Review in Film International

A review I wrote of Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko is on newsstands now. Subscription info at Film International.

New Review in SCOPE

Here's a review I wrote of Haneke's remake of Funny Games: "Haneke's Home Invasion: Three Looks at Funny Games"

New Article in Bright Lights Film Journal

"Deciphering the Indecipherable: Procedure as Art in Fincher's Zodiac".
Check it out.

The Coen Brothers' Mean Streak

Something's happened to the Coen Brothers. Maybe it's success going to their heads (they've got my vote for Smuggest Oscar Acceptance Speech), maybe they're losing their touch, or maybe they're just plain cruel. This decade has been mostly uneven for them. There's O Brother Where Art Thou? (fun but lightweight), The Man Who Wasn't There (an underrated return-to-form), Intolerable Cruelty (intolerable, natch), The Ladykillers (forgettable), No Country for Old Men (strong moments in an overrated whole), and now there's Burn After Reading, which is the darkest and least gracious film of the Coens' careers. After watching it and No Country for Old Men, one has to wonder whether or not the Coens are growing misanthropic, nihilistic, and ugly in their middle age.

The Coens have almost always built their stories around idiots -- Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men -- and Burn After Reading is no exception. This assortment of "heroes" is the dimmest the Coens have ever created, and while that should be the recipe for Coen comedy gold, the Coens forget the element that makes their films work: sympathy. Sure, their films have always been slightly cold and self-consciously clever stunts about dumb people doing dumb things, but what made the films so engaging was that the film (and the filmmakers) seemed to have a genuine love for these people who had good intentions but lacked the brains to carry them out correctly.

The characters in Burn After Reading are short on both brains and good intentions, and the film offers them no sympathy or redemption. If the audience does get any kicks out of the film, they come from feeling intellectually superior to the characters and taking pleasure in their failure. In this film, the Coens seem to have contempt for the characters, monogamy, the government, and the general populace. They now look at goofiness not as something to smile at but as something to punish.

By the end of the film, it's uncertain whether or not the audience is lumped in with the characters -- we're given nothing except the feeling that everything we just experienced was really meaningless. In short, Burn After Reading doesn't give a crap about anyone in it or anyone watching it. As much as it pains me to say this about two filmmakers I admire, it seems as though the Coens have to make everyone in this film completely stupid and pathetic in order to shed light on the only geniuses in the film: the Coen Brothers.

This could explain the sudden ultraviolent streak in Burn After Reading as well as the overall nihilism of No Country for Old Men. The Coens have always used fatal violence in their films, and while it hasn't always been used seriously, there's something different, something meaner about the violence in their two latest films (Miller's Crossing comes to mind as a film that balances using violence for irony and drama). Burn After Reading (and No Country) seems to look upon suffering and gunshot wounds as the highest form of comedy. They even craft one scene that attempts to outdo the "I Shot Marvin in the Face" scene from Pulp Fiction. Death and misery have become a joke to the Coens because the people in their films are no longer worth their emotional attachment; they used to love these people, now they just love to laugh at the futility of their petty existence. The Coens have replaced the custard pie in the face with a gunshot wound as the biggest gag there is, and in doing so, they have become the kind of nihilist they mocked in The Big Lebowski.

By the end of the film, nothing is of any importance. Not the characters, not the plot, not the comedy, and certainly not the resolution. The Coens have completely upended the Hollywood storytelling formula here, only they have replaced it with a smug void. It's hard to tell whether or not they do this out of outrage for the ineptitude of the intelligence community or out of contempt for the human race. Sadly, the film makes a much better case for the latter, with characters so vain, cruel, deceitful, conceited, or just plain stupid that there is no room for a sunny outlook or a constructive statement. Like its title suggests, Burn After Reading is destructive and disdainful, and when it's over, there is little left to take home but smoke and ash.

