It seems almost petty to lament the way Brokeback Mountain is hauling in awards, because I really did like it despite some problems, and furthermore because it’s sure better than anything that was nominated for awards last year. Of course, I thought last year was a very weak year of contenders – Million Dollar Baby, which won best picture, was both morally repugnant and, worse, a bad movie and Sideways, which was sort of the critical darling of the year, was only funny about twice. But what an abundance of riches this year. I don’t care if the numbers are down or if it’s Mel Gibson’s fault or anything, I really just want to see good, interesting movies – in that respect I think 2005 was as good as any year in recent memory.
That’s a point I could really expand on, but I really only mean to explain that I’m not trying to bad talk Brokeback Mountain when I say I don’t think it’s the best movie of the year. It’s just that this year offered a lot of really great movies, among them Munich, which is probably the best film I’ve seen this decade.
For me, a great movie has to be about something larger than itself. Great movies are not always my “favorite” movies – in the years to come I’m sure to watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin more often than “Munich.” But I’ll probably think about Munich more.
The first way it exceeds is that, pure and simple, it’s a great movie. It’s a thriller by Steven Spielberg. So it’s good even if you pay no attention to the subtext of the story, the politics, the many questions the movie asks. But it’s that subtext that makes this something beyond Minority Report or War of the Worlds – it’s the subtext that makes it great.
It’s easy, especially for those of us who are roughly my age, to dismiss the movie as historical, because it concerns events that happened before our lifetime. What matters in the movie, and what I think Spielberg did a very good job of reminding us, is what history teachers so often fail to remind their students of: Why this is relevant. On the surface this is a revenge movie about something that happened in Europe in the 1970s between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s easy to feel distant from even today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict if you’re living in the United States. But of course it matters. Even if you are completely unfeeling to the troubles of others, even if you somehow imagine that we do not now live in a global community, even then you must remember that the very existence of Israel (and America’s good relations with the country) is part of what fuels so much of the hatred felt for us by those who wish us harm. So it does matter. We should ask ourselves why they are fighting and what we can do to stop it. And part of helping to stop it is knowing historically why they’re still fighting.
In one of Munich’s best scenes there is a conversation that brilliantly lays out each side’s case, and yet refuses to take a stand. But it begins to make clear a terrible truth: Both are right, in their way. Both, in their way, are wrong. The film has been beaten up pretty badly by those who say it is overly sympathetic to Palestinians and by those who say it’s overly sympathetic to Israel – of course, that such vehement criticism is raining down from both sides is a testament, I think, to the fairness and truth of the film.
But Munich isn’t just about telling us how we got here in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It speaks volumes about the very nature of terrorism in the world today, and it’s this that has recently kept the film most in my mind. Munich shows us a mid 1970s world that I know existed but still can hardly find credible. In this world, terrorism is an almost legitimate tactic. Not because anyone thinks fondly of it, but because it works. Terrorists take hostages to gain the release of prisoners. The hostages die and some of the hostage takers are captured but then another group of terrorists hijacks a plane and demand the release of those captured hostage-takers. And it works. It’s a stunning thing, to see governments negotiate (which is to say cave in) to terrorists.
Of course, this issue is still around. It’s happening in Iraq all the time, it’s why we still don’t know if this young woman is dead or alive. But it’s not that common worldwide anymore because it doesn’t work very often. Most governments now refuse to negotiate with terrorists. And that’s a horrifying thing, because it can mean innocent American citizens being executed live on TV. In the case of the first part of this year’s 24, terrorists took an airport terminal hostage. Wouldn’t it be unspeakably horrible to watch as the terrorists slaughtered people because they could not extort whatever it is they wanted from the President? Wouldn’t it be terrible to be the President, watching those people die? But it has to go that way, because caving not only rewards bad behavior but also encourages more of it. So Munich is a stomach-turning lesson about why we don’t negotiate with terrorists, no matter the cost.
But the film is much more than a lesson about how we came to be here. It is also a question: How do we stop this? The movie is not about the Munich massacre, after all, it’s about a team of Israelis sent to kill those who planned the Munich massacre. It’s a revenge mission, and a covert one, but also a noble one. I dislike revenge and violence on principle, but I was rooting for Eric Bana and his team nonetheless. And yet, as the movie goes on, we in the audience start to question the worthiness of what the Israelis are doing as much as the characters themselves begin to doubt. We start to see questions like: Is it acceptable for an innocent person to die in an attack that also kills a bad guy? How many innocent people?
And more questions about the justness of their cause. We can of course understand why Israel feels it has been attacked by and why they seek revenge. But what about when the Palestinians begin to seek revenge on the Israelis? At some point you have to ask yourself: Where did all this actually start? At Munich? Or sometime earlier? So long as each side remains assured of it’s moral superiority then greater and more terrible acts of violence are necessary. And, justifiably, we begin to wonder: How does this stop?
There’s no answer. Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner aren’t naïve enough to cop out with any peace rhetoric at the end. Eric Bana, though alive, is not at all sure he will be able to stay that way. And what a life he has – he can’t even have sex with his wife without images of violence playing through his head. How does this end? It doesn’t. “There is no peace at the end of this,” a character says.
