Snowbound with The Shining, or how Stephen King beat Stanley Kubrick at his own game (Part I)

What the heck is going on in this movie? Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Posting has been a bit light of late, I know, basically because many of last weekend's performances were washed out by the blizzard.  Which is also why I spent much of Saturday hunkered down with some favorite movies, among them Stanley Kubrick's celebrated 1980 horror extravaganza, The Shining.

Actually, I'm not sure The Shining is one of my favorite movies; I watched it again at the suggestion of Facebook friends who insisted it was the perfect film for a snowed-in Saturday night.  (It beat out Doctor Zhivago in a small poll, but maybe it shouldn't have!)

But I'm in disagreement on that point, it seems, with the general public, which has enshrined The Shining as "one of the greatest horror movies ever made" after a slightly uncertain embrace on its release (the movie was a minor hit, though, and saved Kubrick's commercial reputation from the blow delivered by Barry Lyndon).

Now it's not that The Shining doesn't intrigue me.  Stanley Kubrick never made a less than fascinating movie; the so-called "trilogy" of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange may comprise the height of his achievement (and, you could argue, the height of intellectual pop cinema in general) - and perhaps nothing else in his oeuvre matches them.  Still, his "second tier" - Paths of Glory, Lolita, and Full Metal Jacket - would be the envy of almost any other filmmaker, and Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut are all intriguing to various degrees.

Although to be honest, I'd actually put The Shining at the bottom of that last tier - only it takes a little 'splainin' to define why - and also why the public thinks differently.

But first, a little background.  The work of auteurs who enjoy long careers can generally be divided into three phases (with Welles as the exception that proves the rule).  The first phase consists of small-scale grappling with the apparatus of commercial filmmaking, and the search for voice and theme.  Kubrick's initial phase is quite short - Paths of Glory, a huge leap in his achievement, was only his third full feature. (Compare to Hitchcock's silent phase, which despite strong hints of his eventual direction, took a dozen films to coalesce; Bergman arguably took nine; in contrast, Lean only took two, and Fellini, like Welles, spoke in his own voice in his first film; but both had worked as editors or assistant directors for years).

The second phase is generally far longer, and builds from a commercial breakthrough (Paths of Glory , for instance, connected Kubrick with Kirk Douglas, who tapped him to take over Spartacus).  Suddenly larger resources and a fresh sense of the artistic self are both available to the auteur, and a kind of long extrapolation begins; his or her distinctive language and perspective (and often the core team that helped develop it) are applied to a series of projects that slowly define - sometimes in rambling fits and starts - an over-arching statement.  Sometimes, as with Lean, this phase boils down to a series of leaps in scale.  Occasionally, as with Coppola, the auteur's talent is too dependent on certain collaborators or circumstances, and his arc devolves into slow collapse. With Kubrick, this extrapolation took the form of an ongoing exploration of differing genres, and covered almost all his remaining career; only in Eyes Wide Shut did he begin what I would call a retrospective phase, in which he self-consciously began to re-examine his means and methods (compare with Hitchcock, whose first retrospective film is probably Vertigo, followed by North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and Frenzy - indeed, all his classic late pictures are retrospective in their essence, although sometimes radical in their technique).

What has all this got to do with The Shining?  A good question - and the answer is that in the rear view mirror, it's obvious that often the extrapolation phase of an auteur's career is beset by unresolved or buried conflicts in the artist's method or personality (or both).  In Hitchcock this issue could be summed up as the limits of anxiety and fetish; in Fellini the problem became a self-consciousness that concealed a deeper self-doubt (indeed, his retrospective phase probably began as early as La Dolce Vita).

Kubrick's extrapolation phase, in contrast, was troubled less by what many saw as his pop short-comings (the clinical tone and meditative, chess-player pace) and more - and more - by clear, if undiscussed, conflicts with his source material.

Narratives that end in "twinned" concepts - the concrete version in The Shining.

Which is hardly surprising, as Kubrick's movies are marked by thematic consistency, despite their differing sources and superficial variety (war picture, black comedy, science fiction, costume drama, horror).  In every Kubrick film, isolation plays a leading role; the characters are always trapped in a harsh or even inhuman environment (a battleground, or outer space, or a blizzard) - and what's more, they move through it in ignorance.  I think ignorance (and specifically moral action in ignorance) has rarely been given the consideration in Kubrick's work that is its proper due, especially as (curiously enough) it may be his most basic theme.  His first full-length films were noir variants, and all his movies have a sublimated hint of that genre's sense of mystery.  The desperate military brass of Dr. Strangelove spend most of the movie trying to figure out what General Ripper has been up to;  Dave and Frank have no idea why they're going to Jupiter;  Alex agrees to the Ludovico technique with no knowledge of its effects; the list goes on and on.  Everyone is flying blind in Kubrick.

But beneath this lies a different kind of interest, in something even deeper than ignorance; call it un-knowability, for lack of a better word. For Kubrick was obsessed with the contradictory nature of human experience - the places were logic stops, where we suddenly realize our bedrock mental concepts conceal their own antitheses; and many of his best films deconstruct such archetypes to limn their embedded, twin-like oppositions.  The symbiosis of man and machine in 2001 is the most obvious example; but connections between sex and death drive Eyes Wide Shut, and Full Metal Jacket turns on the complex relationship between aggression and fraternity. Indeed, Kubrick was at his best when he could tease from a simple pop trope a hauntingly resonant contradiction; he conjured HAL, the "white hotel room," the monolith, and all of 2001, for example, from the slim premise of Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Sentinel.