Smells Like Teen Spirit ... and Tater Tots

It was 1991, and I was in seventh grade, which meant that life totally sucked. One of the few bright spots came when Cathedral-Carmel Elementary decided to put a radio in the cafeteria and let us listen to KSMB, the KROQ of Lafayette, LA, at the time. Being a Catholic school, Cathedral didn't want us to enjoy ourselves too much, so they installed a decibel meter to monitor our volume. I am not kidding. It came in the form of a stoplight. Green meant we were talking at a reasonable volume (which a seventh grader cannot do), yellow meant we were in very close to being in deep trouble, and red meant the radio got turned off and we lost our recess. This was supposed to remind us that we needed to enjoy our privileges responsibly, but really it just told us that we were being watched ... by God.

This seemed to work out okay ... until this little band from Seattle finally made it to Cajun country. Sure, there was music on the radio I identified with, but there was nothing like "Smells Like Teen Spirit." This was a song that sounded like what was happening to my body: it was oily, messy, loud, and totally out of control. The lyrics didn't matter; I didn't even bother to learn them. It was better to think of it as pre-verbal noise, something primal, something true. After hearing something like Nirvana, nothing else seemed to cut it anymore. The world as this seventh grader knew it was dismantled.

This song started a near-revolution in the lunchroom. One moment, we'd be staring at the cafeteria's interpretation of shepherd's pie, trying to find the courage to eat it because they wouldn't let you make an entire meal out of tater tots and bread rolls. But then that immortal riff stormed into the cafeteria, and we'd all sit perfectly still like someone was about to sing the national anthem or lead us in a prayer. If we were allowed to wear hats, we would have taken them off.

That sense of reverence would crumble the second the drums kicked in. That's when every boy in the room started banging on the table and smacking things with his fork, easily taking the stoplight up to yellow. The teachers watching us tried to silence us by turning down the radio, but we didn't need to hear the song to know what was going on, because the song wasn't coming out of the radio; it was coming out of us. By the end of the chorus, the stoplight was in the red, and the assistant principal brought in a megaphone and blasted its alarm to let us know that not only were we not going to have recess tomorrow, but we were so going to Hell. At least there they'd play Nirvana without a stupid stoplight.

The next day, we tried to keep it together, but it's impossible to maintain any sort of decorum during a Nirvana song. So, again we got the red light, and again we stayed inside for recess. By the end of the week, the radio was gone, and the stoplight was too. It got replaced by the megaphone and a "silent" lunch. If you talked, you paid the price. Now and forever, Amen. Looks like Teen Spirit was no match for the Holy Spirit. So much for rebellion.

Every time I hear "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I am transported back to that cafeteria, then to that old Pontiac Grand Prix where I blasted all these tunes at maximum volume, to that wonderful bedroom of mine where I obsessed over this music and pressed my face against my Panasonic stereo as I made a new mixtape every week. Even though so much of the music is embarrassing (Live, Candlebox, 4 Non Blondes, The Offspring), I wouldn't trade it for any other era of music. The era really captured what it was like being a teenager. The music was shifting, confused, teetering between original and derivative, but filled with the desire to define itself. And while the music may have only succeeded in defining a new, "alternative" market, it reached for more, which is more than can be said for most popular music.

Bruce Willis: The Best Movie Star There Is

Hands down, bar none, no question about it, Bruce Willis is the greatest movie star we have. A movie star is different from an actor, not lesser, but in some ways, bigger. A movie star is an actor who can only exist on the big screen, people like Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart, and Robert Mitchum. We don't pay to see them play characters, we pay to see them. Put movie stars on the stage, and they'll stink up the joint, but put those mugs in front of a camera and they'll mop the floor with even the most veteran of stage actors. If you're a movie star, you don't need dialogue, you don't need movement -- all you need is your face.