And then, as if to prove the point, the shot pulls back and we find ourselves looking at the skyline of Manhattan in the 1970s and the credits come up and roll over two very recognizable buildings that no longer stand there. It’s almost subtle. I have read reviews from people who seemed not to notice it at all. But I couldn’t stop staring at those two towers, literally couldn’t look away. I’m a smart person and I think rather often about the darker realities of our world, the wars we’re fighting, and all that. And yet while the movie played I hadn’t much thought about America, except to the extent that America was a part of the story. I hadn’t much thought about our own war on terrorism. I hadn’t much thought about the World Trade Center. But there at the end I finally understood.
A work of art like a book or a movie very often isn’t so much about what it’s title implies or what it seems at the beginning – it’s the last image that the writer wants to stay in your head. So it is with Munich. Yes, it’s about Munich. Yes, it’s about Israel and Palestine. But what I’ll always remember most is the way, at the very end, Spielberg reminded me it’s also a movie about today, about America, about those two towers that no longer rise above the skyline.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Hair, football, and game shows with exclamation points: A weekend in review
I need a haircut. That’s the main thing on my mind right now. My hair is seriously out of control. It hasn’t been this long since freshman year of high school probably. It hangs down far enough in the front that if I don’t push it to the side, it’s in front of my eyes. My hair always tends to be crazy after I sleep but it’s especially bad when it’s long. This morning I would have been about eight feet tall if you measured from the top of my hair to my toes.
So this weekend was not really so great. Didn’t really do much of anything on Friday or Saturday, except for some homework. Doing homework again really sucks, by the way.
Yesterday afternoon were the two events I was most interested in all weekend and, typically, they overlapped. The Broncos game started at 1, but I had to be at the Phoenician at 2:30 for tryouts for Jeopardy! In retrospect, I’m thankful I had the audition to save me from the agony that watching that game likely would have induced. Then again, I’m thinking maybe I jinxed the boys in predominantly orange by shaving on Saturday morning. I shaved so I would look presentable for Jeopardy! (we were supposed to dress as we would if we were appearing on the show). I hadn’t shaved for a good two weeks, though, and I was getting pretty hairy. As you in the audience are likely unaware, let me explain that Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer, who apparently thinks he’s a hockey player, had grown himself a nice “playoff beard” over the past several weeks. When I let the chin scruff take over, many people at work joked that it was my own playoff beard. I was even warned not to save it, lest it doom the Broncos. I shaved. The Broncos got whupped. Yet further confirmation that the universe is governed by my grooming habits.
But not the Jeopardy! universe, apparently.
Over the summer Diana and I took to TIVO-ing (sorry, digitally recording) Jeopardy! and then watching them the next day when I came home for my lunch break. I guess it was then that I signed up online for contestant recruitment. I don’t recall now if there was any kind of test I had to pass at that point or not – maybe they just assume anyone who really doubts their aptitude wouldn’t risk embarrassing themselves by trying out. So this weekend the Jeopardy! folks were here doing testing at the Phoenician. Basically, at 2:30 I walked into a ballroom with probably 70-100 other people (and we were the third group of the day) and we all talked briefly, answered some practice questions and finally settled in for the test. I understand that if you try out in California at the studio the whole thing is computerized but not so on the road. The questions are computerized but everyone in the room got a sheet of paper with 50 blank spaces on it. The questions went by very quickly; I think they said we only had 8 seconds per question, which is typical for the show I guess. You didn’t have to write it out in a question or anything, just get down enough info to answer the question. It was pretty typical Jeopardy, in other words some questions were easy because it was a category I know well, other questions were difficult but I was able to guess and a few just had me completely stumped. We all handed in our papers and two people went out in the hall to grade them. They’re pretty secretive about what it takes to pass. They claim there’s a pre-determined “passing number” based on how many people they need. But for all I know they only took the highest-scoring five (only five people from our group passed). If you pass, you stay on in the room for a while, play a mock game and talk to the producers. Basically, they’re trying to see who’s most likely to not freak out if they actually do end up on television. If all that goes well, they put your name in a file and they may or may not call to ask you to come to LA sometimes within the next year. Even if they call you, there’s no guarantee you’ll get to be on the show.
That’s all just for your info, though, because I didn’t pass the test. They jokingly tell you to just tell all your friends that you only missed the cut by one question, but actually they don’t reveal how well or poorly you did at all and they don’t reveal the scores of those who passed, either. If you don’t pass, they encourage you to try again, though not until a year has passed.
I will probably try again if they come back to Phoenix. Unlike people who were there yesterday from Denver, Texas, and New Mexico, I can’t imagine traveling to do this kind of thing. But it was still actually fun and challenging and I didn’t feel completely stupid. Also, I was probably the youngest person in the room. I’m not sure if that indicates that we do in fact get smarter with age or just that the older you get the more history questions are things that occurred in your lifetime.
Anyway, you won’t be seeing me on Jeopardy! any time this year. But you might be seeing me writing with my very own Jeopardy! pen. I guess it wasn’t a loss, after all.
So this weekend was not really so great. Didn’t really do much of anything on Friday or Saturday, except for some homework. Doing homework again really sucks, by the way.
