I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Ummm...

Jack Nicholson has made a video endorsing Hillary Clinton, featuring clips from some of Nicholson's most famous characters saying things that sound vaguely pro-Clinton when taken out of context.

So apparently, the Clinton campaign--which the Huffington Post says released the video--thinks it's a good idea to have their candidate endorsed by a ghoulishly disfigured mass murderer, a deranged writer who talks to ghosts, a corrupt Gitmo commander who covers up the murder of his own troops, and a spoiled rich kid who likes to sexually harass hapless waitresses.  The best guy in the bunch is the woman-beating private eye who fails to punish political corruption and incest.

Maybe they just want us to forget the "3 a.m." commercial.

Clinton/Torrance '08:  You keep asking us all the questions first but WE DON'T MIND WE REALLY DON'T MIND WE'RE HAPPY TO ANSWER THEM HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY.

I'm Not There

In an age where the musician biopic has become such formulaic Oscar-bait that it now has its own parody movie, Todd Haynes has given the genre an original, distinctive twist.  Maybe we can start calling the Todd Haynes biopic a subgenre in its own right, since his Bob Dylan sextuple biography I'm Not There shares that twist with Velvet Goldmine and, to a lesser extent, Superstar:  a willingness to leap outside the particulars of its subject's life, to jump into allusion and parody and outright fantasy and so arrive at some larger, less easily represented truth.

Not that you can pin down anything as specific or confining as a Todd Haynes formula.  I'm Not There bears a few crucial differences from its predecessors, and one unmistakeable advantage--this time Haynes made sure got the rights to the music.  Velvet Goldmine arguably thrived under its constraints since the fake Bowie numbers dovetailed so perfectly with its themes of fabricated authenticity, and those Shudder to Think songs are fantastic homages.  But that's not a trick a director can pull twice, and while I'm Not There also pivots around the idea that its subject created his own identity, many times over, Haynes's polymorphous Dylan doesn't work quite the same way as his gloriously fake Bowie.  He isn't creating fantasy personas like Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or The Thin White Duke; he's creating Bob Dylan, many Bob Dylans, and to tell his story nobody else's music will do.  (The movie isn't exactly hurting for use of his back catalogue, either.  I'm not sure you could find a more bittersweet soundtrack for the collapse of Robbie Clark's marriage than "Visions of Johanna.")

The six lead roles are split between different periods in Dylan's life, different aspects of his personality, and different idealized conceptions of himself, with a few actors getting to walk the line between fact and fantasy.  Christian Bale plays the most squarely historical Dylan and the most boring one.  His late-developing paunch and the small crowd at his church strike me as a devastating shot at the Christian Dylan, but it's perceptive of Haynes to have the same actor playing the young, fiery, protest-movement Dylan everybody lionizes.  (The casting makes such telling insights that the script doesn't always pull its own weight.)  Heath Ledger gets some of the most moving scenes as the married Dylan, while Cate Blanchett gets the most fun Dylan and the most successful stunt casting--although Marcus Carl Franklin is unbelievably good as 11-year-old "Woody Guthrie."  Ben Whishaw plays what appears to be a purely ideal Dylan who never enters the biography, which is just as well since the movie is already bursting with Dylans.

We shouldn't overlook Bruce Greenwood, who contributes a great turn as all the various authority figures Dylan pushes against (one of them, naturally, named Mr. Jones). If Blanchett, Ledger, et al are one person fractured into many guises then Greenwood is the perfect antithesis, many forces compressed into one stoic face.  Sadly, a quick intercut almost ruins the trick by making the dual role too obvious, but Greenwood pulls off the aging Peckinpah villain and the sanctimonious BBC gatekeeper with equal aplomb.

I was hoping the Billy the Kid sequences would culminate in a burst of redemptive violence a la Peckinpah, but I guess that wouldn't be true to Dylan or his music.  Instead those scenes link up with one of the movie's most conflicted and compelling themes, an ongoing question of whether art is compatible with political engagement.  For most of the movie Dylan (in all his various guises) tries to wriggle free of everybody who wants to claim him and his music for their cause, but his scorn for awards banquets and possessive folkies quickly shades into total quietism and withdrawal.

This is where we pick up Richard Gere's Billy the Kid Dylan, in hiding from the world and his own reputation.  He learns soon enough that sometimes the world won't leave you alone--first through the sounds of jungle warfare echoing from the woods around his cabin and then, with a less heavy hand, when the law encroaches on the strange and mournful town of Riddle.  When Billy pushes back it's not with the gunplay his name and his cinematic inspiration seem to demand, and it's not terribly effective either, but the point has been made:  independence and artistic freedom are all well and good until the forces you've been ignoring set their sights on you.

Plenty of people, artists or otherwise, will tell you that art should never engage with politics (not infrequently after they encounter a work of art whose politics they don't share).  It's a common enough stance but, for me, an unsatisfactory one, especially when your country is engaged in something as monumentally, unavoidably evil as an unnecessary and unjust war.  I'm Not There flirts with the ascetic approach but says it can't work for long.  And if the movie comes back around to something like the other Dylans' position that music doesn't need a cause or a champion, if it resists being locked into one message just as much as Dylan does one identity, it still feels stronger for having questioned and ultimately rejected Billy the Kid's confusion of freedom with escapism.

That's not the only movie in I'm Not There.  At best, it's one of about five or six.  This is also a movie of haunting musical numbers and smart period jokes, of Fellini and Richard Lester and D. A. Pennebaker parodies (reminding me again of Velvet Goldmine and its playful exhumation of Citizen Kane), of Julianne Moore in a Joan Baez wig and David Cross on a golf cart.  A movie as witty and cryptic and passionate and melancholy and mercurial as its subject.

