Sunday, November 15, 2009

My Sweet Irascible You

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography
by Mitchell Zuckoff
2009, Knopf


I have a long and storied history with film for my short quarter-century of life. One of the first and longest-lasting of these stories is my admiration for Robert Altman.

Film began to interest me as an artistic medium in sophomore year of high school. At the time, I was incredibly interested in theatre, but living in the suburbs of New England somewhat preempts access to legitimate theatre. Film, I discovered, was an acceptable substitute for my creative cravings. (I should mention that the mother of one of my friends was particularly inspiring and nurturing in my interest in both of these art forms.)

I was waxing nostalgic recently with a colleague about how different the world of the arts was during my adolescent years. The world was full of great possibilities of discovery. For every film I saw, there opened a connection to a vast history of cultural heroes I had not previously been privy to.

When Gosford Park came out in 2001, I had never heard of Robert Altman. I went to see the film with a friend of mine and we sat in the surprisingly crowded theatre in the third row, craning upwards at the period costumes and crying to ourselves over the repressed, yet somehow dignified, lives of the characters on screen.

Oh, how taken was I. The spinning cameras and interlacing dialogue were obviously old hat to the filmmaking world and I had seen their evidence in films and television during my earlier, more oblivious days. But these techniques were completely electrifying. There was nuance in the scraps of dialogue Altman threw his audience as he camera brushed past the characters.

Altman's camera hovered at a distance, providing a distance from the action that made it easy for the audience to make judgments on the characters, to know them as constructs; yet, paradoxically, the camera's distance made the characters more real as well. When the camera would grace a character with a tighter, more intimate framing it revealed their essential humanity and tantalized me with the icebergian hint of depth below those waters. Like the people I knew in my life, his characters were real but not fully revealed. Their inner lives were present, but obscured by the minutiae of life.

Mitchell Zuckoff's incredibly affecting, affectionate Robert Altman: An Oral Biography paints Altman himself in a similar way through the virtue of its "oral biography" conceit and creates a beautifully suggestive portrait of Altman as a man and as an artist while maintaining some element of distance.

The book began as a traditional biography and Zuckoff spent several months interviewing Altman for the project. After Altman's death, the book was refocused to incorporate anecdotes and commentary by the dozens (and dozens) of actors who appeared in his films as well as his family, war buddies, producers and others in a manner similar to Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. or Live from New York (the SNL oral history).

What is interesting about reading an oral biography is justifying the lapses in memory that time necessitates. Several of the accounts here contradict each other. If there is any specific flaw in Zuckoff's book, it's that in the case of discrepancies that cast negatived light on someone (Warren Beatty, for example), the target is given the last word to essentially contradict those who spoke before him.

The conceit of asking dozens of artists to characterize a man based on their brief experiences with him brings us closer to Altman and yet, like the characters in his films, further away. The reminiscences are amalgamated together as one reads the book and Altman becomes a difficult figure to pin down.

Some of the anecdotes and tributes are incredibly intimate and these tend to take place in moments of privacy between Altman and a colleague. When it comes to perspectives on Altman working with a group, the interviewees paint the same portrait of his gruffness, his antiauthoritarianistic tendencies and his egoism. These memories are recalled alternately with like-minded admiration and condoning apologies.

The interviewees seem to be suggesting in their frank admissions of his irascibility and their fond recollections of intimate moments of affection that, essentially, Altman was a difficult, bullying figure who had hidden depths of sensitivity in his relations with loved ones and artists under his tutelage.

His relationship with his wife, in particular, demonstrates this dynamic. Altman womanized behind her back but was also her biggest champion and adored her. Kathryn Altman is portrayed as such a fiercely-independent woman that, given her awareness of the affairs, it would seem she did not leave Altman because of some private vulnerability he showed her.

Altman's films would seem to bear this perspective out and Altman himself repeatedly suggests in the book that he is, in fact, his films.