Bruce Willis is this kind of movie star. He is impossible to ignore when he's onscreen, and it's all because of his face, which seems to age even better than a French wine. Every new crease and wrinkle -- even hair loss -- has worked to make Willis a better movie star. Like Steve McQueen, Bogey, or Mitchum, Willis has that haggard look, that face that tells us more about his character than any screenwriter could ever hope to. Any writer or director worth his salt should cut pages out of a script the minute Willis signs on. Because all those words don't mean squat up against the face of a movie star in close-up.

Bruce has always had this, but it really clicks for him in Pulp Fiction. The first thing we see of him in that film is his face, and we see it for several minutes. Up against that, what else is there to see? It's the face of a man who's seen it all, a man who's above it all. The pronounced lines flanking his mouth act like curtains, throwing the spotlight on our hero's tight-lipped superiority to whoever is speaking to him. Our man listens carefully, but he knows the answer already: you're wrong ... and stupid. He'd tell you, but what's the point? You'll only understand what a jackass you are after he breaks your nose.

You may say that George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, or Tom Cruise have one over on Bruce as the greatest movie star of our time. Johnny Depp is an actor who's gotten as big as a movie star, Pitt's somewhere between actor and movie star (depending on the film), and Tom Cruise? Please. Bruno might sing blues of dubious distinction, but movie stars are allowed embarrassing side projects once in a while (see: Clint and a monkey). What movie stars are not allowed to do, however, is to jump on couches on daytime TV. Daytime TV couch-jumpers are the kind of people movie stars smack with baseball bats.

Clooney is a close call, but his charm is one-note: he's suave. That's the beginning and end of his range. It's a delightful one-note act, but it's one-note all the same. Bruce can do Clooney, Clint, and throw in some John Wayne swagger for good measure. Besides, the decision to put Bruce in Ocean's Twelve is really just George's admission that the grins upon which the Ocean'sMoonlighting or Die Hard? Designer clothes -- that's it. franchise is built were stolen from Bruce. And they are stolen from Bruce -- what's in Danny Ocean that isn't in

Like any classic movie star, Bruno is dangerous. He can crack a joke one minute, then kick the everloving crap out of you the next. Every movie star has to have this, which is why Tom Cruise is out: no matter how many times he tells Iceman that he really is dangerous before he kisses him, he's about as dangerous as Shirley Temple (he does kiss Kilmer, right?). As dangerous as Bruce is, though, he also has the class to star in a movie with Damon Wayans without killing him.

The real important thing Bruce has on past tough guy stars like Bogey and Mitchum is joy. Bruce has just enough Cary Grant in him to let us in on the fun. No, he'll never do something like Bringing Up Baby (though Hudson Hawk is an honest attempt at the Marx Brothers), but this sense of glee helps to make his aura infectious.

Bottom line: take any crappy movie, put Bruce Willis in it, and it immediately becomes 10 times more interesting (see: The Last Boy Scout, Oceans' Twelve, Look Who's Talking). That's the mark of a movie star. Sure, he's done plenty of crappy movies, but he's seldom crappy in them, because it's hard to suck when you're having a blast. And that's what endears Bruno to us: the guy just gets out there and has a good time; nothing seems precious to him. In an age of actors whose career choices are so calculated and deliberate, this kind of behavior is refreshing. Finally, a star who just goes out and does his thing. What's not to love about that?

Jeanne Dielman Comes to DVD

Break out your shoe polish and dishrags, for one of the greatest films of all time is finally getting its video debut in the United States. The Criterion Collection is releasing Chantal Akerman's epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxhelles in a gorgeous 2-DVD set.

One of the greatest films ever made? A 201-minute structuralist/feminist film in which nothing happens except a woman cleans her apartment? A film shot almost entirely in medium shots, with no camera movement, few cast members, hardly any exterior shots, and even less dialogue? A film that merely chronicles the tedium of doing chores and running errands, seemingly in real time? What could possibly be so great about that?