Yesterday afternoon were the two events I was most interested in all weekend and, typically, they overlapped. The Broncos game started at 1, but I had to be at the Phoenician at 2:30 for tryouts for Jeopardy! In retrospect, I’m thankful I had the audition to save me from the agony that watching that game likely would have induced. Then again, I’m thinking maybe I jinxed the boys in predominantly orange by shaving on Saturday morning. I shaved so I would look presentable for Jeopardy! (we were supposed to dress as we would if we were appearing on the show). I hadn’t shaved for a good two weeks, though, and I was getting pretty hairy. As you in the audience are likely unaware, let me explain that Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer, who apparently thinks he’s a hockey player, had grown himself a nice “playoff beard” over the past several weeks. When I let the chin scruff take over, many people at work joked that it was my own playoff beard. I was even warned not to save it, lest it doom the Broncos. I shaved. The Broncos got whupped. Yet further confirmation that the universe is governed by my grooming habits.
But not the Jeopardy! universe, apparently.
Over the summer Diana and I took to TIVO-ing (sorry, digitally recording) Jeopardy! and then watching them the next day when I came home for my lunch break. I guess it was then that I signed up online for contestant recruitment. I don’t recall now if there was any kind of test I had to pass at that point or not – maybe they just assume anyone who really doubts their aptitude wouldn’t risk embarrassing themselves by trying out. So this weekend the Jeopardy! folks were here doing testing at the Phoenician. Basically, at 2:30 I walked into a ballroom with probably 70-100 other people (and we were the third group of the day) and we all talked briefly, answered some practice questions and finally settled in for the test. I understand that if you try out in California at the studio the whole thing is computerized but not so on the road. The questions are computerized but everyone in the room got a sheet of paper with 50 blank spaces on it. The questions went by very quickly; I think they said we only had 8 seconds per question, which is typical for the show I guess. You didn’t have to write it out in a question or anything, just get down enough info to answer the question. It was pretty typical Jeopardy, in other words some questions were easy because it was a category I know well, other questions were difficult but I was able to guess and a few just had me completely stumped. We all handed in our papers and two people went out in the hall to grade them. They’re pretty secretive about what it takes to pass. They claim there’s a pre-determined “passing number” based on how many people they need. But for all I know they only took the highest-scoring five (only five people from our group passed). If you pass, you stay on in the room for a while, play a mock game and talk to the producers. Basically, they’re trying to see who’s most likely to not freak out if they actually do end up on television. If all that goes well, they put your name in a file and they may or may not call to ask you to come to LA sometimes within the next year. Even if they call you, there’s no guarantee you’ll get to be on the show.
That’s all just for your info, though, because I didn’t pass the test. They jokingly tell you to just tell all your friends that you only missed the cut by one question, but actually they don’t reveal how well or poorly you did at all and they don’t reveal the scores of those who passed, either. If you don’t pass, they encourage you to try again, though not until a year has passed.
I will probably try again if they come back to Phoenix. Unlike people who were there yesterday from Denver, Texas, and New Mexico, I can’t imagine traveling to do this kind of thing. But it was still actually fun and challenging and I didn’t feel completely stupid. Also, I was probably the youngest person in the room. I’m not sure if that indicates that we do in fact get smarter with age or just that the older you get the more history questions are things that occurred in your lifetime.
Anyway, you won’t be seeing me on Jeopardy! any time this year. But you might be seeing me writing with my very own Jeopardy! pen. I guess it wasn’t a loss, after all.
Friday, January 20, 2006
“I got no time to get to where I don’t need to be”
If you’re looking for a happy song, you can’t do much better than Jack Johnson. So long as you’re looking for a contented, “what-a-beautiful-life” kind of happiness, that is. Still, you wouldn’t expect a song called “Breakdown” to be joyous, even if it was written by JJ. And yet this makes me smile:
"I hope this old train breaks down
Then I could take a walk around
See what there is to see
Time is just a melody
All the people in the street
Walking fast as their feet can take them
I just rolled through town
And though my window’s got a view
The frame I’m looking through seems to have no concern for now
So for now
I need this old train to breakdown
Oh please just
Let me please break down"
To the best of my knowledge, it’s a song he wrote while traveling by train through Europe. As he rolled on through town after town, he realized that much as he was happy to be headed wherever he was headed, a part of him also wanted to stop and investigate every little place along the way.
What a wonderful notion that seems to me.
I’m not Tony, but I have traveled by train (not since I was a kid) and one of the reasons I so prefer driving is that ability to do what you want when the mood strikes. See something you want a picture of? Pull over and take a picture. Want some food? Get off at the next exit and find something that suits your mood. Nevermind that I like driving, too.
It’s with that in mind that I’ve always yearned to take a cross-country drive. This is perhaps why, against all better judgment, I was charmed by the end of Elizabethtown. I was envious. Driving cross country is one of those things you are expected to do in your youth and that I always figured I would get around to after graduating from college. I had a vague notion of getting a job that didn’t start for several months and – if the job was in California, say – taking a route to get there that went through New York. Just because.
I love driving. I love being out in the middle of nowhere and I love driving in cities. I love finding random and unique shops and restaurants along the road. I love the freedom of having a motel reservation in a city a few hundred miles away and so many hours to kill before night comes.
At one point I had charted a tentative route that I figured might take as little as a few weeks or as long as two months, depending on how I felt. It included some cities where I had friends or family who would be willing to put me up, it included some cities where I’ve never known anyone but always wanted to go. It hit pretty much all corners of the country. I assumed I would do this in summer, so it was also contingent on my ability to stop and catch a game at Yankee Stadium, at Wrigley Field, at Fenway, even Camden in Baltimore. It was my own, mostly secret, dream. It was what I thought might be a graduation present to myself.
