nicky to go from woman to woman, wife to mistress, treat them both appallingly, and have them end up swooning at his feet, there is an emotional truth to this juxtaposition... the emotional truth that there's no such thing as a fixed, stable emotional truth. Like Lenny in The Heartbreak Kid, Nicky doesn't “really” love one woman, and not another; nor is it as simple as saying he “really” loves both... or neither. “Real love” is a sentimental fiction: one that Lenny uses as a justification for his erotic and social ambition. There is no real love, not even in friendship, only bonds of need with fleeting moments of real emotion. That's all love is, and it's nothing to get sentimental about, although it's also the core of our identities: Nicky is his relationships. He's defined by them, and nothing else has any meaning for him, even if what he seems to demand most of all, with a tyrannical disregard for what it costs the other person, is the acknowledgement that he's loved, the only thing that stands between him and his fear of the absolute obliteration of death. 

First of 2012! Orwell, Calvino, the Anxiety of Reading, and the Danger of Stories

After my shameful report on my year in reading, it occurred to me that although I will never read enough to be a top literary blogger, if I'm going to keep a literary blog at all (if only for the amusement of myself and a few friends), I really ought to read a bit more. As a child and adolescent I lived under the pleasant illusion that I was well-read, which was true compared to both the peers and adults with whom I was surrounded; in university I was disturbed to discover that I was better-read than the average English student. But I'm not a serious or “ambitious” reader (to use the adjective I came across in a literary blog the other day) by the standards of the blogosphere, where bloggers posts lists of 30 to a hundred books they've read in a year. This sort of blogging tends does tend to bleed into bragging, like telling the world how many push-ups you can do at a time, an attitude to reading reinforced by the percentage bar on e-books, constantly informing you how much progress you've made (which, incidentally, puts the emphasis on you and your agency rather than, as with old-fashioned checking how many pages remain, on the book). The difficulty, rather than the pleasure, of reading has moved to the forefront of our experience (perhaps our definition) of it, turning it into an onerous duty alternately on behalf of the Self or the Book (both supreme), and God forbid you should take a lot of pleasure in reading, and devote a lot of reflection to what you've read, without reading a lot of books. In our positivist world we have no time for intangibles like quality of experience, only for measurable tangibles.

Orwell and The Overpraise of Books

Publishers have responded to the modern reader's sense that there's too much to read and too little time with series like Penguin's Great Ideas: little, cheap books of classic essays or collections of essays by well-known authors. I impulse-bought several of these in the last couple of years and then wondered when I'd ever get around to them. Now that I've launched my project of reading The Books in My House, however, I'm starting with these, and I've already knocked down one book in 2012: the Orwell collection Books & Cigarettes. The Penguin series is sure to multiply the number of books I read in 2012, though not necessarily the number of pages (or words, if we can no longer go by pages in the era of digital reading).

I have read – probably in Harold Bloom, who is not an admirer of 1984 – that Orwell's real strength as a writer lay in his essays rather than his fiction. I have only the dimmest memories of 1984, which I read in early adolescence (along with Animal Farm, which went right over my head), but I definitely enjoyed this slim collection, many of whose subjects bear on this problem of Modern Reading, starting with the first, title essay, which laments (in 1946) the willingness of the public (including the author) to spend its money on leisure activities like cigarettes, beer, and movies compared to its reluctance to spend it on books. Nevertheless, Orwell is not sentimental (or, in stark contrast to the literary blogger, bragging) in his attitude to books, which he characterizes, “There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single setting and forgets a week later....” In the second essay, “Bookshop Memories,” in which Orwell recollects his experiences of working in a second-hand bookshop, he writes, “Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening, and in the third essay, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” where he describes the misery and squalor of the life of this instance of the literary professional (“He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike”), “It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has had some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”

Misery, squalor, and Sartrean disgust are consistent presences in Orwell's essays, climaxing in the two longer essays that end the collection, one, “How the Poor Die,” describing his experiences in a French hospital in 1929, the other his childhood experiences in a boarding school. The last, longest essay is a tour de force of autobiographical writing, starting from the personal (and traumatic) to take a wider, sociological and psychological view. The result is interestingly Freudian – especially since a quick google search for Orwell and Freud turns up a 1978 Virginia Quarterly Review essay that claims, based on the biographical evidence, that Orwell considered psychoanalysis quackery and exhibited no interest in Freud.

Nevertheless, in “Such, Such Were the Joys” (written by 1947 and published in 1952, according to the note at the end of the essay), Orwell draws what can only be considered psychological conclusions – and fascinating ones – based on his recollection of childhood experiences and his subjective reactions to them, and writes about childhood sexuality (with reference to a group masturbation scandal) in the frank manner that I, at any rate, associate with the influence of Freud on intellectuals in the first half of the 20^th century (and from which I think we've largely retreated). To me, nothing could sound more Freudian than Orwell's interest in the inner life – the alien world – of the child, and his (ultimately scientific) method of approaching it through an honest recounting of his memories, undistorted by sentimentality, moralizing, or projection of adult values.