Yet as I sat through The Shining last weekend (as my house, like the Overlook, was slowly buried in snow), I began to realize how often Kubrick actually failed in this ongoing project.  Try as he might, he couldn't work his magic on all his sources. Certainly in Barry Lyndon his duel with Thackeray ended in a draw; and I'd argue that in The Shining, his similar showdown with Stephen King led only to frustration, and a concealed defeat.   Which I will consider more fully in the second half of this two-part series.

Watching the reruns on That 70's Show

Politically and culturally, ours is a backward-looking nation. In our politics, we endlessly battle over the legacy of the 60's, and much of our pop culture still takes its cues from the 70's (not coincidentally, the era in which the mutual co-optation of our political cultures first took form). That observation goes double for the movies - the tail end of the 70's (and the cusp of the 80's) was the period in which the blockbuster and the video game emerged, cable TV first splintered the national audience, and the comic book was posited as a format for A-list production.  Those tropes and issues have been working and re-working their way through the multiplex ever since.

What's most fascinating about these developments, however, is that they seemed to nip the last great flowering of American film in the bud. Indeed, by the mid-80's it was clear the movies had taken a nose-dive in quality - a collapse from which they've never fully recovered. One by one the old arthouse masters fell silent (Bergman bade farewell to film, Fellini foundered), while the mainstream auteurs, the ones who hoped to yoke high and low together onscreen, were heard from less and less (Hitchcock and Lean died, Kubrick's output dwindled).

What was more surprising was that all the young turks who had dominated the American screen in the 70's suddenly hit a wall; Coppola never recovered from the debacle of One from the Heart (1982); Spielberg repeated himself or groped for a vision after E.T. (also 1982); Polanski remained in exile; Woody Allen began his long decline; Lucas openly declared himself the effects engineer he had always been.  The slide didn't feel like a crash because there were still pop pleasures to be had (Aliens, Back to the Future) - and quirky new talents did appear (Terry Gilliam, Steven Soderbergh, Tim Burton, the Coens).  But slowly it sank in that none of this latest generation of filmmakers was able to scale the heights of their predecessors - much less carve out movies that could transform the culture.

Why that should have proved true is the kind of question that, if film criticism were a science rather than a degraded form of cheap rhetoric, it might be equipped to answer.  Certainly Reagan's reactionary 40's mentality (so oddly mimicking the 40's pop-surround of Star Wars) had something to do with it; politically, America was in a retrenchment (from which, again, it has never fully recovered, and which may destroy the nation yet).  And as noted before, technology continued to crib on the cultural space of the movies, and further fragment a diminishing audience, while general cultural literacy (necessary for any serious art form) continued its steady descent. And the business codes of the industry evolved from skepticism to something like hostility toward individual vision.  In this regard the annual slate of Oscar nominations operates as a sad palimpsest: in 1975, the nominees for best picture were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Barry Lyndon, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, and Nashville; in 1988, the nominees were Rain Man, Working Girl, Dangerous Liaisons, Mississippi Burning, and The Accidental Tourist. Other years, Out of Africa and Driving Miss Daisy actually won the trophy.  Sigh.

Cross this with The Goonies and you have what Super 8 hoped to be.

These thoughts came to mind (again) as I sat through two recent movies that both felt like repeats of that 70's show: J.J. Abrams's Super 8, a Spielberg homage produced by the master himself, and Terrence Malick's big, beautiful new bore, The Tree of Life.  Both were striking in their devotion to the zeitgeist of that benighted decade (in one case, the director borrowed from himself), but both attempts at cultural ventriloquism - or should I say turning back the clock? - essentially failed.  And as I watched them, I sensed a drifting pop establishment once again attempting to re-connect with its roots, but failing to do so.  Which again, made me heave a heavy sigh.

But I couldn't help but notice what was missing in each case - in Super 8, it was particularly obvious (and thus had its own kind of added poignance).  I admit that J. J. Abrams is brilliant at triangulated audience-development strategies - he got people to buy into the ever-sillier elaborations of Lost, and then his empty "re-boot" of the Star Trek series, too.  But you could never pretend to yourself, while you're sitting in front of the screen during one of his pictures, that Abrams has any real talent as a filmmaker.  Where he places his camera, how he structures his sequences, how his themes develop - all this feels either borrowed or banal (his one talent is for casting). And so it seems to me Abrams shouldn't set himself up before the example of Spielberg - a natural with the camera if ever there was one, who even in his lesser films will startle you with a scene that in purely cinematic terms is so inspired it's close to perfection.

And there are a lot of sequences like that in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (complete movie above), which, if you combined its spookier sequences with the Goonies (and added a few jolts from Jaws and other Spielberg flicks), appears to have served as the template for Super 8.  Don't get me wrong - I think Close Encounters is at times a bit flaccid in its uplift - Spielberg was never a screenwriter - and it's probably ground zero for what a friend of mine snarkily calls "The Spielberg Facial," in which a character - and sometimes character after character - stares in awe at the approaching shark/spaceship/dinosaur as the director zooms in for the money shot.  But I have to admit that many of the sequences in CE3K are nonetheless unforgettable, even if they depend on the Spielberg Facial; editing, imagery, action and, of course, music (by the amazingly versatile John Williams) cohere into scenes that still look, well, awesome.  Indeed, just about every appearance of the alien craft in CE3K is the kind of cinematic tour de force that George Lucas could only dream of.  Spielberg just had it goin' on.