But when I graduated from college I was unemployed and so didn’t think it wise to spend what little money I had on a road trip. Plus, I was in love by then with someone who was both employed and no fan of car trips. So instead of packing my car up and heading out on some unknown highway, I just rented a U-Haul and drove to Phoenix. It wasn’t so bad. Friends helped me unpack and that night we all relaxed in the hot tub at the complex. I don’t regret it, you see. But I do still want to take that trip – someday.
"I hope this old train breaks down
Then I could take a walk around
See what there is to see
Time is just a melody
All the people in the street
Walking fast as their feet can take them
I just rolled through town
And though my window’s got a view
The frame I’m looking through seems to have no concern for now
So for now
I need this old train to breakdown
Oh please just
Let me please break down"
To the best of my knowledge, it’s a song he wrote while traveling by train through Europe. As he rolled on through town after town, he realized that much as he was happy to be headed wherever he was headed, a part of him also wanted to stop and investigate every little place along the way.
What a wonderful notion that seems to me.
I’m not Tony, but I have traveled by train (not since I was a kid) and one of the reasons I so prefer driving is that ability to do what you want when the mood strikes. See something you want a picture of? Pull over and take a picture. Want some food? Get off at the next exit and find something that suits your mood. Nevermind that I like driving, too.
It’s with that in mind that I’ve always yearned to take a cross-country drive. This is perhaps why, against all better judgment, I was charmed by the end of Elizabethtown. I was envious. Driving cross country is one of those things you are expected to do in your youth and that I always figured I would get around to after graduating from college. I had a vague notion of getting a job that didn’t start for several months and – if the job was in California, say – taking a route to get there that went through New York. Just because.
I love driving. I love being out in the middle of nowhere and I love driving in cities. I love finding random and unique shops and restaurants along the road. I love the freedom of having a motel reservation in a city a few hundred miles away and so many hours to kill before night comes.
At one point I had charted a tentative route that I figured might take as little as a few weeks or as long as two months, depending on how I felt. It included some cities where I had friends or family who would be willing to put me up, it included some cities where I’ve never known anyone but always wanted to go. It hit pretty much all corners of the country. I assumed I would do this in summer, so it was also contingent on my ability to stop and catch a game at Yankee Stadium, at Wrigley Field, at Fenway, even Camden in Baltimore. It was my own, mostly secret, dream. It was what I thought might be a graduation present to myself.
But when I graduated from college I was unemployed and so didn’t think it wise to spend what little money I had on a road trip. Plus, I was in love by then with someone who was both employed and no fan of car trips. So instead of packing my car up and heading out on some unknown highway, I just rented a U-Haul and drove to Phoenix. It wasn’t so bad. Friends helped me unpack and that night we all relaxed in the hot tub at the complex. I don’t regret it, you see. But I do still want to take that trip – someday.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Why I hate (and yet love) David Foster Wallace
Have I mentioned here yet that Powell'sBlog is my new favorite Web site? Well, it is.
Today brings a great posting, inspired (if not actually about) a David Foster Wallace essay. This paragraph in particular really hits the nail on the head when it comes to DFW:
"Many talented authors instill in their readership a particular brand of I-could-have-written-that confidence. Nick Hornby comes to mind. He makes writing look effortless. David Foster Wallace also makes the job seem easy, but unless you scored 800 on both your SATs, cruised through med school, and now spend nights pining for the time when Mensa membership really counted for something, you never get the feeling that you would have known to use quite the same words or to put them in as effective an order. No, if reading Wallace stirs any reaction among prospective writers, it's more likely despair. Why bother? The shaggy fellow on the book flap is clearly so much better at this, and better informed, than you could ever hope to be."
The full post is here.
Today brings a great posting, inspired (if not actually about) a David Foster Wallace essay. This paragraph in particular really hits the nail on the head when it comes to DFW:
"Many talented authors instill in their readership a particular brand of I-could-have-written-that confidence. Nick Hornby comes to mind. He makes writing look effortless. David Foster Wallace also makes the job seem easy, but unless you scored 800 on both your SATs, cruised through med school, and now spend nights pining for the time when Mensa membership really counted for something, you never get the feeling that you would have known to use quite the same words or to put them in as effective an order. No, if reading Wallace stirs any reaction among prospective writers, it's more likely despair. Why bother? The shaggy fellow on the book flap is clearly so much better at this, and better informed, than you could ever hope to be."
The full post is here.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
The Mountaintop
Martin Luther King Day was Monday and I meant to post this then, but I didn't.
This is a tiny bit taken from the end of one of MLK's most famous speeches, usually referred to as the "I've been to the mountaintop speech," which he gave on April 3, 1968. That is, one day before he was shot and killed.
"I have a dream" is a more famous speech, a more significant one. But it's maybe too famous. We all know it so well that it's impact is lessened; worse yet, King's whole memory is wrapped up in it, which is a shame because the MLK I try to think of is the man who has been to the mountaintop. A religious man, a man who fought the power but remained true to his mission of fighting in a non-violent way. A man who was arrested, harrassed, beaten, and still swore never to fight with fists or weapons, but merely his words. A man who, despite that, was murdered anyway.
I've been writing up a thing about the movie "Munich," which I saw last week but seems to haunt me with every new thing I see or think about -- MLK, 24, even James Frey.
These words ... even just reading them can make me choke up. For a brief while during their 2001 tour, U2 played part of this speech during "Pride," and it was utter genius, devastating, sublime.
