All about the Coen Brothers

Last week, Slate published three pieces I wrote about the films of Joel and Ethan Coen: first, an essay about my path from initial fandom to mild hostility to a more thoughtful (I hope) devotion to their work (accompanied by a slide show of some of their favorite motifs); second, a brief write-up, with clips, of their short films and advertising work; and third, my personal (and tentative) ranking of their fifteen feature films, with links to the many rankings others have done over the last few years.

Then on Monday I wrote a post for Brow Beat, the Slate culture blog, reflecting on the results of a poll Brow Beat blogger Nina Shen Rastogi put up asking readers what their favorite (and least favorite) Coen brothers films were. I also wrote in that post about the many enjoyable responses generated by the pieces published the week before (I learned, among other things, which Coen brothers film Judd Apatow prefers to the rest, something I did not think to ask him about last fall).

This is not the first time I have written about the Coen brothers for Slate: in 2008, ten years after the release of the The Big Lebowski, I considered the politics of Walter Sobchak.

“One should never tell anyone anything.”

Today in The National, I write about the massive and fantastic novel Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías (pictured left), the third volume of which has just been published in English.

Your Face Tomorrow, the enormously ambitious novel in three volumes by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, began seven years ago with a warning: “One should never tell anyone anything.” Not that Marías or his narrator, Jaime Deza, believes this advice – both go on to violate it for nearly 1,300 pages. But that opening remark haunts all that follows. Like so much fiction by Marías, Your Face Tomorrow returns again and again to the moral complications of storytelling: the hidden motives behind the stories we tell; the inevitable inaccuracies of language; the way that just listening to a story can implicate us in what it recounts. As the narrator of another Marias novel, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, says: “the only safe option would be never to say or do anything”.

Read the rest.

From Chance the Gardener to Joe the Plumber

Today in Slate, I argue that Hal Ashby’s best movies—culminating in his masterpiece, Being There—are deeply political.

Unlike Network—made four years earlier and based on the fear that one man could amass enormous influence on the airwaves—Being There suggests that television's real threat is the way it scatters our attention among random stimuli. As Eve says in the clip above, we now have too much information, and it's all become "a muddle." Which is precisely why Chance—mistaken by Eve's husband for an economist named Chauncey Gardener—can rise to prominence by obliviously spouting platitudes like "as long as the roots are not severed, all will be well" and "growth has it seasons." Soon the president of the United States is echoing his remarks, and Chance himself is invited to share his wisdom on the talk show circuit—a trajectory that, at this point, feels sadly familiar.

Read the rest.

(Above, Chance the gardener watches television.)

"...at least it's an ethos."

With the 10th anniversary of The Big Lebowski upon us, I present the argument in Slate today that Walter Sobchak, the bellicose Vietnam vet played by John Goodman, is a neocon:

If that seems like a stretch, consider the traits Walter exhibits over the course of the film: faith in American military might (the Gulf War, he says, "is gonna be a piece of cake"; in the original script, he calls it "a fucking cakewalk"); nostalgia for the Cold War ("Charlie," he says, referring to the Viet Cong, was a "worthy fuckin' adversary"); strong support for the state of Israel (to judge from his reverent paraphrase of Theodor Herzl: "If you will it, Dude, it is no dream"); and even, perhaps, past affiliation with the left (he refers knowingly to Lenin's given name and admits to having "dabbled in pacifism"). Goodman, who has called the role his all-time favorite, seems also to have sensed Walter's imperialist side. "Dude has a rather, let's say, Eastern approach to bowling," he said in an interview. "Walter is strictly Manifest Destiny."

(That's Walter up there on the left, by the way, played by John Goodman, and doing his best Colin Powell.)

Daniel Mendelsohn's essays

In the New York Observer this week, I review Daniel Mendelsohn's How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of his (brilliant) essays:

Daniel Mendelsohn brightens the dour New York Review of Books like few other contributors. This is partly thanks to his subject matter: neither Iraq nor climate change but literature, theater and the movies. It’s also thanks to his—not style, exactly; Mr. Mendelsohn’s a gifted writer, but the prose of his essays is less lyrical than that of his books, The Lost (2006) and The Elusive Embrace (1999). What distinguishes his criticism, rather, is a willingness to address not just the arts but their reception. He writes reviews as cultural commentary, and he’s more or less mastered the form.

Attempted Resurrection

New York Observer

May 7, 2008

THE LAZARUS PROJECT
By Aleksandar Hemon
Riverhead Books, 292 pages, $24.95

A haunting, 100-year-old photograph faces page 53 of The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon's second novel and third book: A top-hatted gentleman with a neatly trimmed white beard stands behind a younger man, more shabbily dressed and slumped in a chair. He holds the young man's head in his hands and looks straight at the camera; the young man's eyes are half closed and appear crossed. The men's names are etched onto the photo: Standing is Captain Evans, of the Chicago police department, and sitting is Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant, just 19 years old, who, when this photograph was taken, had very recently been shot and killed by Chicago's Chief of Police.