In films like Nashville and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman's worldview is a caustic, cynical one. But what makes these (and, by and large, all his) films so quintessential to the American canon is that they are not so entirely one-minded in this perspective. His characters are flawed to mirror the flaws of society, but Altman largely forgives their flaws and chooses to populate these films with lovingly idiosyncratic characterizations.

A perfect example of this dichotomy between cynicism and tenderness is Altman's Short Cuts, based on the work of the brilliant brilliant brilliant Raymond Carver and also my favorite of his films.

Nashville presented a country at a moral crisis, tinted by Altman's cynical and satiric viewpoint, but Short Cuts questions that cynicism. The worldview contained in Short Cuts is not an overtly optimistic one, by far. There are deaths and betrayals and Carver's small tragedies of life, but this view of life is tempered by an optimism that suggests that not every tragic situations must end tragically and not every cruel actions must correspond to a cruel heart. In this way, the characters and the plots of Short Cuts come to represent a more multi-faceted view of life, one that considers its shortcomings alongside its pleasures. With this film, Altman does not suggest that his worldview in Nashville was incorrect; he acknowledges society's selfishness, ignorance and cruelty. But with Short Cuts, he points to the counter-examples, suggesting that these varying perspectives of optimism and cynicism all occupy, after all, the same world.

The above quote comes from a paper I wrote in 2006 in film school. The class was an examination of the work of Jon Jost, whose brilliant but difficult films represented independent filmmaking, and of Altman, whose brilliant but accessible films were erected as a straw man by my brilliant but close-minded professor to demonstrate the false paradigm of indie filmmaking in Hollywood.

Altman was a Hollywood filmmaker who worked if not with indie budgets then with indie spirit. Altman mortgaged his house by my count three times to finance his films and is routinely broke throughout the biography. Altman's greatest contributions to cinema are truly independent-minded innovations like his trademark over-lapping dialogue and the use of zoom lenses.

The greatest achievement of Zuckoff's book is not in its attempt to create a portrait of the elusive, irascible Mr. Altman but in reproducing Altman's zeal for filmmaking. The anecdotes throughout the book, particularly those related to Popeye and McCabe, have the effect of inspiring awe in the reader simply by sharing, through the interview subjects, the awe Altman inspired in his collaborators.

Altman's seat-of-your-pants organic stick-it-to-the-man brash filmmaking is, in every sense of the word, exhilarating to hear tell of.

In writing this entry, I truly had to restrain myself from writing all the things I wanted to discuss. If given the space, I could very easily have written an entry three times as long discussing further Altman's independent-leanings, the nature of his idiosyncratic camera, his supposed misogyny, his reluctant role as father, and his identification with his work as well as the numerous truly delightful anecdotes about his methods of filming.

Zuckoff's book has truly reinvigorated by admiration for Robert Altman, both his role as artist and his artistic output.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Hieronymus Posh

Erased
by Jim Krusoe
2009, Tin House Books


A good friend of mine doesn't really like to read. He has been known to, like myself, attempt a Thomas Pynchon book once every couple of years. (This is in contrast to my other friends who don't like to read who pick up The Kite Runner or The DaVinci Code as their once-yearly novel of choice.)

About two years ago, this friend of mine kept bringing up this book he read, something called Girl Factory. I wrongly assumed it was a nonfictional account of Warhol's Factory or the Chelsea Hotel. (I think I had it confused with the film about Edie Sedgwick starring Sienna Miller.)

When pressed about the book, my friend repeatedly said it was "weird" and not much more. There were no thumbs, down or up, or star. He wouldn't even say if he recommended it or warned against it. It was just "weird" and it kept coming up in conversation.

Recently, Tin House published the next novel by the author of Girl Factory. Remembering our conversations about it, I signed up to check it out from the library. The book was published over the summer but the condition of the book was horrifying. There was a different-colored substance smeared on nearly every page.

So with the book held a good foot from my body at all times, I flew through this 250-odd page novel in two days.

Erased begins mysteriously with a son describing his last phone conversation with his previously-estranged mother, who is accused by a passing man of being dead without knowing it.