Martin Luther King, April 3, 1968. Memphis, TN:
"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.
And I don't mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
I can stop whenever I want!
I have never used crack cocaine. I have never used methamphetamines. I have never used heroin.
But I do watch “24.”
As with a drug addict, it’s something that a sensible person might not admit in polite company – to those who he hopes will think highly of him.
As with a drug addict, I know 24 is bad for me. It’s painful while experiencing it and the resulting guilt is nauseating. But it’s an addiction. I can go off it here and there, if necessary. I can even rationalize that it would be better to not watch it altogether, lest its seductive wiles work their charm on me yet again.
But I am an addict. I am weak. I’m watching.
This show is awful, ridiculous, even disgusting in the way that appeals to the most violent and ugly of human emotions. It’s sometimes badly written, the plots are convoluted, and ever since season one the ridiculousness factor has increased exponentially.
As art, it's awful. As politics, it's awful. As suspense, it's awful.
But. I. Can’t. Stop. Watching.
Which I guess means it's fucking great TV.
But I do watch “24.”
As with a drug addict, it’s something that a sensible person might not admit in polite company – to those who he hopes will think highly of him.
As with a drug addict, I know 24 is bad for me. It’s painful while experiencing it and the resulting guilt is nauseating. But it’s an addiction. I can go off it here and there, if necessary. I can even rationalize that it would be better to not watch it altogether, lest its seductive wiles work their charm on me yet again.
But I am an addict. I am weak. I’m watching.
This show is awful, ridiculous, even disgusting in the way that appeals to the most violent and ugly of human emotions. It’s sometimes badly written, the plots are convoluted, and ever since season one the ridiculousness factor has increased exponentially.
As art, it's awful. As politics, it's awful. As suspense, it's awful.
But. I. Can’t. Stop. Watching.
Which I guess means it's fucking great TV.
Whither the hand job?
Sadly, that brilliant turn of phrase is not mine. It comes from this article, supposedly a book review but really more a mediatation on today's adolescent girls. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to be a writer.
(I agree with her, too.)
(I agree with her, too.)
Monday, January 16, 2006
What I thought of Brokeback Mountain
** As always, spoilers abound. You’ve been warned. **
To be fair, I really liked Brokeback Mountain. It’s just beautifully directed – which you would expect, because it’s Ang Lee. But no matter how many times they were all nominated, I certainly wasn’t prepared for how good all four lead actors would be. Really, who could have imagined that the guy from A Knight’s Tale and the guy from Donnie Darko would be so good as gay cowboys? Even more, who would have thought a girl from Dawson’s Creek and the girl from the Princess Diaries would be so good as the long-suffering wives of gay cowboys?
But it’s not a perfect movie. It’s slow in places, sometimes with great effect but other times it seems needless. The score is OK at first – spare and quiet, but so repetitive that it soon became noticeable to me (rarely a good sign).
The story itself is a bit of a melodrama, though I suppose that’s typical of love stories. But, curiously, whereas the melodrama of the short story worked, it didn’t work for me in the movie.
The story is fatalistic: From the very first moment Enis tells Jack that he worries about being found out you know at least one of them will die. As in the movie, the literary Jack Twist has ideas and dreams of how they could be together, but (perhaps because the story is told from Enis’ point of view) these never seem logical. As the reader you know the story isn’t going to work out that way.
But, even though I knew how the movie would end, I still found myself rejecting its fatalism. We see Jack in Texas, we know he is aware of the wider world in a way that Enis is not. At one point I started to wonder: Why doesn’t Jack just move to San Francisco? Of course, art – tragedy especially – is all about the choices people could have made but didn’t. Maybe that hint that it could have turned out differently makes the movie better. But not for me.
I try very hard to not let the experience of a movie be too biased by having read the source material beforehand, but Brokeback Mountain was a very different experience indeed. It’s probably the only movie I’ve ever seen with more plot than was in the original story. Given how short the story was based on, this was inevitable. The screenwriters did a good job with both the adaptation and the addition – but because movies are a visual medium and visual obscenity is more shocking than written obscenity and because this obscenity is homosexual and so even more risqué than plain old hetero sex – I felt the movie lacked shock value.
A lot of that is just me, of course. I’m not really shocked by the notion of gayness. Two men kissing isn’t something that turns my head any more than a man and a woman. And while I probably have a more open attitude about that then most of the movie’s audience, I’m still not really sure there was anything in the movie that was shocking to those who went to see it. Everyone walks in knowing they’re going to see “the gay cowboy movie.” Surely no one expects their relationship is only revealed through meaningful glances.
When I originally read it, the story was shocking to me. Here I had read all the way through this wonderful collection of short stories and I came to the last one in which these two cowboys are herding sheep on a mountain one summer. Nothing that came before suggests what the story is going to be about. You figure: sheep are going or a big storm is going to hit. Something. But frankly I would have been less surprised if one of them fucked a sheep than I was when – very suddenly, the whole thing goes from almost wholly platonic to full-on butt-fucking in a just a couple short paragraphs – they started having sex with each other. The story exploits pre-conceptions to shocking effect. I’ve read a lot of stories about men discovering themselves to be gay. I’ve read a lot of stories about cowboys. Reading it later I realized there are hints, little homo-erotic glances and yearning looks – but even that wouldn’t have prepared me for the gusto with which they jump into the sleeping bag.