Thank You, Ed Brubaker

While we're thanking people, let's nod to Ed Brubaker for the neo-noir round-up in the latest issue of Criminal.  (Come to think of it, Matt Fraction had a piece of that, too.)  I hadn't realized this was out on DVD until I read his glowing review:

Two years ago, a couple of films sent me on a neo-noir kick. I wanted to see all the antecedents for The Limey and several of the movies excerpted in Los Angeles Plays Itself.  The gaping absence in my viewing was Point Blank, not yet out on DVD--I must have missed it by a couple months.  Brubaker and company have finally shown me the light.  The DVD is worth a rental just for the commentary track, which has director John Boorman talking with Steven Soderbergh, who cheerfully admits he's been ripping off Point Blank for most of his career.

Ideally I should have watched this two years ago, right between Charley Varrick and Vanishing Point (not a neo-noir, but still the most seventies movie ever made).  I may not have quite the same craving for stories of taciturn loners out for revenge anymore (Terence Stamp is still my favorite, by the way), but at least half of my interest in Point Blank was for its use of architecture and that still holds up.  Boorman puts the hideous late-modernist design of Los Angeles to great use, creating a spatial atmosphere as relentlessly inhuman as his characters.  The interiors are no less repellent, an overdecorated world of mirrored walls and wet bars; Point Blank comes from a 1967 where there's no Vietnam, no Sergeant Pepper's, and San Francisco has an Alcatraz but no Haight-Ashbury.  It's what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if Elvis had won the war: Graceland uber alles.  Point Blank is the dying fantasy of a decadent postwar culture--dead, but it doesn't know it yet.

So thank you, Ed Brubaker.  This concludes our latest installment of Things I Should Have Read or Seen a Long Fucking Time Ago Theatre.

Casino Royale

It broke my thirteen-year-old heart to see James Bond playing Texas hold 'em.  I could almost accept it in Casino Royale's Bahamian scenes, but attiring Bond in a tuxedo and sending him to an old-world casino while the dealer intones in an elegant continental accent about "the big blind" was a damn waste.  Why not have Bond drink Coors Light and drive a Ford truck and scream "I'm James Bond, bitch!" while you're at it?  Put the man in a game that reminds me of Sean Connery, not Dave Foley.

I realize the producers chose Texas hold 'em because everybody already knows the rules and can follow the game (and I suppose the game's televised popularity stems from the fact that it's so easy to follow, with most of the cards visible on the table and a betting system that lends itself to cheap theatrics--did any hand in Casino Royale not end with somebody going all in?).  But if you're going to choose the game because you don't need to explain it, you don't then need to have the characters standing around telling each other what a "tell" is, especially as Bond gets taken in by an obvious feint.  Besides, the Bond franchise is supposed to lead the curve, not follow it: maybe Casino Royale could have started a nationwide baccarat craze.  No, probably not, but it would have been fun watching your old college buddies and that slightly obnoxious guy from work buy those little paddles and the shoe.

Other than the choice of game, the biggest disappointment was the theme song by Chris Cornell (hopefully on his last stop before "I ♥ the 90s" color commentary), all feigned emotion and canned soul.  It would be hard to think of a less Bond-like singer who doesn't perform with a headset mike and a cowboy hat; another wasted opportunity, especially since the opening titles finally outgrew the naked-chicks-dancing-in-front-of-a-gun motif.  Otherwise the music was as great as it's always been since David Arnold came on board the franchise--he knows exactly when to play it cool and modern, when to introduce a loud John Barry flourish.

My gripes aside, the movie is a highly successful reinvigoration of the Bond franchise (although, as a Brosnan fan, I didn't think it needed much reinvigoration--just redirection, which Casino Royale supplies).  The film is unusually front-loaded on the action (I don't think I was able to exhale once during the Le Parkour chase scene) but I didn't mind the shift to intrigue and betrayal.  Daniel Craig handles himself well, presenting two very different faces of Bond:  the stoic, all but sociopathic killer of the Fleming novels and the first couple of movies, and a more humane person who surfaces only briefly before he is submerged again (literally).  The movie has too many false endings, although that's largely due to the imperfectly climactic source material.  This is the most complete and faithful adaptation of a Fleming novel in a long time, a sound strategy for bringing James Bond back to basics.

Of course, James Bond is always going back to basics.  The critics praised Timothy Dalton for playing a grittier, meaner Bond after the bloated Roger Moore years, and that only led to a couple of movies where he fought the Nancy Reagan-approved scourge of drug dealers--and Wayne Newton.  Pierce Brosnan started out with the cynical Goldeneye (directed by Casino Royale's Martin Campbell, apparently the franchise's go-to guy for realistic reinventions) and three movies later he was fighting villains who wore powered armor.  We'll see how long Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson can resist the temptation to include unkillable henchmen and submarine cars.

That said, I know Le Chiffre originally worked for SMERSH but I'll be disappointed yet again if the mysterious organization turns out to be anyone other than SPECTRE.  (Preferably a newer, quieter, more sinister SPECTRE but SPECTRE just the same, white cat and all.)  There are basics and then there are essentials.

Torture Heroes

In today's Washington Post, Stephen Hunter bemoans the lack of heroism in modern action heroes.  (Free registration required.)

Initially, his taste in movie heroes looks pretty good.  Effusing over John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Hunter looks for the qualities D.H. Lawrence identified in his survey of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales ("The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer").  But he finds them so lacking in today's leading men that he can only assemble them in a Frankenstein compilation of traits culled from the men who ruled the silver screen in the 1960s and early 70s, when Hunter was presumably coming of age.  He devotes a lot of attention to individual body parts, until the whole column reads like a mash note to the strictly heterosexual crushes of his puberty.