But J.J. Abrams doesn't.  He couldn't orchestrate a scene if his life depended on it.  Half of Close Encounters was burned into my memory back when I first saw it in 1977 (I even remember the theatre I saw it in, which you usually do when the picture is a great one).  Meanwhile, only a week has passed since I caught Super 8, but already I can hardly remember anything about it.  The young actors were subtle and affecting, I remember that; the special effects were certainly convincing (but they always are, these days; special effects are the one thing Hollywood can still do).  The conceit of the movie -that Abrams's nouveau-Goonies were making a Romero-style zombie film - was hilariously realized over the final credits.  And the period - actually, the year, 1979 (you can pinpoint it) - was invoked almost as a fetish. from the pop songs on the radio (My Sharona, Heart of Glass) to the introduction of the Walkman to the faint yellow stains carefully painted onto the stars' capped teeth.

But for all that, the fraying, frazzled sunniness of the decade - the loose, cynically genial attitude that Spielberg conjured effortlessly in Close Encounters - somehow never came over; a blandly ironic millennial self-consciousness was always just being held at bay.  And the film's plot, like its tone, refused to cohere - indeed, the fact that the kids had accidentally photographed the monster terrorizing their scrappy little town eventually felt like an afterthought in a movie that seemed to be running on several separate tracks at once.  By the finish, Abrams had begun jumping from one digital setpiece to another with predictable crudeness, and more and more scenes felt like half-hearted glosses on Spielberg's early hits.  Most critics have praised the film for being better than  Thor and The Green Lantern - which I'm sure it is.  But it's still mired in its own under-achieving period - i.e., the millennium - so why pay to see it when the real thing is available on YouTube for free?  I'm afraid the ultimate message of Super 8 is a dispiriting reminder to America that you can't go home to the multiplex anymore.


An inside look at how Malick created the exquisite look of his 70's masterpiece, Days of Heaven.

Somehow, though, Terrence Malick didn't get that memo. He literally tries to go home in The Tree of Life - and not only to his childhood home in Texas, but all the way back to everybody's home, the primordial soup of the cosmos. I'm not kidding; after a brief introduction to his characters - a 50's family much like the director's own - this Rhodes scholar backs up the way James Michener used to in blockbusters like Hawaii to tell his tale from the very beginning: we stare in ravished disbelief as galaxies form, and amino acids coalesce into proteins, and eventually dinosaurs rule the earth (albeit with curiously soulful attitude).

The only director who has ever brought this kind of thing off, of course, is Kubrick (in 2001:A Space Odyssey, produced just before the high tide of American cinema). But much as J. J. Abrams is no Spielberg, Malick is no Kubrick; while 2001 opens with a stunningly photographed prehistoric drama which poetically compresses every theme in the ensuing film, Malick's "fantasia" (yes, I also couldn't help but recall that corny Disney visualization of Rite of Spring) is merely stunningly photographed (ironically enough, it was photographed by Douglas Trumbull, one of Kubrick's special effects men on 2001).

But then almost everything in The Tree of Life is merely stunningly photographed - it's basically a catalogue of Malick's familiar concerns, stripped down to their imagistic essence. I suppose the director's central theme is evanescence, so the arc of his career makes its own kind of stylistic sense; whereas in his early, great films (Badlands, Days of Heaven), Malick at least lightly tethered his haunting imagery to sturdy plotlines, in his later, more self-indulgent work he has begun to skimp on that boring story-structure stuff, the better to riff on his addiction to luminism. In short, this self-serious director was always episodic; now - despite pretending he's telling a story so big it has to start with the Big Bang - he's purely impressionistic. Indeed, sometimes his movie boils down to simplistic existential questions literally whispered over the pretty pictures.

Although don't get me wrong - those pretty pictures can be pretty seductive; indeed, the luminousness never stops in The Tree of Life; Malick seems to be able to find it anywhere. Whereas the famously ravishing Days of Heaven depended on what photographers call "the magic hour" for its haunted look, Malick now seems to be able to tease a delicately soulful glow from any time of day. And to be fair, there are moments of wide-eyed wonder here that capture precisely what it's like to see the world as a child does (that is, as mysteriously new), as well as several inspired images - like the moment in which sunlight flickers on a wall like an errant soul - that can stand up to anything in this director's earlier achievement.

It's always the magic hour in The Tree of Life.

Which makes sense, as the embedment of the spiritual in the physical is one of this director's conceptual hobbyhorses, and in Tree of Life it's more apparent than ever that there's a streak of Melville in Malick - he shares the great novelist's spiritual homo-eroticism (as do many, if not most, heterosexual men - they're all in love with innocent guy-ness). Thus there's a curiously obsessive undertow to Malick's adoration of the crewcut boys who figure as his heroes (and who struggle, in predictable fashion, with their thorny but loving father, played by Brad Pitt); they're not only freshly minted Holden Caulfield clones but also little Billy Budds running innocently around their tiny town (one of them, we know, will die at the end of adolescence). But again, to be fair, there's a clear-eyed awareness at work, here, too - Malick's boys (one of whom is a dead ringer for Pitt) break windows and gleefully strap helpless frogs to fireworks, just the way real boys do. Indeed, Tree of Life is most affecting when it dances along the line between Buddhist reverie and an acquiescence of the hard truths of human nature.

Still, we slowly zone out on all the zen, and Malick doesn't even attempt the development of the kind of climax that Melville always relied on. The movie begins to feel less and less, rather than more and more, coherent, as Malick starts hopping back and forth between his boys' childhood and adulthood - and by the time a strange kind of Rapture (we saw Mom floating around earlier) has begun to take place at some heavenly beach, we find ourselves patting back a smile rather than tearing up. (Needless to say, the picture closes with ANOTHER galaxy forming - the cycle begins again, Little Grasshopper!)  We also begin to sense an off-putting self-absorption operating beneath Malick's twilit Eden; he and Pitt, for instance, can't really make their iconically prickly father figure come alive - and Sean Penn, who plays one of the boys all grown up, just looks lost; all the auto-erotic innocence apparently precludes any messy adult complexity.