Much as I remember that, what has always made Brokeback Mountain stick in my mind more than any other Proulx short story is the way it managed to be graphic without actually being graphic. The sex scenes, such as they are, in the story are probably the best I’ve read anywhere in the way they communicate everything important occurring without becoming porn and without being shy. But save for a handful of kisses and their first night as lovers, the sexual component of what Jack and Enis are up to seemed mostly removed from the movie. Which is understandable, I guess, but to me it compromises that good that the film is otherwise doing.
If this were a story of star-crossed heterosexual lovers it would be better than average for a love story, but not award-worthy, not a movie that people talk about even if they haven’t seen it. The whole point of Brokeback Mountain is its gayness. That’s fine to me, most good movies find a hook to turn on: Syriana is about the politics of oil, Munich is about revenge, Capote is about the inner battle of an artist. But it felt like cheating somehow to only tacitly acknowledge why Jack and Enis keep meeting up in the mountains. As Jack says late in the movie, “A few fucks a year” aren’t enough for him; this could almost be surprising because for nearly an hour we haven’t seen the two do much in each other’s company besides hug and drink whiskey and argue.
You have to admire a movie that asks its audience to confront homosexuality as its central issue (most gay movies are about something else – Philadelphia was more about AIDS, RENT is more about, well, AIDS, and Capote was more about being a writer). It’s just a shame that, good as the movie was, it seemed to lack the conviction of its subject.
It's not just that toward the end it stopped being much of a gay movie. It stopped being much of a romance. This is partly why it started to seem pointlessly long at the end. Jack comes and he and Enis fight. Jack comes but Enis has his kids. Jack comes and he and Enis fight. Yawn. Where's the passion? Where's the sex, the kissing, hell any reminder that these men love each other? It just seemed to vanish in the second half of the movie. It would have been a problem in any romance movie; it's especially one for the gay cowboy movie. The finale is powerful and redeems it. But that doesn't forgive the problems that came earlier. Why add so much extra story for Enis but leave Jack's character so murky? Why the waitress character? Why do "films" anymore seem to need to clock in at over (often well over) two hours, when they'd be better in every way if they were shorter?
To be fair, I really liked Brokeback Mountain. It’s just beautifully directed – which you would expect, because it’s Ang Lee. But no matter how many times they were all nominated, I certainly wasn’t prepared for how good all four lead actors would be. Really, who could have imagined that the guy from A Knight’s Tale and the guy from Donnie Darko would be so good as gay cowboys? Even more, who would have thought a girl from Dawson’s Creek and the girl from the Princess Diaries would be so good as the long-suffering wives of gay cowboys?
But it’s not a perfect movie. It’s slow in places, sometimes with great effect but other times it seems needless. The score is OK at first – spare and quiet, but so repetitive that it soon became noticeable to me (rarely a good sign).
The story itself is a bit of a melodrama, though I suppose that’s typical of love stories. But, curiously, whereas the melodrama of the short story worked, it didn’t work for me in the movie.
The story is fatalistic: From the very first moment Enis tells Jack that he worries about being found out you know at least one of them will die. As in the movie, the literary Jack Twist has ideas and dreams of how they could be together, but (perhaps because the story is told from Enis’ point of view) these never seem logical. As the reader you know the story isn’t going to work out that way.
But, even though I knew how the movie would end, I still found myself rejecting its fatalism. We see Jack in Texas, we know he is aware of the wider world in a way that Enis is not. At one point I started to wonder: Why doesn’t Jack just move to San Francisco? Of course, art – tragedy especially – is all about the choices people could have made but didn’t. Maybe that hint that it could have turned out differently makes the movie better. But not for me.
I try very hard to not let the experience of a movie be too biased by having read the source material beforehand, but Brokeback Mountain was a very different experience indeed. It’s probably the only movie I’ve ever seen with more plot than was in the original story. Given how short the story was based on, this was inevitable. The screenwriters did a good job with both the adaptation and the addition – but because movies are a visual medium and visual obscenity is more shocking than written obscenity and because this obscenity is homosexual and so even more risqué than plain old hetero sex – I felt the movie lacked shock value.
A lot of that is just me, of course. I’m not really shocked by the notion of gayness. Two men kissing isn’t something that turns my head any more than a man and a woman. And while I probably have a more open attitude about that then most of the movie’s audience, I’m still not really sure there was anything in the movie that was shocking to those who went to see it. Everyone walks in knowing they’re going to see “the gay cowboy movie.” Surely no one expects their relationship is only revealed through meaningful glances.
When I originally read it, the story was shocking to me. Here I had read all the way through this wonderful collection of short stories and I came to the last one in which these two cowboys are herding sheep on a mountain one summer. Nothing that came before suggests what the story is going to be about. You figure: sheep are going or a big storm is going to hit. Something. But frankly I would have been less surprised if one of them fucked a sheep than I was when – very suddenly, the whole thing goes from almost wholly platonic to full-on butt-fucking in a just a couple short paragraphs – they started having sex with each other. The story exploits pre-conceptions to shocking effect. I’ve read a lot of stories about men discovering themselves to be gay. I’ve read a lot of stories about cowboys. Reading it later I realized there are hints, little homo-erotic glances and yearning looks – but even that wouldn’t have prepared me for the gusto with which they jump into the sleeping bag.