In fact, Orwell is so unsentimental on the subject of children that he argues (again, based on his experience) that children are not especially loving, and in fact may feel disgust, loathing, and incomprehension towards adults. It makes one wonder – if we do not sentimentalize the child (as Freud didn't, either), why are we concerned about the horrors he suffers due to the values of society and sadism of adults – about the shame and humiliation to which he's senselessly subjected? The only possible answer is that everyone is, at one point, a child; that children are among the class of the powerless and, although the concept is a relatively new one, human beings with rights; and that the experiences of childhood affect the adult one becomes, the society one shapes, and one's treatment of the powerless. The essay also gives the impression that although children are not kinder, more innocent, or more loving than adults, they are morally superior in one respect: they have not yet fully accepted the cruel, ugly, and incoherent values of society. Or rather, they do accept them (children are naturally conformist), but subjectively they know that these values are lies: they are still aware of the conflict between subjective, emotional experience and the consciously unquestionable truth of authority – the basic psychological conflict of childhood in Orwell's essay. Children still know, subjectively, that two and two equal four, whatever they are told; adults are no longer aware that any difference exists at all between truth and lies. (Orwell deals with totalitarian distortion of truth, or destruction of the concept, in the U.S.S.R. and its effect on infatuated leftist European intellectuals, in “The Prevention of Literature,” where he writes, “Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.”)

Calvino and the Story in Postmodern Fiction

At midnight on January 1^st, 2012, I was in the middle of the final novel fragment in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, making it both my last read of 2011 and my first read of 2012. It seemed like an excitingly fitting way to transition into a new year, reading the protagonist's recounting of an apocalypse that's resulted from what had appeared to be his fantasy of using the power of his mind to obliterate everything he dislikes in the world around him, starting with the surrounding buildings and ending with... everything. When the feat has been accomplished, strange officials (“the men from Section D”) approach him and congratulate him on ushering in a new era that they will control, whereupon he regrets his work but find he can't undo it. To erase is easier than to create.

For those who don't know (I didn't before I started reading it, though I knew of the title), the conceit of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is that the protagonist, the Reader (addressed as “you”), tries to read the book you are reading, or one called that and written by Italo Calvino, but gets cut off by a manufacturer's defect, and his efforts to get hold of the rest of the book place a series of apparently, but not actually, related books in his hands, each of which he is also cut off from reading for increasingly absurd reasons, at the same time becoming involved in an international conspiracy to replace the truth in books with tricks and lies. The chapters of If on a Winter's Night, recounting the Reader's adventures and the progress of his romance with the Other Reader, alternate with these beginnings of novels, which are pastiches of various genres, from the crime novel to European rural realism to Japanese quasi-pornography. Not straight pastiches, however, but liberally laden with postmodern strangeness (including those hoary tropes to which Bolano pays tribute, the mirror and the void), as well as a lot of kinky sexuality. The broadest pastiche of all, however, is the plot of “the novel itself,” with its conspiracies, Manichean agents and counteragents, and incidental UFO references.

The term “postmodern playfulness” still gets thrown around a lot, even though it's been thrown around so much that its lost all meaning and, therefore, usefulness as a critical phrase, since although it's true that a certain kind of playfulness, or lighthearted self-reflexivity, characterizes a lot of postmodern fiction, not all postmodern playfulness is alike – in fact, the playfulness of any two postmodern authors is distinctly different. Calvino's self-reflexivity and playfulness in If on a Winter's Night could not, for example, be more different from Bolano's in Nazi Literature in the Americas, although inventiveness and the vignette form are central features of both works (and after “postmodern playfulness,” “inventiveness” is the primary quality that comes to mind in reference to both). Calvino's playfulness is untinged by the sinister or any interest in evil, although like Bolano he is fascinated by violence, and he repeatedly returns to the subject of death. Maybe what I mean is that Bolano's playfulness slightly mitigates his sinister subject matter and tone, the reverse is true of Calvino: one's first impression is of playfulness, which is slightly mitigated by encroachments of the sinister and a sense of dread. In addition, while Bolano's inventiveness closes in on itself and gives the impression of privacy and inscrutability, Calvino's opens out towards the reader, issuing in lucid thematics and metafictional discourses on the nature of reading.

As much as I enjoyed Calvino's reflections on reading, especially as they bear on the odd experiment of the novel, this metafiction, and the plot about truth versus lies in novels (or different kinds of novels), were for me the least interesting parts of the novel. (Naturally, they're the things you'd have to write about if you were writing an academic essay on it.) Leaving the pastiches as the most interesting parts. They are not, in fact, much like the beginnings of novels (even allowing for their postmodern elements); rather, they are complete fictions in their own right, albeit with cliffhanger endings, with thematics and protagonist psychology established more thoroughly than they would be and plot developments occurring faster and thicker than they would in the beginning of any novel. They are, in other words, performances of invention and strangeness – of interest – that could not possibly be sustained for the length of a novel. Even if the writer could keep it up, the reader would become exhausted (and, perhaps partly for that reason, partly due to the lack of a single, sustained plot, I found my attention dimming towards the end of the book, as I did with Nazi Literature). And yet we wish writers could sustain, and readers endure, that level of inventiveness; that reading could always have that intensity, without the dull bits that allow readers to rest between dramatic episodes, without lapses of attention even during the most interesting parts.