With all that going for it, it comes as little surprise that Jeanne Dielman is just now getting a proper video release in the United States. It is difficult to explain the greatness of Jeanne Dielman to someone who is not up for the experience. The film is a complete slap in the face to traditional narrative conventions, a combination of Andy Warhol's epic films like Empire and Sleep and the film-essays of Jean-Luc Godard like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (also recently released on DVD by Criterion) that seems to want to make the audience feel little more than the slow passage of time. But this is what makes the film great: it sticks to its guns, audience expectations be damned, and delivers to the audience the most devastating depiction of the housewife's confined life in cinema (eat it, Revolutionary Road). If we think watching a housewife work for three hours is boring, try living her life.

In that sense, it requires a certain act of will on the part of the American viewer -- or any viewer, for that matter -- to "endure" the film. It requires us to meet Akerman more than halfway, and if you don't buy into her vision, you won't make it past the first 30 minutes. However, once you give yourself to the film and settle into its rhythms, all of that stuff about defying traditional narrative, courting boredom, and all the rest of it falls away. You get sucked into the story and the film becomes an edge-of-your-seat thriller, a ticking time bomb. Even though you feel like you have a pretty good idea of what will happen -- she'll run another errand, she'll clean some more stuff -- you're terrified of what will happen if something breaks Jeanne's rigidly designed pattern. And when that pattern does start to go unravel, the duration of the film serves to make the story all the more uneasy: we see the train wreck coming, but we don't know when, where, or how it will happen. We also can't do anything about it. We can only watch and wonder how it came to this, and as we think back over the events of the film, we can see how inevitable all of it is and how close we are to Jeanne's fate.

The film matches Jeanne's obsessively routinized day by being equally constrained in its visual structure. Every shot, literally every single one, is a flat, static shot set up on a perpendicular axis to the action at about five feet off the ground (Akerman's eye level). There are no close-ups and wide shots are saved for the exteriors. So while the camera placement in each scene seems totally arbitrary and "objective," nothing could be further from the truth. Designing a three-hour film around this visual strategy requires a clearly thought-out point of view. It also requires a truckload of determination and artistic restraint. Imagine the temptation to break the design, to make the film more interesting visually, to move the camera, especially when you know that these techniques would make the film more "entertaining." It takes someone with a steel rod for an artistic backbone to make such decisions and stick to them. The fact that Akerman was 25 years old when she made this film -- the same age at which Orson Welles began Citizen Kane -- only serves to make Jeanne Dielman a more tremendous achievement.

Jeanne Dielman is a film with the commitment and brashness of youth paired with the wisdom and restraint of old age. It is, in short, perfect, the kind of total work artists dream of making just once. It is a film that swings for the fences, no concessions, no compromises, and it remains true to itself and what it wants to say. Regardless of whether its style and themes are to our liking or not, one must admire such a success.

Until this DVD release, Jeanne Dielman was the kind of film you heard about for years before you found a copy of it. My copy was a horrendous fourth-generation bootleg from a VHS tape. I knew the quality was horrible, but until I saw a print of the film at LACMA last April, I had no idea how awful it was. For a film so devoted to small details, a crisp video transfer is essential, and the folks at The Criterion Collection have once again outdone themselves. And while I may mourn the aura the film acquired by being hard to find, it is comforting to know that new viewers can find this film and experience its power immediately.

The Virtues of Inherent Vice

If you had told me one year ago that the most delightful beach read of 2009 would be written by Thomas Pynchon, I'd have stared back at you in disbelief, raised eyebrows in tow.

Don't get me wrong, Pynchon is one of my favorite writers of all-time, but when I think of reading him, beach chairs and daiquiris do not immediately spring to mind. What usually pops into my head are the stacks of other books I have to keep next to his latest novel in order to keep up with his many, far-ranging allusions to entropy, number theory, parallel time, and ... you get the idea.

But with his latest, Inherent Vice, good ol' Thomas Ruggles Pynchon has served up his most accessible, hilarious, page-turning novel yet. Inherent Vice is the noir-esque story of private eye Doc Sportello, a huarache-wearing, dope-smoking, hallucination-and-blackout-prone beach bum who gets in over his head faster than he can get an erection (and, when talking about Sportello, that's pretty darn quick).

