Category: 7. David Ross

The European Twilight

Thematics of emptiness: on the set of "The International."

By David Ross. I believe that we are witnessing Europe in its death convulsion. I have in mind Europe’s economic situation, which is worse than ours insofar as there’s no pro-growth, free-market, small-government solution waiting in the wings – but even more I have in mind its spiritual situation. Vastly admiring Children of Men (one of the most moving books I’ve ever read), I’ve been reading some of P.D. James’ mystery fiction. She brilliantly evokes the symptoms of spiritual decay: empty churches, childless couples, bureaucracies people dislike but nonetheless accept as faits accomplis, monuments and traditions that lurk as depressing wraiths of former glory. While living in the UK from 1996 to 2000, I remember picking up on this funereal aura and finding it very unfamiliar and unaccountable. Americans are simply not used to thinking of themselves as occupying the dying embers of history.

James, however, is detached from this dynamic: she observes it without embodying it and understands it only in terms of its external manifestations. She is like H.G. Wells’ Victorian time traveler, puzzled and appalled but in no position to philosophize the finer points of the situation she encounters. In his unnerving novel Elementary Particles (titled Atomised in the UK), Michel Houellebecq provides a full theory. In his historical scheme, the rational impulse arose as a kind of mutation in the cultural DNA of the West; rationalism promulgated scientific materialism; scientific materialism dismantled the structure of religious faith and negated all systems of meaning that transcend the self; the spiritual vacuum was filled by – could only have been filled by – an ultimately unsatisfactory and self-destructive hedonism and social atomism. If this scheme is familiar to the point of being trite, Houellebecq has a subtle feel for the texture of this reality (its brittle intellectualism, its flatness of affect) and a rigorous, dark instinct for the equivalency of all actions once they have been drained of anything except physical meaning. He is also particularly good at demonstrating how his philosophical premises play out in the individual case.

Juliette Binoche in "Cache."

Fancying itself on the cutting edge, film has institutionalized the post-modern manner, but its dabbling in glass and chrome set design, in the spectra of blue-grey, in fractured narrative, is usually nothing more than window dressing. Tom Tykwer’s The International (2009) is typical: a bland thriller involving the usual corporate conspiracy dressed up as post-modern statement. Far more to the point is Michael Haneke’s Caché (English title Hidden, 2005), in which a French literary pundit (on television, of course) suddenly begins to receive cryptically threatening letters and surveillance video of his own house. The film is an intricate cultural puzzle, but its most basic comprehension is that the post-modern bourgeoisie is resourceless to defend or even justify its existence – and that history, far from having ended, increasingly threatens the equilibrium of Europe’s culture of weakness and indulgence.


The Golden Age of the Nerd

Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera from Superbad.

By David Ross. Back in the day, all kinds of people were plausibly brainy society girls like Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story, working girls like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday – but in our day the mind itself has been knocked from its pedestal, and ostentatious braininess or even quick-wittedness has become a form of social disease. The socially acceptable posture is an easygoing indifference to little things like knowledge, logic, and consistency (“Dude, take it easy, what’s the difference.”). All of this is implicit in the evolution of the 50’s egghead (object of bemused respect) into the 80’s nerd (victim of locker-room sadism and prom-night ridicule). Continue reading The Golden Age of the Nerd

On David Lynch’s Inland Empire

David Lynch

By David Ross. By pure chance, I recently happened upon Michael Atkinson’s discussion of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). I was struck by Atkinson’s antic way with words and by his nimble intelligence, so much so that I checked for Atkinson on Wikipedia. He’s made a name for himself as a novelist and poet, as it turns out. I further discovered that he has a blog with much the same air of acuity. Among other things, Atkinson offers his list of the fifty top films of the decade (in order no less – no wimpy relativism there).

Atkinson is right to observe that the organizing principle of Inland Empire is not psychological, in this respect differing from Bergman’s Persona (1966) and most other experiments in pure cinema.  But he seems to imply that the film’s dissociative chaos has no unifying principle or organizing logic, and that the search for codes and readings is a kind of category mistake. Atkinson comes closest to the mark when he observes that Inland Empire is purely a movie and nothing else. It strikes me that the film’s organizing principle is cinematic possibility, and that we witness, in essence, a kaleidoscope of set-pieces involving sub-genres of screen gothic (Southern gothic in the traditional sense, mean street gothic, mafia gothic, redneck gothic), though none are fully realized or contextualized. Continue reading On David Lynch’s Inland Empire

Capucine

Capucine: the essence of glamour and elegance.