Much as I remember that, what has always made Brokeback Mountain stick in my mind more than any other Proulx short story is the way it managed to be graphic without actually being graphic. The sex scenes, such as they are, in the story are probably the best I’ve read anywhere in the way they communicate everything important occurring without becoming porn and without being shy. But save for a handful of kisses and their first night as lovers, the sexual component of what Jack and Enis are up to seemed mostly removed from the movie. Which is understandable, I guess, but to me it compromises that good that the film is otherwise doing.
If this were a story of star-crossed heterosexual lovers it would be better than average for a love story, but not award-worthy, not a movie that people talk about even if they haven’t seen it. The whole point of Brokeback Mountain is its gayness. That’s fine to me, most good movies find a hook to turn on: Syriana is about the politics of oil, Munich is about revenge, Capote is about the inner battle of an artist. But it felt like cheating somehow to only tacitly acknowledge why Jack and Enis keep meeting up in the mountains. As Jack says late in the movie, “A few fucks a year” aren’t enough for him; this could almost be surprising because for nearly an hour we haven’t seen the two do much in each other’s company besides hug and drink whiskey and argue.
You have to admire a movie that asks its audience to confront homosexuality as its central issue (most gay movies are about something else – Philadelphia was more about AIDS, RENT is more about, well, AIDS, and Capote was more about being a writer). It’s just a shame that, good as the movie was, it seemed to lack the conviction of its subject.
It's not just that toward the end it stopped being much of a gay movie. It stopped being much of a romance. This is partly why it started to seem pointlessly long at the end. Jack comes and he and Enis fight. Jack comes but Enis has his kids. Jack comes and he and Enis fight. Yawn. Where's the passion? Where's the sex, the kissing, hell any reminder that these men love each other? It just seemed to vanish in the second half of the movie. It would have been a problem in any romance movie; it's especially one for the gay cowboy movie. The finale is powerful and redeems it. But that doesn't forgive the problems that came earlier. Why add so much extra story for Enis but leave Jack's character so murky? Why the waitress character? Why do "films" anymore seem to need to clock in at over (often well over) two hours, when they'd be better in every way if they were shorter?
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Schadenfreude
Schadenfreude (someone cue up the Avenue Q soundtrack!) is certainly not the most pure of human emotions, but that doesn’t make it any less sweet. Don’t we all sometimes love to see bad things happen to other people? The highlight of last year’s Orange Bowl wasn’t USC beating the hell out of Oklahoma (though I loved that), it was Ashley Simpson getting booed at halftime. I know I’m not only speaking for myself here.
So it has been with a tiny bit of glee that I’ve observed this week’s “outing” of all the BS in Oprah’s current book club selection, “A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey. (In short: Frey’s book is a supposed memoir of his adolescent life as a drug addict and criminal. Except that it’s now clear that Frey was at most a petty criminal and basically completely oversells his hardcore cred in the book.)
I read the book several years ago and didn’t much like it then, not because I had any sense of the non-truths in it, but mostly because I didn’t think Frey was a very good writer. Moreover, I had not too much earlier read a much better memoir, largely but not wholly about addiction and recovery, called “The Black Veil” by Rick Moody.
But most of all, Frey’s book was self-aggrandizing and – worse – hypocritical. Consider the section of the book when Frey is at a rehab clinic and a former patient of the clinic – an unidentified but well-known rock star – comes to talk to the current patients. The rock star claims to have consumed pounds of drugs on a daily basis – enough, it seemed to me, to kill a football team let alone a skinny punk. But that was the point – the rock star was over-embellishing his story to the point of ridiculousness. Frey lashed out against the rock star and writes of a fantasy in which he beats up the rock star for spewing such obvious and over-inflated BS. Which is pretty fucking ironic, no?
Personally, I have no moral qualm with some bits of fiction creeping into memoir. Any history is written from a point of view. But then again, Frey’s argument that he’s simply telling his own story as he remembers it is just laughable. Then he went on Larry King and offered up a defense along the lines of Clinton’s “it depends on what you think the definition of ‘is’ is.”
But what really annoys me are those who are sticking by him, especially Oprah. I understand she’s no desire to be made to look like a chump, but she’s turned on authors she’s picked before, and for less – just ask Jonathan Franzen. When Frey appeared on Larry King, Oprah called in and defended the author. Her feeling was that, no matter the facts of the story, the ‘inspirational value’ of reading the book is nonetheless the same. And I’m sorry but that’s just crap.
I didn’t find much of inspirational value in “A Million Little Pieces” to begin with; remember that in the book he proclaimed contempt for the rock star who over-inflated his story. That detail has stuck with me ever since because it didn’t mesh with an author who seemed all too-eager to “brag” about his own bad boy exploits before getting clean. And that was before I knew he’d made the “bad boy” shit up, for the most part. (In retrospect, that Frey’s story has a lot of fiction in it shouldn’t surprise anyone – he tried to sell the book as a novel before one publisher finally suggested he try calling it a memoir instead.)
As I recall, the inspirational message Frey tried to impart with his book was essentially that addicts aren’t victims – they only have themselves to blame and in the end only they can save themselves. I’ve got no quarrel with that message personally, I’m a big believer that we make our own destinies. I just never liked how Frey made his argument. (His crappy writing was another issue, but let’s not get into that.)
So what do we make of someone who has now all but admitted that the hole he had to pull himself out of wasn’t nearly as dark or deep as he previously claimed? Addiction of any type is hard to beat and there’s probably value in Frey’s actual life story. So what made him embellish?