Thus we're left feeling that we're watching a different kind of reminiscence - one for a time in which Terrence Malick could actually pull his philosophical visions off. It's fairly apparent that The Tree of Life only got made because of the participation of Pitt and Penn; interesting movies are only made by studios these days because of pressure from actors (not the audience). And like many stars, these two are no doubt nostalgic for the old mojo of American film - when they could be confident, at least now and then, that they were devoting themselves to art, not commerce; and Malick is one of that tradition's last living auteurs. Only his highbrow well seems as dry as Spielberg's middlebrow one - indeed, one thing we wonder while we're watching the wondrous imagery of The Tree of Life is why the movie exists at all; in some deep way, it feels oddly superfluous. Tellingly, when Robert DeNiro tried to explain why he had voted to give it the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the actor stammered that "It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize." Okay.  Note he didn't mention the "artistic success." But I doubt we'd have to go back to the dawn of time to explain that ellipsis; we'd probably only have to go back to 1973.

Lost in the labyrinth with Christopher Nolan (Part II)

What, if anything, is at the center of Christopher Nolan's maze?

In my first post on Inception, I attempted to explain why Christopher Nolan's blockbuster had incited such passion on the Web (and such recalcitrance elsewhere), using the director's own hints as guide.  And in brief, I found in the pitched battle over the movie a war between two cultures: the culture of film - with its attenuated but still real roots in theatre, music, and art - and the culture of the virtual, in which only genre and paranoid onanism hold sway.  Critics looked at Inception and saw everything it lacked: characters, narrative, resonant symbolism; but geeks simply saw themselves, writ large, and with superb skill.  To them, it seemed obvious that a dream should look like The Matrix (or some other cool action flick); because what else would a dream look like?  What is a film for other than to provide thrills, to serve as "a wild ride"?

Which isn't to say that Inception isn't brilliantly made, or that Nolan isn't very, very clever.  It is, and he is - what's more, the director clearly has his finger on something new that's embedded in the culture; his immense commercial success, built on movies of undeniable intellectual challenge, make his legacy impossible to ignore.  But the question remains - is that "something new" he has tapped into capable of making art - or is it simply replacing art?

In short, what is Nolan's legacy made of?  I'd argue that in their complexity, his films mirror art, and maybe even great works of art; but their material is always derivative of art (the way "genre" is) without ever quite becoming, Pinocchio-like, the real thing.  Of course it's been a staple of film criticism for a long time that pop can achieve the status of art - and it arguably has, in movies like The Godfather and Citizen Kane - but these days it seems the greatness of those pop baubles may have really been due to the actual sources of art leaking into genre on the down low.  A sense of the tragic isn't actually indigenous to Mario Puzo's The Godfather, for instance; Francis Ford Coppola worked it into his movie sideways, from his knowledge of opera and theatre.  Ditto Roman Polanski, and Orson Welles, and even Alfred Hitchcok.  And critics did handsprings over their movies because they sensed in them an old magic in a new, populist form.

But when Christopher Nolan goes to work - with a brain just as sharp as Coppola's, if not more so - he doesn't try to tap into theatre, or opera, or even the great movies of the past; he simply tries to deepen genre with more genre.  Thus as we get lost in the maze of a movie like Inception, we only meet up with - other movies.

The imagery for "The Dawn of Man" in "2001."

To see why this is so, ponder, for a moment, what many consider the "ambiguities" of Inception, next to what we think of as real ambiguity in genuine works of art.  And no, with apologies to William Empson, we won't even reach as high as Shakespeare - let's look again, instead, at Stanley Kubrick (in whose artistic vineyard Inception fans imagine Nolan is toiling).

Kubrick has his flaws, of course, but his movies are genuinely ambiguous - indeed, as we watch them repeatedly, an almost frightening sense of thematic depth often opens out beneath us.  Take 2001, for instance (above and below) - it took viewers a long time to appreciate that the "computer-goes-crazy" story of HAL hooked seamlessly into the meditation on mind and machine that was threaded through the whole movie.  Indeed, after repeated viewings, fans realized that much in the film was ambiguous - even early reviewers chuckled, for instance, that HAL seemed like the most "human" character in the movie, but only gradually did viewers realize what that meant.

Other assumptions - such as the unseen presence of "aliens" behind the mysterious monolith (an assumption of "genre," btw) - likewise collapsed over time.  By now, we appreciate 2001 as a strange, slow poem on the question of what, exactly a machine is - and whether we ourselves are anything more than that (and whether the universe is, either; note the visual parallels between HAL's "eye," below, and the sunrise above).

And the imagery for the dawn of HAL.

There's a similar thematic apparatus working through most of Kubrick's oeuvre; Full Metal Jacket simultaneously illuminates the protective and destructive aspects of the war instinct; Eyes Wide Shut ponders the dance of sex and death.  But if these movies are sometimes recondite, or seem frustratingly paradoxical - if they simply pause sometimes in the hope that we'll "catch up" with their imagery - it's because their themes (not merely their techniques) are recondite and paradoxical.  Kubrick never dabbles in deception for its own sake; he doesn't indulge in sudden narrative boomerangs just to "blow our minds."  He's simply not interested in keeping us on our toes as a means of distraction.