But he can't swoon over the tough guys of his past without first running down the presumably softer heroes of the present, implying that we're suffering some sort of manliness shortage.  He never really explains why Matt Damon (star of the admirably unsentimental Jason Bourne movies) and company aren't tough enough except to say that Ben Affleck is "too pretty"; the production department pitches in by running a picture of Johnny Depp in all his kohled-up Jack Sparrow glory.  Hunter wants but cannot permit himself to say that the new stars are just too goshdarned effeminate, although again the production department comes through for him.  In the illustration that accompanies the print version of the article, they've pasted the features from a half-dozen older stars onto a shaved, waxed, faux-hawked male body that looks like it's walked straight out of an underwear ad.

Since he won't directly voice this masculine anxiety, Hunter's case is mostly hypothetical and mostly negative as he inventories the things the new heroes won't do:

Today's stars need love.  They don't want to be feared, they want to be hugged.  They want to be told, "It's okay, big fella."  They don't want to shoot anyone, if possible; they certainly won't beat a confession out of a suspect [...]

In other words, today's male action heroes are wusses because they won't torture people.  By the end of the paragraph, this celebration of brutality isn't even subtext anymore:

They never get even, they don't punish, they see the folly of vengeance, they inflict pain only on special occasions.  (Last year's "Sin City" was one such occasion, where the point of the film was its removal from a moral spectrum, thus allowing its brutish heroes the freedom to torture, which they did.)

Sin City must be a tough case for Hunter, providing exactly the kind of swaggering, suspect-beating, bitch-slapping heroes he pines for yet rendering them as moral and physical grotesques.  I didn't much like Sin City but if it troubles Stephen Hunter by holding up a mirror to his ethic of abusive toughness then it did exactly one thing right.  (It also foregrounds and amplifies the misogyny of those old-school heroes, something Hunter studiously dances around in his paean to them.)

Elsewhere in the same paper Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan (our freedom-loving partners in the Global War on Terror), provides another perspective on interrogation and torture as seen from outside the comforting darkness of a cineplex:

The next day, an envelope landed on my desk; inside were photos of the corpse of a man who had been imprisoned in Uzbekistan's gulags.  I learned that his name was Muzafar Avazov.  His face was bruised, his torso and limbs livid purple.  We sent the photos to the University of Glasgow.  Two weeks later, a pathology report arrived.  It said that the man's fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the fine line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid.  He had been boiled alive.

And, if this should seem far from home:

According to a press release distributed to local media by the U.S. embassy in Tashkent in December 2002, the [Uzbek President Islam] Karimov regime received more than $500 million in U.S. aid that year alone.  That included $120 million for the Uzbek armed forces and more than $80 million for the re-branded Uzbek security services, successor to the KGB.

In other words, when the prisoner was boiled to death that summer, U.S. taxpayers helped heat the water.

But I'm sure the authorities got their confession, administered by torturers with the eyes of John Wayne, the lips of Clint Eastwood, and the callused, manly hands of Lee Marvin.

Hunter gives away his game when he writes that "Only a few boys seem to have the man-junk that can get them through the heavy lifting of a hero's role."  (The first one he lists is Samuel L. Jackson.  Mr. Hunter, I offer you this advice:  you might want to reconsider any sentence construction that has you referring to fifty-seven-year-old Samuel L. Jackson as a "boy.")  There it is, surfaced at last--the man-junk.  He wields the words with all the dexterity of a middle-aged dad picking up slang from his son, but the meaning is clear:  our generation of sensitive, torture-averse heroes just don't have the balls for the job.

His essay provides yet another reminder of the inadequate, appalling, embarrasingly Freudian explanation for the Bush administration's misdeeds in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and "black prisons" all over Europe.  We have inflicted horrible violence on the world, our principles, and ourselves because on September 11, 2001 our masculinity was threatened.  With the White House occupied by the worst possible people under those circumstances--a pair of guys who ran on a hawkish platform but had ducked the military conflict of their youth--our leaders became desperate to reassert our (their) manliness by any means necessary.  Too many of us, equally threatened, fell right in step behind them.  (Hunter, by the way, is a conservative movie reviewer and novelist who praised Dick Cheney's "samurai" qualities after the VP shot his hunting/drinking buddy in the face.  Apparently the modern samurai can coast by on draft deferrals--the important thing is the steely resolve with which he sends other people to fight.)  And so a bunch of the softest, most cowardly bastards in history play at hard men by ordering their subordinates to shock, drown, strip, beat, and humiliate prisoners, while the Stephen Hunters berate our fictional heroes for not joining in.

Which brings us to one of the most puzzling things about Hunter's piece: our culture currently has no shortage of torture heroes.  From movies to TV to comics, you don't have to look far to find entertainment that luridly dramatizes, justifies, or outright glorifies the business of inflicting pain on captives.  (An aside to my academic friends:  another sign that most culture doesn't "subvert" a damn thing.  An aside to my conservative friends:  still more evidence that "liberal Hollywood" doesn't just make liberal product.  Popular culture eagerly offers itself up to whoever's in power, ready to spread whatever good news they dictate.)

We would all do well to remember another piece of film criticism from New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels:

In even the most morally unsophisticated forms of popular storytelling, it is certainly not violence in itself, not even killing, that unmistakably separates good guys from evil ones. It is torture. Heroes may kill; villains torture [...]

Our government would like to obliterate that difference in its desire to excuse its own crimes.  We don't have to help them.

Beating a Dead Man's Chest

As one of the Curmudgeons used to say, this is not a review.  There's no point to reviewing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, a movie that has proven quite review-proof.  Hell, you've probably already seen it anyway, quite possibly in a theater filled with people your own age or older dressed in halfassed or occasionally fullassed pirate "garb."