As if taking the stranger's suggestion, the mother promptly disappears, packing up and moving back to Cleveland and shortly dying.

Her son eventually receives mysterious postcards from her beckoning him to Cleveland and he follows.

The narrative becomes increasingly weird as Cleveland is portrayed as a city of smiling, helpful, artistically gifted citizens who are content with their lives. Inspired, the narrator takes up sculpting as he begins his not-especially-thorough search for his mother.

Some truly weird episodes ensue. Two that stand out in particular would include: a string of murders throughout the country involving artistic gardening implements that the narrator sells through a mail-order catalogue, which begin as a boon to sales and conclude with congressional hearings on the culpability of mail-order catalogues in such events; and a city-wide rat hunt prompted by an infestation of infanticidal rats throughout the city. The latter is conducted by concerned citizens signing up and then executing the rodents and culminates in a delightfully funny rat-on-mob stalemate.

All at once, as if at an invisible signal, they began a high-pitched, almost musical squeal that I took as either a battle cry or a cry for mercy. All of the rats[...] making this as-musical-as-it-may-have-been-to-them, earsplitting-to-me sound, as if to say: "What now? What are you accusing us of that you would yourselves not have done?"

This imagined dialogue spools out into a diatribe indicting humanity's affection for squirrels (because of their tails) and carelessness with musical instruments. The narrator ultimately decides, by the way, not to participate in the massacre of the rats. It does, however, continue on without him.

His search for his mother proceeds in this dream-like fashion, punctuated, for example, by periodic visits to women's auxiliary clubs like the "Lion's Rotary" and the "Christmas Tree" clubs.

Much like in dream logic, characters and places have their doubles and reoccur in slightly-altered forms.
The narrative is interrupted by transcripts of people discussing (in very choppy, tin-eared dialogue like "A good question, Warren, and fortunately the answer is both.") near-death experiences that set the stage for the plot's conceit that the narrator's mother could somehow traverse the tunnel-like link between life and death to communicate with her son.

But while the dialogue was written with a tin ear, the prose was not. Krusoe's talent for fresh, funny turns of phrase are evident throughout the book. For example, in observing his kitchen, the narrator remarks, "On my kitchen counter the toaster still innocently gleamed next to a patch of crumbs like a chrome elephant amid a tribe of pygmies." Delightfully clean, mildly absurd descriptions like these remind me somewhat of Flannery O'Connor's quirkier moments (I'm thinking of the parrots on Bailey's shirt) and are peppered liberally throughout the book.

In the actual machinations of the plot, Krusoe's novel reminds me primarily of Paul Auster (I'm thinking in particular of Ghosts or Oracle Night where writers exchange identities with their characters or other writers). The psychologically complex narrator is prompted by a thoroughly contrived plot device to conduct an existential search in a mirror world populated, in some solipsistic twist, by cartoonishly flat (and occasionally sinister) supporting characters.

Where the beauty in Auster's books is the urgent thrill reached vicariously through the narrator and the increasingly implausible events, the pleasure in Krusoe's novel is mostly in the form of rat-pack-monologues and dissertation-level dissections of the Indians mascot's socio-morphological implications.

Krusoe's charmingly mad flights of fancy are what really make this novel worth reading. Yes, the themes of abandonment and of death are interesting, but it's better to think of this work as epic prose poetry.

Finally, the cover of this edition is truly perfect, a detail from "The Temptation of St. Anthony" by Hieronymus Bosch, featuring a couple riding a giant fish. This image seems to convey the same balance of humorous absurdity and poetic dream-like grace that the prose does.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Interleaving Lives

Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem
2009, Doubleday


Two weeks ago, Mr. Lethem did a reading through the Brookline Booksmith at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. I am not especially familiar with Lethem's work (I've only read his collection of short stories Men and Cartoons and his collection of essays The Disappointment Artist.

I had already checked out Chronic City from the library and brought my library book for him to sign, after checking with the library director that this request was kosher. Mr. Lethem read the entire first chapter of Chronic City with incredibly charming enthusiasm.