My theory is that, never mind his rhetoric, Frey is ashamed of his actions. If I recall correctly, he was not raised in poverty, or beaten by his parents, or abused, or any of those typical social ills that we might expect would lead someone to a life of drugs and crime. This would explain his insistence that addicts have no one to blame but themselves. Without a suitably adequate reason for getting into drugs in the first place, he compensated by making his addiction and recovery all the more remarkable. The end result was that – to me at least, though not apparently to Oprah – the whole thing just rang false.
Maybe some people actually responded to that air of unbelievablity, and it increased their depth of response. I’ve read a lot of non fiction that has affected me that way – the more unusual and stunning something is, the more your remember it. But there’s a line between the unbelievably true and that which smacks of fiction – or, as in this case, trying too hard. Frey crossed the line. It was one thing for me to have that visceral reaction and not like the book when I read it two years ago – then I could still respect those who were moved by the story. Now I don’t.
Fiction has it’s place. It is often moving and wonderful. As I’ve written before, I believe strongly in the powers of fiction. But good fiction is not deliberately manipulative. And it is labeled as fiction. A Million Little Pieces broke both rules. So let the public shaming continue.
So it has been with a tiny bit of glee that I’ve observed this week’s “outing” of all the BS in Oprah’s current book club selection, “A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey. (In short: Frey’s book is a supposed memoir of his adolescent life as a drug addict and criminal. Except that it’s now clear that Frey was at most a petty criminal and basically completely oversells his hardcore cred in the book.)
I read the book several years ago and didn’t much like it then, not because I had any sense of the non-truths in it, but mostly because I didn’t think Frey was a very good writer. Moreover, I had not too much earlier read a much better memoir, largely but not wholly about addiction and recovery, called “The Black Veil” by Rick Moody.
But most of all, Frey’s book was self-aggrandizing and – worse – hypocritical. Consider the section of the book when Frey is at a rehab clinic and a former patient of the clinic – an unidentified but well-known rock star – comes to talk to the current patients. The rock star claims to have consumed pounds of drugs on a daily basis – enough, it seemed to me, to kill a football team let alone a skinny punk. But that was the point – the rock star was over-embellishing his story to the point of ridiculousness. Frey lashed out against the rock star and writes of a fantasy in which he beats up the rock star for spewing such obvious and over-inflated BS. Which is pretty fucking ironic, no?
Personally, I have no moral qualm with some bits of fiction creeping into memoir. Any history is written from a point of view. But then again, Frey’s argument that he’s simply telling his own story as he remembers it is just laughable. Then he went on Larry King and offered up a defense along the lines of Clinton’s “it depends on what you think the definition of ‘is’ is.”
But what really annoys me are those who are sticking by him, especially Oprah. I understand she’s no desire to be made to look like a chump, but she’s turned on authors she’s picked before, and for less – just ask Jonathan Franzen. When Frey appeared on Larry King, Oprah called in and defended the author. Her feeling was that, no matter the facts of the story, the ‘inspirational value’ of reading the book is nonetheless the same. And I’m sorry but that’s just crap.
I didn’t find much of inspirational value in “A Million Little Pieces” to begin with; remember that in the book he proclaimed contempt for the rock star who over-inflated his story. That detail has stuck with me ever since because it didn’t mesh with an author who seemed all too-eager to “brag” about his own bad boy exploits before getting clean. And that was before I knew he’d made the “bad boy” shit up, for the most part. (In retrospect, that Frey’s story has a lot of fiction in it shouldn’t surprise anyone – he tried to sell the book as a novel before one publisher finally suggested he try calling it a memoir instead.)
As I recall, the inspirational message Frey tried to impart with his book was essentially that addicts aren’t victims – they only have themselves to blame and in the end only they can save themselves. I’ve got no quarrel with that message personally, I’m a big believer that we make our own destinies. I just never liked how Frey made his argument. (His crappy writing was another issue, but let’s not get into that.)
So what do we make of someone who has now all but admitted that the hole he had to pull himself out of wasn’t nearly as dark or deep as he previously claimed? Addiction of any type is hard to beat and there’s probably value in Frey’s actual life story. So what made him embellish?
My theory is that, never mind his rhetoric, Frey is ashamed of his actions. If I recall correctly, he was not raised in poverty, or beaten by his parents, or abused, or any of those typical social ills that we might expect would lead someone to a life of drugs and crime. This would explain his insistence that addicts have no one to blame but themselves. Without a suitably adequate reason for getting into drugs in the first place, he compensated by making his addiction and recovery all the more remarkable. The end result was that – to me at least, though not apparently to Oprah – the whole thing just rang false.
Maybe some people actually responded to that air of unbelievablity, and it increased their depth of response. I’ve read a lot of non fiction that has affected me that way – the more unusual and stunning something is, the more your remember it. But there’s a line between the unbelievably true and that which smacks of fiction – or, as in this case, trying too hard. Frey crossed the line. It was one thing for me to have that visceral reaction and not like the book when I read it two years ago – then I could still respect those who were moved by the story. Now I don’t.
Fiction has it’s place. It is often moving and wonderful. As I’ve written before, I believe strongly in the powers of fiction. But good fiction is not deliberately manipulative. And it is labeled as fiction. A Million Little Pieces broke both rules. So let the public shaming continue.
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