If this were a review I might ask how a movie can run more than two hours and post several prolonged climaxes and still not have an ending.  I might bemoan that every successful franchise tries to force itself into the Star Wars trilogy model, complete with the requisite dead, captive, or comatose protagonist at the end of the second installment, observing that this one skips the carbonite and sends its hero straight into a floating Sarlacc Pit.  I might wonder why, given the runaway popularity of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, the producers still gave more screen time to boring Orlando Bloom.

But it's already too late, was always already too late, for reviews, even spot-on ones, so this is not a review.  It's a response to one dull, disturbing, and completely unnecessary element that all but ruined the movie.

The trouble starts with an overlong sequence in which Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and the rest of the crew of the Black Pearl find themselves captives on an island.  The eventual escape is choreographed amusingly enough but the entire episode is a narrative dead end, an obstacle to getting the movie doing what it should have been doing all along--imitating the first one with some more swashbuckling on the high seas.

Instead we get what feels like a solid hour or so of vintage racial caricatures as the pirates are held captive by savage natives.  Of course they're cannibals, even if we now know that stories of Caribbean cannibalism were rumors used to justify European colonialism and slavery.  (The term "cannibal" comes from a name Columbus used for the Carib nations; apparently it originally meant "brave and daring" to the Spanish and had nothing to do with eating human flesh.)  Of course Jack Sparrow is their white god.

But none of this is supposed to be real, right?  I'm pretty sure real pirates didn't have swordfights in runaway mill wheels or get chased by giant krakens either.  Everything in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Placeholder Before the Third and Hopefully Final Movie is drawn from a surprisingly shallow repository of cliches, but there's a difference with the cannibal stuff.  Two differences, actually:  it uncritically recycles racist propaganda and it's part of a larger pattern of insulting portrayals of nonwhite characters.  When a fatal fall in the same sequence kills half the crew of the Black Pearl--the reckless, treacherous half, so they deserve it--it claims all of the nonwhite pirates.  Treacherous white characters like Jack Sparrow or Elizabeth Swann or Gareth from The Office and the guy who got his thumbs broken on Seinfeld will live to see the third installment, but the dark-skinned ones aren't so lucky.  And while the surviving white pirates all have some kind of identifying gimmick or maybe even a name, the darker shipmates are just anonymous scum.

Treachery, cannibalism, and cannon fodder aren't the only roles for nonwhite characters.  They have one more part to play, the same one as always:  providing spiritual guidance for the white leads.  Jack and company escape the anthropophagists but not the stereotypes; their next port of call is some sort of maroon settlement with a hammy voodoo priestess who sets them on the right path (although, in the manner of this movie, she tells them almost nothing they don't already know or need to know--the better to stretch this wafer-thin plot over two and a half hours, and to make sure no audience member is too stupid to follow along).  Oh, and she flirts with every attractive male in sight, just another hypersexualized black character.  The rotting teeth, I concede, are a novelty.

All these screaming cannibals and voodoo hags are queasily reminiscent of the Skull Islanders in Peter Jackson's King Kong, but Pirates lacks even the arch movie quotations and pretentious Conrad passages that served as Jackson's halfhearted acknowledgement that there is something objectionable about his loving recreation of the racist fantasies of the 1930s.  At least Jackson knows his source material is troubling and tries to anticipate that response; Pirates enthusiastically embraces every stereotype it can find without considering where they come from or what baggage they might carry.

Responding to these stereotypes is difficult.  It's not enough to fold our arms and frown and say these caricatures are racist (although they certainly are), as if that label alone could change people's minds, because clearly it doesn't.  Instead it triggers a tiresome confrontation where the script runs something like this:  piece of pop culture makes disturbing or outrageous use of racial stereotypes.  Critic (preferably one of those elitist journalists or academics) calls it racist, confident that this settles the matter.  Indignant fans flood comment box, accusations of political correctness mingling with declarations that you're not supposed to take pop culture seriously anyway, frequently delivered with a spittle-flinging rancor that makes the critic's point better than they ever could.  Go here for a typical example.  What's your favorite reply--the guy who praises Lord of the Rings for showing "that a whites-only movie, geared toward a white audience, can succeed at the box office" (at last, a movie white people can watch!) or the guy who seems to think Moby Dick doesn't have any subtext?  Meanwhile the next blockbuster to feature cannibal darkies is already in postproduction.

Maybe we shouldn't settle for merely identifying racist stereotypes as if we expect everybody to agree that they persist in our popular culture and that they're a problem--two assumptions we can't afford.  Maybe we need to explain why they're a problem: in the case of Pirates because they reduce all nonwhites to mindless savages, backstabbing idiots, or cheerleaders for white people.

Most importantly, maybe we should ask why, in the twenty-first century, we're still taking such great pleasure from the racist propaganda of the twentieth century, or the nineteenth... or, now that Dead Man's Chest has bested all competitors, the fifteenth.  Maybe we need to mock these caricatures relentlessly wherever we find them.

As long as we don't do it in a review.

More Movie Fun

The nicest thing I can say about Crash is that it plays like a Paul Thomas Anderson movie gone horribly wrong.  (I realized this after the montage of disconnected Angelenos gazing forlornly out their windows to the accompaniment of some sweetly-sung dirge, but before the miraculous precipitation that ends the film.)  But that's too kind; Crash may be yet another movie intertwining the lives of a handful of socially and racially disparate citizens to offer a searching social commentary on How We Live, but it has none of Anderson's subtlety, humor, or joy.

