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.

Deep Focus

If the author had not been Jonathan Lethem—award-winning novelist, brilliant essayist, recipient of a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation—I might not have opened They Live, a slim critical monograph published last year concerning a late-1980s science-fiction-horror film I had never seen. When I did open it, I found epigraphs from Roland Barthes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, and short, suggestive chapters with titles like “Note on Diegesis and Ideology and Peek-A-Boo” (on the film-theory terms Lethem finds indispensable) and “The Black Guy and the White Guy, Together Again for the First Time” (on a certain casting cliché in late-20th-century Hollywood action movies). I found shrewd and funny insights concerning the movie's key device, “a pair of sunglasses that reveal yuppies as alien ghouls.” And I found a way of thinking about movies that was thorough, thoughtful, populist, and personal, all at once.

My appreciation of the Deep Focus series published by Soft Skull is up at the Barnes & Noble Review. Read the rest.

On the strange stardom of James Franco

I’ve attempted a semi-unified theory of James Franco for the London Review of Books. You can read the first paragraph here, register for free to read the whole thing here, and check out a couple key paragraphs below:

Acting with James Franco and Erased James Franco didn’t shift public perception of the actor much: the former was a lark and the latter shown only in museums (there are a few minutes on YouTube; they’re enough). But in 2009, Franco embarked on a more public project. While discussing a new film with Carter, in which he was set to play a former soap opera star who has retired because of mental illness, Franco thought that it might be fun to star in a soap himself. He proposed the idea to the producers of General Hospital, America’s third-longest-running television drama, and the oldest still on air. Franco wanted his character to be both crazy and an artist. They created ‘Franco’, a one-named, pseudonymous graffiti artist who now sells crime-scene re-creations in galleries for good money. Shades of Banksy – though ‘Franco’ is actually a deranged killer who is terrorising the fictional town where General Hospital is set. Franco persuaded the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to let them film there. In that episode, ‘Franco’ has a one-man show (‘Francophrenia’) at MOCA, and a detective – who has formed an unlikely partnership with a mob killer in order to track ‘Franco’ down – shows up to arrest him. In the climactic showdown, ‘Franco’ falls to his death from a third-storey balcony in the museum, while Kalup Linzy, an artist who draws on soap opera iconography in his own video installations, performs a musical number.

Franco has said that this piece of ‘performance art’ (his own description) was intended to make people ‘ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate’. The episodes are full of half-baked dialogue on aesthetics. In one, ‘Franco’, eyebrow arched, asks a magazine editor how she knows something is a work of art. ‘Everyone says so,’ she tells him. ‘Then it must be,’ he replies. These exchanges fall with a thud. What is interesting about the endeavour is what it says about Franco as an actor and as a celebrity, and what it might suggest about the nature of celebrity, now, for actors. ‘I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief,’ Franco wrote in a piece about the project for the Wall Street Journal, ‘because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylised world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognised, a real person in a made-up world.’ The phrase ‘real person’ jumps out here. His General Hospital castmates are real people, too. Franco means that people watching the show know who he is. But people watching movies always recognise the stars. Once upon a time, that recognition would not have made them seem ‘real’, but grand – maybe even, in the case of someone like James Dean, mythic. Franco’s ‘star power’ is remarkably diminished: he jumps out from his surroundings because of their littleness. ‘Franco’ is ‘mysterious’, but Franco is not.

Read the rest. (Pictured: Franco channeling Bruce Nauman.)

“There’s no sound people make when drama’s working.”

Another online addendum: New York magazine’s culture website, Vulture, has put up a longer version of my conversation with Judd Apatow. I liked this answer of his in particular:

Funny People seemed to show that influence in terms of writing about your own experience, even when it’s dark, and still being funny. Are you working on anything now that is moving in that direction?

We’ll see. Sometimes you make a movie and your intention is to make people deliriously happy. And when you’re working on a movie like that you understand the rules: The 40-year-old virgin needs to get laid, and when he does, the audience should be happy. And you’re trying to make every scene as unique and funny as you can. You know, with Funny People, I was trying to get big laughs, but also talk about issues which are not usually talked about in a comedy, and some of it is not meant to be entertaining as much as thought-provoking. And it’s a very different experience to try to walk that line than to make a movie where the final judge of every moment is, “Did it get a laugh?” There’s no sound people make when drama’s working. I wish there was. At a preview for the movie, maybe every time a dramatic moment’s working they could make a sort of squeal-y noise. But they don’t … I found that to be a very fulfilling experience, but it’s also painful because you’re really putting your heart into something and putting yourself out there. There are people who really take to it and see what you’re going for, and there are people who say, “Why isn’t it funnier?”

Read the rest. Above: Apatow again (a couple of times).