It all starts in late 1969/early 1970 when Doc's ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, land developer-turned crazy philanthropist Mickey Wolfmann, disappear; and, like all of Pynchon's work, the story just gets stranger from there, encompassing everything from land use and gentrification practices, the internet, Manson, the reconfiguring of Las Vegas, secret societies, surf rock, Ethel Merman-singing hitmen, and the death of the Free Love era; all filtered through a haze of pot smoke and Pynchon-grade paranoia that resembles Robert Altman's adaptation of The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski as much as it does The Crying of Lot 49. It almost seems like, at 72 years old, Pynchon is ready to take a break from pushing himself (and the reader) and just have a blast.

But don't let that lead you to think that Inherent Vice is lightweight airport novel full of "Mindless Pleasures" (TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow). No, Pynchon's not trading in literature for genre fiction. Inherent Vice is still as intricate and dense as any Pynchon work, only here the references are less obscure and the narrative is more familiar. In fact, the story seems to be told in fast-forward, as though Sportello and the reader are being propelled from one clue to the next, with little-to-no time to sort out any of the details. The huge cast of characters (over two dozen in 369 pages) and their shifting allegiances become so hard to keep up with that you eventually give up trying, let go, and just enjoy the ride. The only solutions to this problem are to keep a notebook handy (screw that; I'm poolside) or to read the whole thing in one sitting, which is more doable than you'd think (plus, there are worse ways to spend a Saturday).

What Pynchon also delivers in this novel are some jaw-droppingly poignant and awe-inspiring descriptions of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Just get a whiff of this description of the L.A. freeways on page 19:

"... the Eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses full of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody's radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations, under a sky like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light you began to wonder if anything you'd call psychedelic could ever happen, or if -- bummer! -- all this time it had really been going on up north."

Such a panorama of the schizophrenic Angeleno melting pot actually manages to make being in traffic seem fresh again, even wonderful. If that's not successful writing, I don't know what is.

Although reading Inherent Vice feels like a gleefully crazy drive down the highway, what lingers over the novel is a deep sense of loss -- the loss of optimism, the loss of charity, the loss of intimacy, the loss of a generation's promise at the hands of drugs, greed, technology, and corporate land grabs. For Pynchon, it seems like all the good vibes from the 1960s got co-opted and paved over, turned into theme parks and strip malls, or, even worse, a Disneyfied combination of the two. Like the stoners choosing dope over reality, the land developers and the internet trick the public into exchanging the real for a hallucinatory simulation of it, costing us our cultural authenticity and interpersonal relationships. The final melancholy-but-hopeful paragraphs of the novel, in which a caravan of cars follow each other closely through a dense fog on the Pacific Coast Highway, encapsulates this feeling of dissolution, of a unity disintegrating as each member of the collective goes his/her own way. The passage, and the whole novel by extension, reminds the reader of that glorious moment in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Duke looks out the window of his Vegas hotel and sees the evaporated dream of the 1960s and remarks

"We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ... and with the right kind of glasses you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back" (68).

It's a sentiment that could just as easily come from Inherent Vice, and it serves to remind the reader that for all of Pynchon's arcane references and postmodern gamesmanship, what he is at the end of the day is a writer of heartfelt sincerity who writes about the difficulty of being human in the modern world. If I may be so recklessly bold, I'd call him a romantic idealist, and say that his work aims to inspire readers to seek a more sincere and expansive level of interaction with their fellow humans so that the world no longer feels as lonely and incoherent. And the fact that he can do all that and still make us laugh with low-brow pot and boner jokes and goofy song lyrics just proves how vital a writer he is.