This is a movie whose idea of dramatic tension is a father giving his little girl an imaginary invisible cloak that supposedly protects her from harm.  Its idea of symbolism is a detective pulling a Saint Christopher statue out of the dirt.  Its idea of epiphany is a black car thief deciding not to enter the slave trade.  And its idea of theme is making nearly every character an outspoken racist.  Of course, it's pretty easy to be a racist when all the other characters are walking stereotypes, from the fat indignant black female bureaucrat to the Asian woman who can't drive to the furious entitled yuppie housewife to the trigger-happy white cop.

The movie is basically a sincere version of the racial confrontation game Michael Scott inflicts on his staff in the American version of The Office:  hit everybody with their own worst stereotypes and lean back with arms smugly folded, confident that you've just opened a dialogue that will heal America's racial divide.  But Steve Carell knows Michael Scott is a self-important ass, whereas Paul Haggis and the thirteen other producers of Crash all proudly slap the "Martin Luther King" card right on their own foreheads as they wallow in our hatred.

Cocks and Bulls

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Martin Rowson
Tristram Shandy:  A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Michael Winterbottom

I wish I had minded what I was about when I encountered, on two different occasions last week, two different modern adaptations of Mr. Laurence Sterne's classic eighteenth-century parody Tristram Shandy:—had I considered that not merely a few evenings' pleasant diversion but the production of a rational Blog Entry was concern'd in it, this review should have made quite a different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see it.

I'd been looking foward to one of those adaptations for some time.  Martin Rowson's graphic novel treatment of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which converts the classic poem of modernist angst into a hard-boiled detective story starring a Robert Mitchum lookalike, is one of the wittiest comics ever written.  His version of Tristram Shandy does not disappoint; like the earlier Waste Land (which receives a quick nod or two), it captures the most important qualities of the original while tossing out deadly accurate send-ups of other works of art, literature, and popular culture.  But the bar has been raised somewhat higher.  In The Waste Land, the mere act of quotation served as a clever formal analogue to and parody of Eliot's densely allusive poem; in that sense no reference could ever seem out of place. Tristram Shandy, however, adapts a much earlier and less frantically allusive work--in the wrong hands the extranarrative quotations might seem anachronistic, even desperate.  Somehow, though, they never come to that; lacking the formalistic excuse of his Eliot adaptation, Rowson's manic references instead replicate the freewheeling spirit and the endlessly self-devouring self-awareness of Sterne's tale.

The quotations aren't just anachronistic, they're completely anarchic.  Narrator Tristram Shandy leads us through his conception, birth, christening, and accidental circumcision by windowpane while taking countless digressions into matters geneaological, historical, theological, metatextual, and scatological.  With this as his source material, Rowson can blend his inventions almost seamlessly into Sterne's style no matter how jarring the change in cultural register:  thus the faux George Harriman page or the Oliver Stone film version.  (Think Born on the Fourth of July for the latter, not JFK--it's surprisingly apt, given uncle Toby's condition, but then most of Rowson's jokes are.)

Nevertheless, the contemporary references become a little overbearing by the novel's end, where Rowson glosses over the last five volumes with a barrage of jokes about Martin Amis, Raymond Chandler, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Andrew Davies under the wafer-thin pretext that Tristram Shandy has been downloaded (or uploaded?) into cyberspace.  Those later volumes are a good place to cut material--although Rowson doesn't do justice to the Widow Wadman story--but the modern satires briefly eclipse the source material.

Fortunately, these japes are more than balanced by plenty of period-appropriate references, including some of the work's most impressive parodies:  A set of diagrams of seventeenth-century siege emplacements metamorphose into a wonderfully coarse sexual joke.  Ominous carceral landscapes from Piranesi represent the interior of a certain much-priz'd part of the male anatomy.  The digression-within-a-digression tale of Slawkenbergius is told through an art catalogue (a trick used to equally striking if less satiric effect in Tobias Tycho Schalken's Balthazar).  Best of all, though, are Rowson's many spot-on parodies of Hogarth's engravings.  The Hogarthian print is perfectly suited both to Rowson's antic, chicken fat-laden compositions and his fine-lined pen and ink style.  All of the Hogarth references are illustrated in suitably ludicrous detail; one even comes with mock Sean Shesgreen-style annotations.

If the pastiche does occasionally stray too far from the text of Tristram Shandy, it always remains true to the style.  Unlike Rowson's Waste Land, which seizes every opportunity to mock Eliot's poem for its deliberate inscrutability, his Tristram Shandy bears a genuine affection for its source and a winning desire to match or beat it at its own game.  (The bile is reserved for any academic or literary critic who presumes to analyze it.)  As Rowson tells his canine companion Pete, these self-conscious artistic digressions are perhaps the only way to adapt an arch, self-reflexive novel that's about the impossibility of writing a novel in the first place.

Before I'd finished the comic I stumbled across Michael Winterbottom's recent film adaptation Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which played in Nashville last week.  Winterbottom takes a similar approach to Rowson--much lighter on the allusions (everybody is lighter on the allusions than Martin Rowson) but just as self-conscious about the making of the movie as Rowson is about the composition of his comic, as Sterne is about the writing of the novel.  The movie stresses the impossibility of turning Tristram Shandy into a movie, especially in an industry that's established rigid and dreary formulas for the period piece.  A Cock and Bull Story hits on all of them, right down to the obligatory/gratuitous casting of the American actress (ably filled by Gillian Anderson, who doesn't even have the decency to be American).

The movie is funniest when the shooting of the Tristram Shandy movie-within-the-movie stops, and we follow lead Steve Coogan's attempts to quash a scandal, visit the mother of his child, hit on a sexy production assistant who's far too into German cinema, fund the movie, pretend he's read Tristram Shandy, and fend off a power play by very funny second lead Rob Brydon.  The industry critique isn't particularly cutting edge but the movie never pretends it's throwing bombs at the Man, always directing the mockery first and foremost at itself.  (Contrast with Swimming with Sharks, and pretty much every other "biting" Hollywood satire made in Hollywood.)