The killing of Lazarus Averbuch is depicted in the book's first chapter. Then we meet the book's narrator, Vladimir Brik, whose background parallels that of Aleksandar Hemon himself: a Bosnian who came to Chicago in his 20s, just before the siege of Sarajevo, and stayed there. Brik has gone from odd jobs to teaching ESL to writing a low-paying column about the immigrant experience. As the book opens, he's hoping for a grant to write a book about Averbuch, who survived a pogrom in the Ukraine only to be killed a few months after arriving in the U.S. One night in March of 1908 Averbuch went, for reasons uknown, to the house of Chief George Shippy, who suspected the young man was an anarchist and shot him seven times.

The Lazarus Project alternates between Averbuch's story and the journey of Brik and his old friend Rora, first to Averbuch's native Ukraine, then to Sarajevo. The charismatic and cynical Rora lived in Bosnia during the war, taking photographs and doing other work for a powerful thug named Rambo; he was also a fixer for a reporter named Miller. Now he takes pictures for Brik, documenting their journey. These photographs—taken in fact by Velibor Božović, a photographer and old friend of Mr. Hemon's—adorn alternate chapters of the book; the others are fronted by photos from Averbuch's era.

This dual structure is fairly simple by Mr. Hemon's standards: The stories in his remarkable first book, The Question of Bruno, are frequently fragmentary, sometimes footnoted, and stunningly varied, while his even better first novel, Nowhere Man, has multiple, indeterminate narrators and a concluding chapter with no obvious connection to what comes before. The Lazarus Project is, on the surface, less difficult; the prose, too, is more plain, mostly without the wild juxtapositions seen in the earlier books. It's still beautiful, though: After Shippy shoots Averbuch, we see "the gun smoke slowly moving across the room, like a school of fish."

The quieter approach lends itself to the material—particularly the devastating story of Olga Averbuch, Lazarus's sister. Fierce and complicated, full of grief and anger, she wrestles with the uncertainty about what happened to her brother and the impossibility of writing her mother back home with the news. There are echoes here of an earlier Hemon story, "A Coin," about a Bosnian man in the U.S. and a woman he knows still in Sarajevo.

Such parallels abound in The Lazarus Project: Lazarus is an immigrant, like Brik (who wonders if the Biblical Lazarus, risen from the dead, was also a kind of immigrant); the pogrom Lazarus survived is akin to the ethnic cleansing carried out in Bosnia; and American hysteria about anarchists circa 1908 resembles the fear-mongering perpetrated by, among others, our "idiot president." (As a "reasonably loyal citizen," Brik tries "hard not to wish painful death to" him.)

Well into the book, Brik mentions a fight he had with Mary, his American wife, about the photos from Abu Ghraib. She sees in them "decent American kids acting on a misguided belief they were protecting freedom"; Brik see kids who "loved being alive and righteous by virtue of having good American intentions," and who "liked looking at the pictures of themselves sticking a baton up some Arab ass." During the argument, Brik "flipped and turned crazy," he tells us, shouting about "the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave." Rora, we learn, took pictures of the dead during the war in Bosnia so that Rambo could look at them and enjoy the power of "being alive in the middle of death."

Back on page 52, the eyes of Captain Evans take on a menacing look. Aleksandar Hemon takes no joy in the death around him, attempting instead a kind of resurrection. It's an impossible task—but Hemon works miracles.

Reagan's Favorite Sitcom

My latest for Slate: Alex P. Keaton, conservative hero.

Even after the show shifted its focus to Alex, it trapped him in scenarios seemingly contrived to refute his free-market-über alles worldview. When we meet Alex's hero—his uncle Ned, a rising young executive memorably played by Tom Hanks in a two-part episode—he is on the run for embezzling $4.5 million... And when Alex leaves his job at a mom-and-pop grocery for a big-box store offering higher pay and possible advancement, he finds himself in charge of cat toys and referred to only as "junior stockboy No. 28." Alex returns to his old job, having learned—well, you know.

Reponses to this article from Lawyers, Guns & Money, Joshua Glenn, Free Republic, The Hotline, and WorldViews.

The Miracle of Preston Sturges

My second article for Slate is about the great Preston Sturges, who made eight movies in four years-- seven of which are terrific.

The Lady Eve was Sturges' biggest hit yet, and the reviews were so good they "scared the bejesus out of" him. "I feel like making a good safe tragedy," he wrote to one critic. Instead, he turned his satirical eye on himself with Sullivan's Travels, about a successful director of Hollywood comedies who wants to make a tragedy—specifically, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, based on the novel by Sinclair Beckstein.... Sullivan, played with perfect self-deprecation by Joel McCrea, wants to make "a picture of dignity ... a true canvas of the suffering of humanity." "But with a little sex in it," says one of the studio execs. "But with a little sex in it," he concedes.

Responses from Atlantic Monthly editor Ross Douthat, family-film critic Nell Minnow, and devoted cinephile Andy Horbal.