For those who have yet to be introduced to Pynchon, Inherent Vice would serve as a wonderful gateway drug to his more difficult work, though starting with Inherent Vice may be a bit misleading because his other novels are much more difficult (though more rewarding). On the other hand, those all-too-familiar with the rigor of reading Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon will delight in kicking back with a margarita and taking another trip with their buddy T.P. Either way you slice it, with Against the Day and Inherent Vice, it's clear that Thomas Pynchon still has it, and he's not going to let up.

LACMA Slaps Film Buffs in the Face

The Los Angeles film community has been in a major tizzy since July 28, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced it was (for all intents and purposes) tossing its film program on the cutting room floor. The museum claims that the program was losing millions (over a ten year period) and not to worry: they plan on revamping the film program. Indeed. They're so committed to revitalizing the program that they knocked star programmer Ian Birnie down to a part-time consultant.

According to LACMA, the new film program will:

place greater emphasis on artist-created films reflecting the museum's growing relationship with contemporary artists and the contemporary art world. We will also continue to plan art exhibition-oriented festivals that will be presented in the context of the museum's overall curatorial program. These films will be presented in the Bing Theater occasionally throughout the year.

Great idea, LACMA. Those "artist-created films" really do pack the house, certainly more than The Adventures of Robin Hood. Nobody goes to see that crap. It's too exciting.

Scathing missives have hit the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times every week, penned by the likes of in-house critic Kenneth Turan, Time Magazine's Richard Schickel, and now the ultimate cinephile himself, Martin Scorsese. It seems like the message is clear: for film geeks, when the lights go dark on a cinema forever, the gloves come off.

LACMA's announcement not only royally stinks, but it also represents a major blow to the appreciation of film as an art form on equal footing with painting and sculpture. As corny as it may sound, when a major museum screens the best of American and world cinema in a welcoming and respectful environment, people tend to take the medium more seriously. It certainly worked that way for modern art.

Killing the LACMA film program also asks the question: if a serious museum film program cannot sustain itself in Los Angeles, then where can it survive? Are repertory programs as a whole doomed? If LACMA goes dark, what else will go dark with it? Will old movies only exist on TCM and our Netflix queues? And who cares?

I do, of course, though it's hard to explain the effect such an announcement has on someone who loves to see old movies on the big screen. I can say that I'm crestfallen, but will this make any sense to someone who doesn't feel the same way already? Probably not, and that's the problem. Those who care already will be upset and will find it hard to infect those who don't with their disappointment.

But let me try anyway. As a LACMA member and devotee of its film program, I can only describe this announcement as isolating. What I mean is that LACMA's theater going dark has made my film obsession more private. Nothing gives me a bigger charge at the movies than showing up to a screening of a 200-minute Belgian structuralist feminist film like Jeanne Dielman to discover that the theater is two-thirds full. That makes you feel like you're among your people. I know that no one else may care, but to someone who spent a great deal of high school and college watching films alone, LACMA going dark makes the world seem smaller, which, last time I checked, was not the purpose of art.

So what can we do about it? Well, we too can write angry letters to LACMA or the Los Angeles Times, but since we didn't direct Taxi Driver (or even Shutter Island-- in theaters October 2), our letter probably won't mean much to an organization with both eyes on the bottom line. We could go all Norma Rae on them and threaten to cancel our LACMA memberships and stop patronizing the museum and its Tupperware party art exhibits. That might get them where it hurts, but will it be enough to force a change? After all, isn't the lack of action on the public's part one of the reasons why LACMA is cutting its film program in the first place?

LACMA was well aware of the ruckus its announcement was going to cause. Yeah, getting chewed out by Scorsese's gotta sting, but LACMA will get over it so long as it can ride out the storm. Once everyone re-stocks his/her Netflix queue and abandons the cause, LACMA will return its attention to trying to run a large-scale, expanding museum at a profit. Good luck with that, LACMA.