The Shandy adaptations, unfortunately, are less successful than the behind-the-scenes material.  The screenplay discards Sterne's language for a contemporary narration that manages to be more blunt and yet less direct than the vigorous if verbose eighteenth-century prose.  (Rowson keeps the original language, cutting out reams of it and saving the very best.)  The difference between our clumsy, modern euphemisms for penises and Sterne's flippant Georgian ones is profound; he seems less embarrassed by sex than we are, even with all those rows of *********************.

The movie's many digressions, self-reflexive jokes, and flights of fancy are more true to the novel, whether they operate through literal adaptations like the film equivalent of Sterne's famous black page (allow me to quote:

)

or inventions like the giant womb Coogan gets shoved into.  The truest Shandian humor, though, comes in the parts least tied to the novel.

Ultimately, both adaptations succeed because they're faithful to the spirit of Sterne's work.  But Rowson, working with a larger canvas, fewer time constraints, and no incentives to dumb down the material, manages to be faithful to the letter as well.

V and Virtuality

In December of 2001 I made a wonderful discovery and a terrible mistake:  I read Umberto Eco's brilliant essay "Travels in Hyperreality" just hours before going to see the first Lord of the Rings movie.  I've always wondered if my lukewarm reaction to that trilogy is as much Eco's fault as Jackson's, or Tolkien's, or my own, because while I never particularly cared for Tolkien's work I was even less inclined to like Jackson's plodding, unimaginative adaptations after reading Eco's piece, which tabulates the many forms of what he believes is a distinctively American mania for duplicates, copies, simulacra.  We derive no greater pleasure, he says, than being fooled into thinking that what we see is real.

I won't pretend to be above that desire; Eco described my own tastes as well as anybody's.  How else to explain my fondness for the various DC cartoons, for example?  Certainly many of those episodes deliver great stories in their own right, but plenty exist only to translate certain properties or plotlines into animated form.  Why should I seek out these retellings of stories I already know, unless it's because the added elements of sound and motion bring them closer to life?  Add the elements of live actors and CGI and they come closer still--and the pleasure in those simulacra might have been enough to get me through Jackson's dull realizations, if Eco hadn't ripped down the curtain and exposed the hapless wizard and his one simple trick.  After that, all I had left was Tolkien's beloved parable of a multiracial band of white people who form the world's first D&D party to stop the rising tide of easterners and half-breeds.  Middle Earth Prevails.

It's less of a problem when I like the source material, and few works have resonated with me as deeply or for as long as Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta.  I want to see a faithful virtualization of this work, though that's tempered by the realization that the director and producers have to make certain changes in translating it to a new medium with some very different constraints.  I don't object to the rearrangement of certain events or the trimming of key plotlines (even if Ally Harper and Helen Heyer are my favorite supporting characters)--those are brutal necessities.  I never expected or wanted the new film version of V for Vendetta to be a scene-by-scene replay of the comic; this may be one of Moore's most cinematic and easily translatable works, but there's just too much good material to do it all justice in anything less than a trilogy or a TV miniseries.

I was more afraid that director James McTeigue and writer/producers Andy and Larry Wachowski would simplify the comic, shying away from the more ardent, unpopular, or downright ugly parts of its philosophy.  I didn't really believe the movie was going to embrace the troubling contradictions of its source until I read this New York Times article, which marked the beginning of a nine-month campaign aimed, it seemed, at slowly convincing me that this might finally be the one, the dingus, the black bird, the holiest of grails:  a faithful, enjoyable, smart adaptation of an Alan Moore comic.

Let's be honest:  there is absolutely no way I can evaluate this movie with any kind of critical distance.  This is an adaptation of a story I've loved since I was seventeen.  It's faithful enough, close enough to the source material that the virtuality effect took over and all but determined my initial reaction.  So long as it didn't completely betray the material, which it does not, I was predisposed to like the movie just because I could finally see Finch and Evey and V moving and talking instead of just imagining them.  Which, if you think about it, is actually far less interesting, especially when the comic so adeptly invites the reader to participate by bridging the various juxtapositions and parallels of panel, word/image, plot, and theme.

But virtuality exerts its own attraction.  The film may not have a single image as fraught with arrested motion and potential energy as that panel where V is about to leap onto Prothero's train (there is one that comes close, as V closes in on Bishop Lilliman against a pastel twilight sky--maybe the only shot in the movie to duplicate Lloyd's muted palette).  But who cares?  This V moves.  He speaks.  He looks real.

So every reaction or judgment I had boils down to Was it like the comic?  Or, where the movie was changed, Was it true to the meaning of the comic?

And the short answer, by God, is yes.  McTeigue and the Wachowskis earn a lot of good will by preserving the comic's moral and spiritual core:  Valerie's letter, and the imprisonment/torture/interrogation sequence that it's part of.  That in turn preserves the horrible, unresolvable moral ambiguity that has always been one of the graphic novel's great merits.  I don't mean the ambiguity of dithering over which side is right, for both the comic and the movie are admirably straightforward on this point, but of presenting in unflinching detail the horrible means V uses for noble ends.  This sequence is an almost literal translation of comic to film, virtualizing the comic's harshest and most uplifting episodes.  Wherever the film does so it doesn't go wrong.  Well, they kept the pedophile priest.  But otherwise.

Nor did I mind the necessary changes to the backstory, which update the 1982 comic's nuclear panic to more contemporary fears of bioterrorism (and, of course, gays).  Alan Moore has groused that his story has been "turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country" (thanks, Jog), but he's being too harsh; he would rather there be no movie at all, of course, but for those of us who are under the spell of seeing our favorite stories turned animate and concrete the Wachowskis and McTeigue have struck a good balance between making the story contemporary and remaining true to its mood and setting.  (Can you imagine the uproar in Northampton if they had set it in America?)  In fact, they've done exactly what Moore recommends:  "set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today."  It just happens to be his story, or a version thereof.