Like Orwell, writing in 1946, Calvino, writing in the late 70s, expresses the anxiety of reading that has become so oppressive in our age of information-excess and sentimentality about reading and the book. In the first chapter of If on a Winter's Night, Calvino lists the different types of books that must be considered in making the decision to buy one and not another (or many others). In part:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read for Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working on at the Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With The Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Unfortunately for the devoted reader, reading takes not only time but effort: for the average reader, the shortest book (coming in, say, at a little under or over a hundred pages) will take at least as much time to read as it takes to watch an average-length movie (around 90 minutes), and much more effort. If on a Winter's Night seems to anticipate the eroding attention span of the digital era – the reader can't get past the beginnings of novels and constantly switches from one novel to another. This accommodation of my roving attention is probably the main thing that allowed me to read it much faster than I'm usually able to read most linear narratives of the same length nowadays. (Calvino's protagonist, on the other hand, is a traditionalist who is quite frustrated by not being able to follow the stories through to the end. I was reminded of the Sesame Street children's book classic, There's a Monster at the End of This Book, in which lovable furry neurotic Grover breaks the fourth wall, or whatever you call it in a book, and addresses the reader, imploring her not to turn the pages, and each time making greater efforts to construct a barricade that will prevent the progress of the story. The conceit of the Calvino is like that, but in reverse. TAMATEOTB was published in 1971; postmodern literature for adults took until the end of the decade to catch up with the experimentation of Sesame Street products in their sophisticated prime.)

Without knowing much of anything about Calvino, I suspect that If on a Winter's Night (published in 1979) is influenced by structuralism, that is, the idea that all narrative works are reducible to certain archetypal structural elements and therefore constitute (as Calvino has one of his numbered readers give voice to in the metafictional commentary of the penultimate chapter) One Story or One Book (as all protagonists are one, the abstract Reader, and all love interests One Woman, the Other Reader, who also turns out to be the Ideal Reader for whom the Writer writes). Not only the overarching plot but also all of the novels-within-the-novel are, whatever other genre they belong to, also love stories, with at least one woman appearing in whom the protagonist has an erotic interest before the fragment ends. This, I assume, reflects Calvino's conviction, conscious or otherwise, that eros is the basic motivation behind narrative. Towards the end, the protagonists become more aggressive and rapey towards their love interests, with the Writer (a character in both the framing plot and the diary fragments that make up one of the chapters) even attempting to assault the Other Reader when she shows up to confront him. This does not quite achieve the effect of universality that structuralism assumes, since it's hard to imagine a work of fiction that more absolutely assumes a male perspective, and I got a little tired of the identical episodes of priapism, although to be fair, the protagonist of the Japanese fiction pastische, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, is the only character who actually does get raped – by an older woman.

Not while I was reading, but now, in analyzing, If on a Winter's Night reminds me Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which also uses a framing plot (a couple of actors are making a movie whose script is cursed and at the same time becoming embroiled in an affair) to justify a series of vignettes that draw on archetypal scenarios – mainly involving sluttish women and brutish men – that obliquely mirror each other. Lynch is the least playful of postmodernists, veering even further to the horror side of surrealism than Bolano, although that's not to say that he doesn't have a sense of humour (I found many of the vignettes in the first half of Mulholland Dr. hilarious). I always thought that the premise of INLAND EMPIRE was derived from The Ring (whose premise was a lot more interesting to me than either the Japanese or American versions): instead of a cursed video tape, there's a cursed script. Although perhaps this was simply the zeitgeist, since Lynch had earlier explored the creepiness of video tapes in Lost Highway, which came out a year before Ringu.

In INLAND EMPIRE, the ur-story is ultimately a cursed Polish folk tale (Eastern Europe being the creepiest, most archaic part of the world according to American movies: see also Val Lewton's Cat People). All other stories are simply “adaptations” of this one, and all share its curse: storytelling is dark magic. Northrop Frye, who attempted in Anatomy of Criticism to identify all of the archetypal structures that make up “literature,” of which every individual story is an iteration, saw folk formulas like nursery rhymes, riddles, and charms as the basic units of literature, representing its basic impulses – a theory I once applied, in a graduate school essay, to The Waste Land. As fascinating as the idea of haunted technology is, the idea of the story as haunted is, for me, even more fascinating. It's the difference between thinking of the image as magic – and dangerous – and the idea of thinking of storytelling and literature that way. Perhaps it appeals to me because we are so used to thinking of books (even fiction, which used to be considered contemptible, with few exceptions – a view of fiction that comes up in Orwell's essays) as “good for us,” which is as much as to say that they're harmless, which is as much as to say that they're ineffectual.

To think of stories as dangerous returns their power to them.