But sometimes it seems that's all that Nolan is interested in.  Indeed, the essence of Inception is his relentless cutting between different "levels" of narrative (in case you haven't seen the movie, the dreams-within-dreams afford convenient dilations of time) without any sense of thematic development.  Sure, effects from one dream are interpolated into another, but this only creates possibilities for cool special effects, as when gravity goes all nonsense in one lengthy action sequence.  Meanwhile the psychology of lead character Cobb (as he burrows deeper and deeper into his own psyche) basically remains at the level of an average Oprah Winfrey show - only drenched in a paranoid expectation that everything that "seems" to be happening isn't really "real."  Much as a resident of Second Life knows deep down inside that he doesn't really have wings, so Cobb is half-sure that everything (and everyone) he encounters is a construct - of his employers, or his enemies, or even, perhaps of his own subconscious.

The trouble for Inception is that such an enveloping sense of suspicion basically flattens any hope of the film inspiring any rich emotion (aside, of course, from self-pity).  Even the one possibly resonant surprise at the center of the maze (how Cobb "killed" his wife with the idea that reality itself was an illusion) quickly devolves into a new game-board of dream-gambits that really only exist for their own sake.  Thus when a train - which we realize figures as the means of her death, both real and imaginary - pops up unexpectedly in another, seemingly unrelated, dream, the moment hardly registers as meaningful; in fact it's only about as resonant, as it clicks into the movie's paranoid pattern, as one of the numbers on a Rubik's cube.

So while software geeks, and other obsessive-compulsives, may squeal with delight at every chance to chase Nolan's unreliable narrative weasel around his virtual mulberry bush (the last shot provides a final opportunity to do the same thing with the whole film), grown-ups without access to a bong and a dorm room may find themselves checking out of the whole experience long before its official end.  Or will end up looking at it merely as a kind of memory exercise for over-grown children (the inevitable Lego tribute, at left).

But to be fair, Nolan almost seems aware of this artistic problem himself; he seems half-cognizant of his own inability to create actual art from his brilliance.  Indeed, for most of its running time, Inception largely exists as a defense against its own emptiness.  Over and over again, the director feeds us the same strange-loop catnip as a way of fooling us into thinking his movie is actually going somewhere thematically, instead of merely cycling through three or four ideas that only seem intriguingly ambiguous because it's impossible (due to his ongoing game of narrative monte) to differentiate between them.

Thus the deep, unspoken mood of Inception is something like impotent introspection.  And looking back, it seems that the defining motif of Nolan's career has been a similar form of brooding isolation - think of Batman alone on that urban spire in Batman Begins (at right), grimly surveying a vast landscape of genre, but always separate from it: that's Nolan (and his fans).  And in Inception, that loneliness has metastasized into his own brain: Nolan and his heroes are now even isolated from themselves.

Or is that very lack of connection, perhaps, Nolan's great meta-theme?  Is the true meaning of his oeuvre its self-aware meaninglessness?  Such a claim sounds ridiculous, I know, until you wonder - is Nolan so very far from, say, M.C. Escher?  True, Escher isn't as grandiose, or as self-aggrandizing, as Nolan; the spooky metaphysics of his strange loops burrow into the brain without the help of caped crusaders or leather-clad biceps, or even the cool corporate chic of Inception.  And just btw, the narrative strange loop figures in plenty of Western culture, from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark down to Borges; my favorite example of it in movies, in fact, may be the kitten that wakes up at the close of Celine and Julie Go Boating.  What makes Nolan different, however, is that in his cinema, the strange loops are all that exist in artistic terms; the rest is a derivative flotsam of borrowed imagery and familiar tropes floating over a bottomless well of adolescent angst.


But what if that's all that exists for the audience, too?  In a way, it's possible to read Nolan (at left, in high recursion mode) as an avatar of the post-cultural artist, the professional who can conjure for the crowd the illusion of art's complexity without any of its actual content.  And in a world in which the "market" has replaced the "culture," and in which much of the mass audience already "lives" in a world that doesn't really exist, what other option does an ambitious artist have?  Perhaps film is destined to follow the other visual arts into that self-aware but barren realm in which art is denuded of its ancient richness, but still edges forward on the strength of this or that intellectual strategy, this or that awareness or critical stance.

And given that likelihood, maybe the brilliant Christopher Nolan is the best we can hope for; maybe, in fact, it's time we all bid Stanley Kubrick and his kind good-bye.

A guide for the perplexed

The actual Coen Brothers - not extras from their latest film.

A Serious Man, the latest film from the Coen Brothers (above), who are perhaps the last Hollywood directors who can get away with anything intellectually challenging on the silver screen, has been met by some viewers with a serious charge: anti-Semitism, or at least (since the Coens are Jewish) "self-hatred." Set among the Jewish denizens of an absurdly moderne Midwestern suburb, the movie is clearly sourced in the Coens' own upbringing (they were raised in an academic family in Minneapolis), and yet, according to The Wall Street Journal, the (Jewish) stereotypes and caricatures in the movie "range from dislikable through despicable, with not a smidgeon of humanity to redeem them." The Village Voice went further, calling the movie "loathsome . . . truly vicious," and linking it to "a rising anti-Semitism" that was "understandable" after the recent battles in Gaza.

Meanwhile, other critics may have liked the film, but seem perplexed by it. "Can art come from jadedness?" the Boston Globe's articulately vapid Ty Burr wondered (apropos of nothing, as the film hardly feels jaded), before labeling the movie "Jewish Bergman" (!), and deciding that for the Coens, God is either "absent, absent-minded, or mad as hell." Well, maybe. Yet in his review Burr glosses over - indeed, in effect ignores - what many have noted about the film, and what gives it its structure - its parallels with the Book of Job.