This past March was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Germaine Lefebvre (1931-1990), better known as Capucine (French for nasturtium). Cinéastes will remember the particular feline charm she brought to Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska (1960) and Blake Edward’s The Pink Panther (1963).

She was the inamorata of Darryl F. Zanuck, Peter Sellers, and William Holden, and the dear friend and Lausanne neighbor of Audrey Hepburn, whom she met while modeling during the early 1950s. The sight of the two impossible beauties strolling arm in arm down the spring boulevard must have seemed to passersby a mirage or beatific vision. Tormented by chronic depression, Capucine threw herself from her eight-floor penthouse in Lausanne.

If her film career was minor, she herself was the embodiment of Europe in its last stage of cosmopolitan glamour and elegance – the Europe of Maxim’s, and Givenchy, and Ophüls, of all that was swept away in 1968. Here’s a tribute to a lost age.

Cinema vs. Propaganda

From Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker."

By David Ross.   Avatar is anti-American propaganda on a staggering scale, with who-knows-what geopolitical implications, as well as a monument to the infantile simplicity of the Hollywood world view. Pulitzer prize-winner Stephen Hunter, writing in Commentary, provides what I consider the definitive dismemberment.

All of this, however, states the obvious, or what should be the obvious. Roger Ebert has done his share of shilling for Hollywood, but here takes on the industry, laying out a thorough argument against the 3-D format. Cinéasts should join him on the barricades. Spectacle is not art; the mere titillation of the senses is not art.

The greatest film art, indeed, resists spectacle as a distraction from its own core of intellect and emotion, and tends to grope toward a certain starkness in which the essential thing – whatever it may – stands stripped of the extraneous and revealed in its essence.

"He says his name is 'Jim,' and that he's from West LA."
Films like Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Koreeda’s Maborosi (1995) demonstrate James Cameron’s vast and pathetic misunderstanding of his own art form. Sinking into almost complete stillness, they begin to speak the half-veiled symbol language of the world, and, as Yeats says, “call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions.”

The 1950’s & Baby Boomer Propaganda

Tobey McGuire confronts the 'horrors' of 1950's suburbia in "Pleasantville."

By David Ross. Avatar would seem to have no rivals in terms of asinine but aggressive cultural politics. It turns out to have a strong rival, Pleasantville (1998), the premise of which is that two modern kids (Tobey McGuire and Reese Witherspoon) get sucked into a 1950s TV show. They must save this world of family dinners and manicured lawns from its soullessness, mindlessness, and totalitarian conformity by literally teaching the locals how to have sex (in one icky scene, Reese gives her TV mother a lesson in the basics of masturbation). People awaken from their celibate comas and the world begins to shift from black and white to color, introducing a gratuitous racial allegory as the “coloreds” are harassed by the black and white remnant. Meanwhile, the pages of books, which were previously blank in token of the general emptiness of things, suddenly begin to fill with the words of D.H. Lawrence, J.D. Salinger, and other proto-liberationists. By the end of this magical process of transformation, the kids are humping like rabbits in the backseats of cars, the parents are headed for divorce, the citizenry is fighting in the streets, and the town is reduced to rubble – in short, thank god, the sixties have arrived, and not a moment too soon. Tobey returns to the present day to find that his dubious divorcee mother has broken up with her boyfriend. Tobey dries her eyes having learned the crucial lesson that life is “all about change,” never mind that it has led to the cultural wasteland depicted in the film’s opening scene, in which Tobey and Reese, nerd and slut, enact the clichés of the modern high school.

Baby Boomer propaganda has succeeded wonderfully, Pleasantville and Mad Men being cases in point. My students constantly parrot the assertion that the fifties were an era of conformity, conservatism, and materialism. I retort that the fifties were a golden age of American arts and culture, whose leading lights – Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Hitchcock, Nabokov, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Flannery O’Connor, Eugene O’Neil, Jackson Pollock, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Muddy Waters, Billy Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Edmund Wilson – have no equivalent in later decades. I remind them, also, that the sixties did not even have the brains to invent themselves, but were invented in the pages of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, whose masterpieces, “Howl” and On the Road, respectively appeared in 1956 and 1957. When you consider those who remained active – E.E. Cummings, Eliot, Faulkner, Frost, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Pound, William Carlos Williams – and those from elsewhere whose work was filtering into American culture – Bergman, Bresson, Camus, Fellini, Kurosawa, Picasso – the fifties become a crushing commentary on our own inadequacy.

Nabokov and Lionel Trilling here discuss Lolita on Canadian public television. Consider what this clip implies about the despised fifties: that a largish number of people not only gave a damn about a novel like Lolita (the third bestselling novel of 1958), but gave a damn what an academic Mandarin like Trilling had to say about it.