After the reading, Mr. Lethem signed my library book, "To the Ispwich Library and everyone who will enjoy this without stealing it."

Chronic City is, like its writer, an incredibly charming book. It is, however, also an upsetting, ruminative, depressing book as well.

Early in the book the narrator, a washed-up child actor named Chase Insteadman, muses about how fondness for Manhattan as such:

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave... We only pretend to live in something as orderly as a grid.


Insteadman stumbles accidentally into one of those stranger realms, occupied by an eccentric cultural cataloguer named Perkus Tooth who takes it upon himself to educate Insteadman in the cinematic and musical touchstones which give some sense of rhythm to his world. Tooth suffers from what he calls "cluster headaches," which paralyze his thoughts and cripple his flamboyant idiosyncrasies.

Insteadman falls under his unlikely tutelage and their friendship serves as the ostensible plot of the novel and Tooth's acolytes populate Insteadman's life.

Tooth wakes Insteadman from a life of residually-fed complacency and, with the help of some powerful marijuana, enlists him in his increasingly odder and more paranoid obsessions, which progress from unhealthy appetites for Brando and hamburgers to the enslavement of the public by the font of the New Yorker to mystifying vase-like "chaldrons".

Eventually Tooth and Insteadman become consumed by theories regarding the aforementioned "interleaved realms" in the form of a Second Life-like game called Yet Another World. Tooth believes that there is no way to tell whether they themselves are members of some simulated world based on the real world (bringing to mind issues of meta-textuality that I really don't have the energy to write about).

The book seems to support this theory by its increasingly odd subplots, two of which recall a certain amount of 9/11-like imagery. For example, throughout the book, Manhattan is troubled by a loose tiger who appears randomly and decimates Korean supermarkets and hamburger joints. A minor character in the book continues this theme of destruction by creating installation art in the form of public chasms located throughout the island into which lonely souls fling themselves with abandon.

This theme of "worlds within worlds" or the fiction of life is continued in through the career moves of the protagonist and his lover. Insteadman, being a washed-up actor, occupies a nether-realm of personality where he embodies different people and never quite fully himself. As he puts it, in my favorite pop-cultural reference (of many) in the novel, "I winced [at the thought of being] Ralph Bellamy in a movie belonging to Cary Grant."

Insteadman's lover plays a similar societal role. Like an actor who dons characters, Oona Laszlo is a ghost-writer who pens others' autobiographies, adopting their lives as her own.

Which brings me, circuitously, to the issue of surnames. Lethem names his characters improbably compound words and unlikely combinations of vowels and consonants. Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman (who one character calls fittingly "Chase Unperson") as well as Oona Laszlo ("Laszlo" being a popular cinematic pen name) have already been mentioned. Other characters in the book include Richard Abneg, Grace Hawkmanaji ("The Hawkman"), and Strabo Blandiana.

In adding these curious elements to his otherwise emotionally poignant (and occasionally trenchant) narrative, Lethem brings a bizarre kind of levity to the text. I'd like to theorize that Lethem had some larger symbolic reasoning for the tigers and surnames and the stranded astronauts and chaldrons but it seems that these elements bring to mind nothing other than the unlikely peculiarity of life itself, as well as the meta-fictional motif alluded to above.

At the very least, these eccentricities, like Tooth himself, make the text incredibly endearing and prevent the reader from wallowing along with the characters in their existential marijuana-induced crises. Lethem's Manhattan is a strange place where his characters grapple with the pulsating rhythms of interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal introspection no less strange, I guess, than the rhythms of our actual lives. The tigers and chaldrons seem to lend the book the otherworldly (if slightly alarming) sense of humor with which I, like Mr. Lethem, prefer to view the world.

Mr. Lethem's characters ultimately intersect in one anothers' lives in their multitude of assumed identities and brighten, however briefly, each other's lives. Each character wonderfully, maddeningly, haltingly receives some renewed sense of purpose in their odd lives in what one might wrongly assume to be a disconnected island.