We first meet the movie's lead, one Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, below) as he's having a physical, but soon learn more about his moral constitution; like Job, he's self-effacing but righteous - "a serious man," in his own words: a hard-working professor and family man who loves his kids and is loyal to his wife (except maybe in his dreams). Nevertheless, circumstance or fate or what-have-you begins to load Larry's back with misfortune: his wife decides to leave him for an unctuous neighbor; his bid for tenure is in jeopardy; he smashes up his car; his kids are secretly stealing from him; a student is bribing him to change his failing grade; and his sad-sack brother, who has been sleeping on the couch for months, is sinking into something like paranoid psychosis, all while obsessing over a grand scheme of probability.


Michael Stuhlbarg as the Coen's Serious Man.

Funny enough, probability is on Larry's mind, too, back at the university, where he has to explain to uncomprehending students Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It means "we can never know what's going on," he tells them (which of course isn't true; the Uncertainty Principle tells us quite a bit about what's going on; but never mind), and that lack of true knowledge of the universe has begun to haunt him. He desperately seeks out spiritual guidance from the rabbis at his synagogue, but each encounter is more frustrating than the last. And the Lord continues to smite him.

It's odd that the poor mensch doesn't think of the Book of Job, or that none of his rabbis mention it to him (of course maybe that would have made everything too meta even for the Coens). Then again, at least one blogger has claimed that A Serious Man has "almost nothing to do with the Book of Job," so maybe I and many other viewers are finding parallels where there aren't any. Still, the movie is built around the religious question of affliction, features the advice of three rabbis (Job is advised by three "friendly accusers"), and concludes with the sudden appearance of a tornado (God reveals himself to Job from a whirlwind). And it does include a proxy for Job's plague of boils (Larry's brother is constantly draining a sebaceous cyst), and it opens, like the Old Testament book, with a cunning stratagem from the Devil himself. So it does seem that if the Coens didn't have Job in mind, then there's more cultural coincidence going on here than you could swing a dead cat at. (Or a live one, if like Larry you have to lecture on Schrödinger's famous feline.)

But back to that opening cameo from the Devil. People often forget that in the Bible, it's Satan, not Yahweh, who is tormenting Job (all God does is play along, as a kind of bet on Job's spiritual mettle). Thus the Coens open their latter-day parable with a potent fable from the shtetl, in which a seemingly innocuous old rabbi (the lovable Fyvush Finkel) turns up at the door of a poor couple on a dark winter's night. The husband's impulse is to invite him in; the wife, however, is certain he's a dybbuk, literally a dead man walking, re-animated by a demon. She even stabs him to make her point; but the Coens leave a shred of doubt trailing after the wounded rabbi as he staggers out - as well as a lingering sense that perhaps the rabbis counseling poor Larry in his modern Midwestern shtetl are themselves somehow demonic (particularly the one with a weird, Twilight-Zone-style tale of Hebrew script embedded in goyim teeth).


The Coens on the "set" of the Midwest shtetl moderne they found for their film.

So while A Serious Man may reflect the Book of Job, it doesn't quite mirror it; there's little sense that Job's various confidantes are emissaries of "the enemy," for instance. But perhaps it's in the very differences between source and film that we may find the key, as it were, to the Coen's scripture - and there are two digressions from the film's Old Testament source that all but cry out for exegesis. So here goes nothing. (Warning: serious spoilers ahead!)

In the Old Testament, Job's final advisor is "Elihu," who rebukes the claims of the three "friendly accusers" - i.e., that in a just universe, all affliction must be punishment for wrongdoing. Elihu's argument is that suffering is beyond our critique; it may exist to guard us from a moral fall, or even from further, greater suffering - but at bottom, its meaning is unknowable, just as we cannot have a full understanding of God's true nature or purpose. Rather pointedly, when Yahweh himself finally appears, he rebukes Job's friendly accusers but lets Elihu's arguments pass unremarked.

A key difference between Elihu and Job's three friends, however, is his age, and I think the Coens seize on this detail. Elihu begins his argument by apologizing for his youth: "I am young in years, and you are old," he explains (in William Blake's engraving, at left), "and that is why I was fearful, not daring to tell you what I know." Thus it's no surprise that the Coens begin to focus on Larry's young son Danny, who staggers through his bar mitzvah stoned, and is addicted to F Troop and the Jefferson Airplane. Through a complicated plot maneuver, when Danny receives his "bar mitzvah greeting" from the ancient rabbi who has pointedly refused to advise his father, his advice turns out to be a quote from an Airplane song, "Somebody to Love":

When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies
don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?

Obviously, the Coens have found an analogue for Elihu's arguments in the blandishments of pop - an amplified shrug before the mysteries of a mad universe, mixed with an all-too-human wail for love. This is witty enough, and after all, despite his cannabis-induced haze, Danny has gotten through his bar mitzvah and become a member of the nation of Israel.

And for a few, brief moments, his father's fortunes seem to improve.

But then the Coens take their last, and biggest, detour from the Old Testament. In what almost counts as an epilogue, Larry, unlike Job, finally does something unrighteous. Something wrong. Knowing, the film implies, that an envelope of money left by his failing student could be his way out of crippling legal costs, Larry changes the grade of said student from F to C (actually, in a typical Coen grace note, to C-).

And Yahweh's vengeance is swift. Within moments, a call comes from the doctor's office we saw way back at the beginning of the film: Larry's X-rays have come back from the lab, and things don't look good. At once we sense actual Job-level torments are now in store for poor Larry - only this time as punishment, not test.