In memory of the great programs LACMA has brought to Los Angeles, here's a short list of my five favorite film programs I was lucky enough to see at LACMA:
1. Heaven's Gate -- the full cut of Michael Cimino's unfairly maligned film, with a Q&A afterwards with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
2. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxhelles - Chantal Akerman's masterpiece will never look as beautiful as it did at LACMA on April 10, 2009.
3. Satantango - how many theaters will screen a seven-and-a-half hour Hungarian film?
4. Veronika Voss & Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven - two wonderful films by the wonderful Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
5. La Belle et La Bete - Jean Cocteau's perfect fantasy.

But I can't act superior all day. LACMA's film program lost money because enough people did not attend their programs. That includes me. So here's a list of the films I missed that I wish I hadn't:
1. The Decalogue
2. Eraserhead
3. The Third Generation & Lola
4. Bigger Than Life
5. Le Cercle Rouge
6. L'Avventura & Red Desert
7. 1900
8. La Strada
9. War and Peace (1968)
10. Ivan the Terrible, Parts 1 and 2

For more information on the effort to stop LACMA from looking totally corporate and stupid, visit the blog Save Film @ LACMA.

The Hollywood Novel at Zero

Most Hollywood novels are written by "legitimate" writers whose experience Out West has driven them to hate the movies. The novels read like the whiny, embittered diatribes that they are, craftless rants that seethe with resentment and make claims to providing the anti-myth to Hollywood's myth; however, they really only serve to reinforce a cliché in the reader's mind: that Hollywood is completely uncreative, petty, and full of abused, self-destructive narcissists. What a joy to read.

Steve Erickson's Zeroville destroys this cliché. After decades of novels about "Hollywood" and "the industry," Erickson has written a work that mixes the apocalyptic dread of Day of the Locust with the passion and heart of The Last Tycoon, thus capturing everything there is to hate (and love) about Tinseltown. It's a novel that not only reclaims the Hollywood novel from its dissenters, but it also reclaims the movies for its rightful owners: cinephiles.

This doesn't mean Zeroville celebrates Hollywood. On the contrary, Erickson gives West a run for his money when it comes to filleting the rich and famous. Zeroville is a Being There-esque tale whose central character, Vikar, appears (almost magically) in front of the Vista Theater in Los Feliz in 1969. He is a total cipher, his most identifiable characteristic being the tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor from A Place in the Sun on his shaved forehead. Over the course of the novel, he encounters (and influences) all the movers-and-shakers in New Hollywood.

Erickson's novel wouldn't be the revelation it is if everyone in New Hollywood didn't come off looking absolutely reprehensible, John Milius being the delightfully strange exception. To most film freaks, the Hollywood films of the 1970s represent the pinnacle of American filmmaking, the anti-myths that exposed the classic Hollywood myths as fabrications. Erickson, however, paints the prophets of the New Hollywood as misanthropes more in love with themselves than with cinema, and their work is portrayed as poor, decadent imitations of great films. He turns the anti-myth itself into a myth, and it's a trick that may anger some cinephiles but it's one that makes total sense within Erickson's thesis: we're too caught up in the myth of the artist/celebrity and not engaged enough in the essence of cinema. For Erickson, the true peak of Hollywood storytelling came somewhere in the middle of A Place in the Sun, and it's been downhill ever since.

Erickson's tricks will work best on those whose knowledge of cinema borders on the unhealthy (Vikar himself is referred to as "cine-autistic"). The first half of the novel feels almost more like a film version of "Name That Tune," as Erickson describes films such as 2001 and The Passion of Joan of Arc without disclosing their titles. This guessing game only sucks the reader into the story further, as Vikar starts to uncover a secret that stands to alter the landscape of cinema.

Giving away that secret would be worse than criminal, but what is necessary to state is that Erickson does not call for a break from the past; rather, he calls for a return to it. He wants cinema to go back to zero. Not zero in the sense of abolishing technique or history, but zero in the sense of purity. Erickson wants moviegoers (and moviemakers) to reconnect with the pure joy of the cinematic image, to forget rules, stars, and money, and to remember what this magical medium is all about: communicating complex emotions and ideas.