What Makes Judd Apatow Laugh?

I talked to Judd Apatow about the new book he edited, the pilot Conan O’Brien wrote for Adam West, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Raymond Carver, and, among a few other subjects, Woody Allen:

I did notice there’s nothing [in the book] by Woody Allen.
I continue to follow everything he does. He’s very up-front about making movies to avoid existential issues, and I try to think of myself as someone who’s more along the philosophical lines of James Brooks and Cameron Crowe—writers who are looking to say something positive about our time on earth. I’m not as old as Woody, and I still want to feel that life is good and you don’t need to make 90 movies to avoid your fear of death. As much as I love him, I wish he would tell me that things are going to be okay at some point. But I don’t think he will.

Read the rest. (Above, Apatow gets Barbara Walters to give thumbs down to Jay Leno.)

No Great Work of Art Can Be “Spoiled”

I've written another piece for The Awl, this one about “spoilers”:

Consider this: Alfred Hitchcock knew as much about creating suspense as perhaps any narrative artist of the past century; and when he made what is, hands down, his most artistically ambitious movie, Vertigo, he went out of his way to spoil the mystery halfway through. Vertigo is the story of one woman pretending to be another in an effort to deceive a man, and Hitchcock easily could have preserved the mystery of that woman’s identity until the end of the film.

But the pleasures and satisfactions of Vertigo don’t depend on not knowing a basic aspect of the plot. They derive from the movie’s brilliant illustration of love and desire and the ways we idealize and romanticize particular human beings and then become disappointed or even disgusted by their simple, physical humanity. It’s the best thing Hitchcock ever did, and knowing who is actually who doesn’t change that.

On the other hand you have The Usual Suspects, which, after you have learned the identity of Keyser Soze, really isn’t very good.

Read the rest. (Pictured above: Kim Novak, James Stewart, and Kim Novak, in a publicity image for Vertigo.)

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.)

In Search of The Red Balloon

Today in Slate, a little nostalgia (also, later in the piece, discussion of major Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien):

The summer when I was 4, my mother took me each Friday to the town library to sit in the dark with a juice box, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and 10 or 20 other kids to watch a movie. This was a year or two before VCRs became ubiquitous, when watching movies was still by necessity a communal pastime. These library outings happened each week, but there's only one movie I can remember—vividly—seeing there that summer: a half-hour, nearly wordless French film from the 1950s called The Red Balloon.

Slouching Towards Hollywood

The DVD release of The Panic in Needle Park got me thinking about Joan Didion as a screenwriter. I've now written about the subject for Slate:

And though Dunne wrote the first draft, The Panic in Needle Park feels more like a Didion work. It opens with Helen, played by Kitty Winn, looking overwhelmed on a crowded subway. We soon learn that she has just gotten an abortion—a "free scrape," as her artist boyfriend (a young Raul Julia) calls it. As Roger Ebert has noted, this calls to mind Maria Wyeth, the protagonist of Didion's 1970 novel, Play It as It Lays, whose own abortion precipitates her decline into drugs and disaster. (Didion was finishing that novel just as she and Dunne began the Needle Park screenplay.) Helen's youth, and the bohemian trappings of her boyfriend's apartment, meanwhile, call to mind the subjects of Didion's nonfiction—in particular, the drug-addled adolescents in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," written just a couple of years earlier. Like them, Helen seems lost and uncertain, someone who was "never taught and would never now learn the games that held the society together," as Didion writes in her famous essay.

Mangling Ernest Hemingway

In Slate, I take a look at an unfortunate cinematic subgenre, Hollywood Hemingway:

widescreen, Technicolor adaptations featuring foreign settings and doomed love, and always at least half an hour too long. Mostly products of the 1950s, they were made when Hemingway was a living legend and motion picture executives—thanks to the collapse of the studio system and the new ubiquity of television—were deeply insecure.

Responses from Joshua Gibson and from Alex Massie, who writes for The Scotsman and The New Republic.

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.

The Madness of Jimmy Stewart

I've written an article for Slate about my favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart:

Despite these tortured performances, the idea of "Jimmy Stewart, Everyman" not only persisted but grew—even after, in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), he slyly played a "country lawyer" whose false projection of sincerity acquits a guilty man... most likely, that image survived because Stewart was not, for the public, an actor: He was a star. And our image of stars stems not only—perhaps hardly at all—from what we see on-screen, but from what we know or invent of their personal lives. In this respect, Stewart was the anti-Mel Gibson: His upstanding reputation (Princeton graduate from a small town, genuine war hero, and husband of 45 years) made, and continues to make, his on-screen darkness a little hard to see.

Responses from La Petite Jacqueline and Thought Provoked.