Meanwhile Danny is about to face his own moment of truth, as a tornado much like the divine whirlwind in Job (at right, again from Blake) descends on his schoolyard. By his side is his junior-high pot pusher. Apparently they, not Job, are the ones destined to hear the new Revelation. But before we can hear it, whatever it may be, the film abruptly ends.

Job has gone down; and God, apparently, has decided to speak to Elihu, i.e. Danny, i.e. the Coens, instead. (Hence, perhaps, the success which followed for them, much like the renewal of prosperity that came for Job.) This final twist is, therefore, both a gesture of literally cosmic arrogance and a decided rejection of the faith in which the Coens were raised - and yet its cadence, which by all means should be triumphant, seems dark and tinged with regret; the whirlwind roars toward Danny with furious, nihilistic menace, and as it approaches, his pusher stares into his eyes with an expression that has no expression. Is God concealed within this whirlwind, or is the voice of the whirlwind essentially the voice of nothing, of nothingness? The Coens don't tell us; all they give us over the credits is the voice of Grace Slick. Maybe she's the new God.

So the brothers seem to feel no triumph in their triumph, as it were. But the question lingers: can a film be this critical of Judaism - indeed even reject Judaism - and yet not be anti-Semitic? I'd argue "yes," but I can understand the reactions of those who argue "no." The Coens do push the long-standing in-jokes about Jewish looks and tics from so many Jewish entertainers to a new, awful extreme; sometimes their camera simply stops to stare at a craggy proboscis or a drooping eyelid with a weird sense of fascination filtered through several levels of irony. How are we to take what amounts, in a way, to a cinematic Jewish tic? And are we perhaps supposed to equate all the plain looks and saggy skin on display as some sort of metaphor for the fallen, demonic state of Judaism itself?

How we answer that question, I think, depends on whether we feel, like Ty Burr, that the Coens are "cold." It's worth noting, however, that Burr describes them as being as cold as Stanley Kubrick, which in effect immediately dismantles the argument. Kubrick was hardly cold, and the insistence that he was by the fading generation of Paulettes who are still trying to undermine his reputation may count as the longest-running gag in American cinematic criticism (only the joke is on the public). Of course Kubrick was merely contemplative, not cold - although certainly he saw the universe as cold, and famously held back from satisfying the egoism of the average movie viewer. To Ty Burr, of course, that's unthinkable - and he resents the moral judgment it implies (richly deserved as that judgment may be).

Perhaps the Coens are a bit like that, then - they may be, as Burr snickers, "Stanley Kubrick's grandchildren," just not in the pejorative way he intends. They, like the divine Stanley, do stand at least one step away from the imagery they conjure, and thus they dodge the claim that they intend the grotesquerie of their characters as moral statement. Perhaps in their attitude toward their native milieu they're more like Fellini than Kubrick - and of course we hardly think of Fellini as anti-Catholic. Which isn't to say the Coens' imagery is on the level of Kubrick's or Fellini's, but here, as in No Country for Old Men, the Brothers C get at something like Kubrick's sense of submerged metaphor. And like Kubrick, their tales are suffused with melancholy, I think, beneath their carefully designed pop surfaces. Certainly much of A Serious Man plays like a long, belated valentine to their father. It's just not a valentine to their faith.

Beyond the Infinite, and the Pale

As a Stanley Kubrick fan, I found this irresistible (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan). For the record, this is actually a recording not of a school orchestra, but of the "Portsmouth Sinfonia," a British art-school stunt in the 70's in which the only entrance requirement was that players be unfamiliar with their chosen instrument. For a while, Brian Eno was a member (he played clarinet). For a latterday, less conceptual iteration of this hardy meme, check out the Really Terrible Orchestra, which, alas, I just missed in Edinburgh this summer.

The Paulettes bury Kubrick - again!

Will it never end? Will the Paulettes never give up on Stanley Kubrick? You'd have thought they'd gotten their last shots in with Eyes Wide Shut - when even the director's death did little to dissuade Pauline Kael, with her trademark class, from calling his final work "a piece of shit" while her acolytes piled on.

But you know, it's a funny thing about genius - it's hard to keep a good one down. Eyes Wide Shut was slowly rehabilitated, after several major magazines ridiculed the dim film-critic consensus (an unheard-of event, right there). Kubrick boxed sets began to be issued with striking regularity. A gigantic coffee-table tome, The Stanley Kubrick Archives, was published. Hollywood's most successful director, Steven Spielberg, completed Kubrick's unfinished A.I. - again, unheard-of (can The Aryan Papers be too far off?).

But the endurance of the Kubrick legend, needless to say, rankled the Paulettes (as Pauline Kael's critical followers are known). After all, they bet big against him. Big. Kael herself called him a pornographer in print and intimated that he was a racist. And just how valid could her criticism be if it was utterly opposed to the film artist with possibly the greatest legacy since World War II?

For make no mistake: of Kubrick's thirteen feature films, five are masterpieces (Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey - that's Kubrick directing on its famous centrifuge set, above) three more are flawed but fascinating (Lolita, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut), and one is a sumptuous failure with many brilliant moments (Barry Lyndon). It's an incredible oeuvre - one of the best of the century. No wonder there are endless re-issues of the boxed set (which always lacks, unfortunately, Paths of Glory).

But I suppose, with each re-issue, we'll have to endure another ritual as well - let's call it The Paulettes' Revenge. Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe seems to have taken on the duty of the current roasting in last Sunday's edition, so welcome to yet another episode of (drum roll, please) "Tom Garvey Bitch-Slaps the Globe Critic." And without further ado . . .