Other changes are less necessary, and less successful.  Much of the dialogue is laughable, which is absurd since this property came readymade with some of the finest dialogue available on this side of the firmament.  I'm afraid it actually does require negative talent to come up with some of the lines we were given in its stead.

Evey is a more adult character now, and her class standing has been bumped up as well; she's working in TV production, not a match factory, and she doesn't have to whore herself out to make ends meet.  Was this an attempt to clean up the character by wiping away any troublesome improprieties, or to pitch the character at an American audience generally more affluent than Warrior readers back in Thatcher's England?  In either case, Evey is more mature, less vulnerable, and not especially looking for a father figure anymore; she never quite helps V in any premeditated way (until the very end), even working against him at one point in a vain attempt to pry herself out of his clutches.

That greater confidence means Evey can reject V in no uncertain terms after his worst crimes are revealed.  This is more morally palatable for us and better for Evey, but it's worse for the plot as it means she never sticks around to learn the tricks of V's trade, or to denounce his methods once she does.  The change truncates her moral development--she begins the film more capable than her comics counterpart but ends it somehow less so--and raises the question of why V needs to remold her in the first place.  Worse still, I get the feeling that Evey was aged not to offer a clearer renunciation of V's actions, but to set up an utterly conventional love story between the two of them, their conflicted, moving father/daughter relationship scrapped because Hollywood can imagine no kind of relationship other than enemy or lover.

The Gordon Dietrich character works well, though, much better than I had initially feared.  He is a reworking of the Gordon character from the graphic novel, classed up just like Evey from a small-time gangster to a late-night talk show host, and he's  got his own personal Shadow Gallery, which makes him an even more explicit failed V surrogate.  His lampoon of the government (which fulfills the same role as the illicit revue in the Kitty Kat Keller) is a one-time deal, and it has exactly the consequences we'd expect it would have in Adam Susan's England, which makes the departure from Moore's and Lloyd's vision much more acceptable.  It also makes Dietrich somebody who tries to criticize the government from within the channels of respectable civil discourse; his utter failure within those channels is even better anarchist propaganda than the original.

Except V isn't an anarchist anymore.  On this point Moore, Greg Morrow (providing quality film commentary over at Les Bourrus Hurlants) and I are in full agreement:  the film timidly erases any hint of anarchy to promote democracy instead.  It still advocates the blowing up of buildings, mind you, although V doesn't rack up nearly as much of a body count.  (Except for his personal vendetta.  That's still okay.)  I don't object to the politics of this change, for the net results are much closer to my own, so much as the general whitewashing.  The film doesn't change V's methods, it just tries to paint a friendlier smile on them.

And there are a few things to be said for the anarchist V, honesty foremost among them.  The film V is just as monstrous but less explicit about acknowledging that he's become a monster; the script has none of the discussions about anarchy and order that make Eve's future role, or the dangers of V's present one, so clear.  But I knew this movie wouldn't be as clever as the comic.  I even knew that, despite its admirable willingness to criticize our imperial presidency and the unfortunate timeliness of its depictions of detainment and torture, it wouldn't be as outspoken as the comic.

But it looks so real.

Really, I never should have written this post.  I never should have thought about the movie at all.  I kept my expectations realistic until the last week or so before the release, when the reviews got so ecstatic and the defenders of torture got so outraged, and by the time I was sitting in the theater and the previews started I was fired up to love it.  I was still fired up when I left the theater and started the car and practically the first line I heard over the stereo, by earlier design, was "Alan Moore knows the score."  This was the dingus, or as close as we are ever going to get.

In this comment thread (scroll down), Dave Intermittent called V for Vendetta, the original one, "a young man's book, inasmuch as anarchism is a philosophy for naive young men."  That might be true for Book 1, with its cool Shakespeare-quoting knife-throwing building-demolishing hero and its poisoning by communion host and its detective who actually says, without any trace of irony, "I'm going to have to get right inside his head, to think the way he thinks.  And that scares me."

But Moore had already outgrown all that by Book 2, which is itself a story of growing maturity as Evey is pulled away from her childish dependency on V and forced, through the most horrific ordeals, to become Eve, who by Book 3 will not have much patience for the kind of simplistic allegories V spouts back in Book 1.  Even V's platitudes become more complex:  compare his tale of anarchy and justice just before he blows up the Old Bailey in Book 1, Chapter 5, "Versions" with his distinction between anarchy and chaos in Book 3, Chapter 2, "Verwirrung."  Compare his absolute certainty that he's done right by Evey at the end of Book 2 with his recognition in Book 3 that his enemies aren't the only ones who have to be disposed of to build a new England.

The book continues to grow still.  It's shed the circumstances of its creation, outlasted Thatcher and crossed the Atlantic to take on conservatism's newer, even uglier face.  Maybe V for Vendetta has endured because the comic grows up with its readers.  As I wrote last year, the seventeen-year-old can latch onto the cool slogans like "Ideas are bulletproof" and the adult can linger over Valerie's letter.

And that is the movie's most unfortunate absence.  I had been afraid the Wachowskis, those purveyors of shlock gnosticism and bullet time, would produce a movie of adolescent simplicity.  I was wrong:  they produced a movie of adult simplicity, of revenge fantasies and revolutions made palatable for responsible citizens.  They picked up after the book's moral ambiguities without really confronting them and stripped it of some vital transgressive energy in the process.  They gave us Valerie's letter, and it was beautiful; but I wanted some big, bold, bulletproof ideas to go with it.

Journey of a Critic

I really don't want to come across as one of the fanboy purists.  I don't expect cross-media adaptations to duplicate their source material note for note and I often don't like those that do.  That's why I'm not being complimentary when I say the greatest thrill in the modern Hollywood megabudget version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes from its evocation of the decidedly lo-fi television shows and radio plays made a quarter-century ago.

The new Hitchhiker's Guide produced a number of mild laughs, most of which had been knocking around in the cellar for a couple of decades, and one moment of most transcendent joy.  It happened when "Journey of a Sorceror," the theme to the old BBC radio and television Hitchhiker's, came out of absolutely nowhere to play over the titles.  Obviously, this is a thrill that depends on memory and referentiality (self-referentiality and therefore not quite of the sort that's causing such a stir, but only just barely):  it only affects you if you have warm memories of those earlier adaptations.

But this bit of nerd-pleasing in-jokery stirred a nostalgia I didn't even know I felt.  I had forgotten this theme, forgotten I'd even forgotten this theme, until it roared out of the depths of CGI'd space to bring back memories of the middle school gym where I first saw the old BBC shows.  (Upon reflection, I went to some pretty weird-ass middle schools.)  I realized how much of my early adolescence, that time where we choose the subcultural affinities that will define us, for better or worse, for the rest of our days, was played to an ambient soundtrack of the BBC's futurist electropop.  I tip my hat to you masters of Maida Vale, you kings of tweedy sci-fi shlock.

(Yet I just learned yesterday morning that said theme was written by - oh dear god - one of the Eagles.  I'm happy for Bernie Leadon, though. At least his work with the Hitchhiker's franchise turned out better than his on-screen debut.  Here's a free piece of advice for all budding rock stars:  If you decide to hire the Hell's Angels for your concert security, and if you decide to pay them in cocaine, DO NOT PAY THEM UNTIL AFTER THE SHOW.  You'll thank me for these words of wisdom later.)

It doesn't speak well of the new movie that all its high points are like that, big-budget realizations of a twenty-five-year-old geek ur-text.  The movie is at its best when it restages the same old Hitchhiker's scenes; departures from that original, especially a disastrously staged sequence on the Vogon homeworld, are usually mistakes.  I realize it's especially hard to identify an "original" with this story, which has warped through more permutations than the Heart of Gold.  For all I know the Vogsphere stuff was penned by Adams for the special Hitchhiker's Guide kineoscope adaptation, visible only on an old hand-cranked Victorian peepshow machine in the sub-basement of the V&A.  But it seems new, and it unquestionably doesn't work.

The movie's greatest failing is its brutal narrative economy.  The director is in such a rush to convey information that he forgets to make any of it amusing:  even the Guide entries lose much of their droll wit, try as Stephen Fry might.  But the relentless plotplotplotplotplot pacing makes absolutely no sense in light of the movie's many narrative distractions, especially the sequence on Vogsphere and a long, even more pointless scene with John Malkovich as Humma Kavula or Hava Nagila or something - basically an ecclesiastical Al Gore to Sam Rockwell's all too Bushlike Zaphod Beeblebrox.  Confused politics aside, these interludes are wholly superfluous, mere obstacles to getting the characters back into vintage Hitchhiker's territory, and I had the same reaction to all of them: this was time that could have been funny.

Not that it necessarily would have been.  The casting isn't bad; even Rockwell could have reined in his scenery-chewing performance, I'm sure, if they'd had a crew of handlers standing by just off-camera with electric cattle prods at the ready. Some of the cast does a whole lot with nothing and some just stay at the level of what the script and direction give them.  The best treat is, again, another exhumation of the BBC television series when Simon Jones, the old Arthur Dent, turns up to play a homicidal but extremely courteous answering machine message.  His scene works because he, better than anyone else in this film, knows how to play the deadpan delivery that drives Douglas Adams's humor.  It's sorely missed in the rest of the movie, which is too frantic by far.

On the other hand, Jones's brief appearance also suggests that Martin Freeman (of the original The Office) is in some ways better suited to play Arthur.  There is something a bit too polished, too BBC about Simon Jones, as if nobody that composed could possibly be about to lose his house, his dream girl, or his planet.  Actually, Jones has just about the level of sang-froid one would expect of a thermonuclear-empowered answering service.  This isn't to say Freeman's Arthur is better than Jones's, but I'd place any shortcomings squarely on the scripting and direction, not the ability of the actors.

Freeman also has a tougher job than Jones as he is, of the movie's four principals, the only English actor and thus in some ways the most responsible for conveying the Adams wit.  Everyone else has been Americanized, resulting in a sort of transatlantic schizophrenia.  The economies of scale are pure Hollywood but the movie intermittently tries to remind us that it's English, mostly through a sort of overcompensating Englishness (Anglité?):  the plummy Stephen Fry narration, the Vogon designs that look a lot like they're lifted from Martin Rowson (it's the high noses), the satire on bureaucracy that looks a lot like it's lifted from Brazil.  That's part of the original too, of course, whichever original you care to choose, and so it predates Terry Gilliam's masterpiece, although it hasn't aged nearly as well; after a quarter-century of Thatchers and Reagans, and Third Ways and New Labours, there isn't anything even mildly subversive about railing against civil servants anymore.

In fact, the Bushian direction of Zaphod and the increased screen-time for the soft target of Vogon bureaucracy combine to provide, at moments, an oddly paleoconservative tilt to the movie - and it's no coincidence that they've toned down all the "God is dead" bits of the original Guide entries, right?  Anything that might tweak or challenge the currently dominant American political or religious mode is gone, leaving only some of the most scathing social satire of the James Callaghan government.

See, I'm not one of the fanboy purists - some of the twenty-five-year-old comedy I can do without.