Feeney begins his hatchet job with - what else? - an interview with Robert Altman. Ah, yes, Robert Altman - remember him? The director of one masterpiece (Nashville), five or six more very interesting films (M*A*S*H, Images, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, and The Player), and then some thirty more movies that are either mediocre or outright suck? Yeah, him. The guy with the bleached-out, "stoned" camerawork, the muddy soundtracks, the sketchy bohemian stance, and the none-too-subtle mix of malice and misogyny? The guy who was unrelentingly brutal to his characters, and who stripped his actresses naked as often as he possibly could? Yeah, him. That wild party animal!

Unsurprisingly, Feeney informs us, he once interviewed Altman on Kubrick, and guess what: Altman didn't think much of him. Surprise, surprise. As Feeney puts it: "Kubrick was the anti-Altman: not actor-friendly, not improvisational, not prolific, neither slapdash nor shaggy."

No, not prolific - just always interesting. And what's this "not actor-friendly" b.s.? Kubrick's "not actor-friendly" because he clashed with Shelley Duvall on the set of The Shining? Please. Few directors have produced more indelible performances: Kubrick's direction gave us Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton in Spartacus; James Mason, Shelley Winters and Peter Sellers in Lolita; the entire cast of Dr. Strangelove; Douglas Rain in 2001; Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (above left); R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket; Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, and a host of brilliant character performances in almost all his films (even Barry Lyndon includes wonderful performances by Leonard Rossiter, Godfrey Quigley and others). By way of comparison, there are fine performances in early Altman, yes, but one gropes for anything great from his actors after Three Women (and sorry, Altman was never more inept than he was with the sterling British cast of Gosford Park). Indeed, only the ensemble of M*A*S*H achieved anything like the cultural impact of the acting in half of Kubrick's movies.

Actually, Feeney's smart enough to realize he can't make his case against Kubrick on artistic terms - there are just too many highlights to disguise. (And he doesn't even dare to bring up Kubrick's imagery or his soundtracks, because here the gap between Kubrick and just about everybody else is something like a chasm.) So he forgoes art for politics. He just doesn't like Kubrick - and neither should you. Kubrick was pretentious. He was a control freak. He "thrilled to the idea of total authority." He was a dictator - just like some of his villains! And worst of all, no punk band has ever named themselves after him. (I'm not kidding, Feeney really said that - he also says Kubrick's movies "flirt with turning into musicals"!)

Uh-huh. And can you say "beside the point"? Good. Now think about it. Let's take that "pretentious" claim - it's true: Kubrick was pretentious. Some great artists are not pretentious; but others are. Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest artist in any genre, was not pretentious. Mozart was not pretentious. But Beethoven was pretentious. Wagner was pretentious. Matisse was not pretentious; Picasso was pretentious. So by Feeney's logic, you really shouldn't like Beethoven or Picasso.



And how about that "anti-improvisational" claim - only someone who isn't familiar with Kubrick's work history could ever make it. Kubrick was improvisatory on a grand scale, often changing artistic course in mid-production and abandoning early decisions in flights of inspiration. Can you believe that Dr. Strangelove was originally planned as a suspense drama, and that Kubrick entirely re-wrote it with Terry Southern in his limo on the way to the studio? Or that Kubrick commissioned an entire score for 2001, recorded it at great expense, then trashed it for the tracks he'd been listening to in production (he pulled this trick again with The Shining)? That Malcolm McDowell improvised "Singin' in the Rain" in A Clockwork Orange? Ditto much of Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining - and R. Lee Ermey's famous rants in Full Metal Jacket (above)? In short, very few directors have improvised quite as much as Stanley Kubrick - or taken such risky chances.

Of course Kubrick was - or rather, became - highly self-conscious, as is the case with many wildly successful artists. His work process became even more labored, as he felt the weight of living up to his past successes. (His many takes, while rather coldly administered, could also be seen as an opportunity for actor exploration, not directorial control; surely anyone can see that.) Always a loner, he also became more isolated after terrorist threats against his family during the making of Barry Lyndon. Eventually, it's true, he was something of a recluse.

But hold on a minute - isn't this also the maverick artist's dream? Kubrick held onto an astonishing level of control over his projects through the very methods that Feeney decries - obsessive attention to detail, isolation, and cold calculation. If Altman had had those attributes, perhaps his career wouldn't have gone into a tailspin after the failures of bombs like Buffalo Bill, and H.E.A.L.T.H. Maybe we'd have three or four more great Altman movies, instead of twenty crummy ones. Of course there were places Kubrick went that Altman could never go: Altman was never capable of the operatic synthesis that was Kubrick's highest goal - those moments in which sound, image, and drama coalesce into a resonance that only cinema can manage (as in Eyes Wide Shut, above). To the end of his days, Altman essentially directed his films as if they were television (where he began his career); when his scripts were good, the movies were good, and when the scripts were bad, well . . . the movies were, too. But hey, they were great parties, right? What's most poignant about Altman is that he never realized that if you commit yourself to going with the flow, and conjure a constant atmosphere of give-and-take and compromise, then you wind up with, well, movies that are compromised, too.


Seriously, could Altman ever match this image? Or idea?

So can we begin to decouple the bohemian stance from the artistic product? Can we admit that if you run your set like a party, you wind up with Dr. T. and the Women? Can the Paulettes ever just say, "Kubrick's movies are paced too slowly, but they're worth the time and trouble"? And can they stop saying that Kubrick was a pornographer, a racist, a control freak, or as Feeney says, "almost lunatic"? (And can we please drop the junior-high-level observation that HAL is "the most interesting character in 2001"? That's the point, kids.)

In other words, can the Paulettes move on?