A writer’s bucket list

I never thought I’d say this, but I may as well admit it: I’m getting pretty excited for Noah. When Darren Aronofsky announced that he was tackling an epic Biblical movie as his next project, it seemed like a strange departure from the director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan. The trailers have been oddly thrilling, though, and early word is that this is a deeply weird, personal movie that just happens to have cost a hundred million dollars to make, which is a prospect I can never resist. And in fact, Aronofsky’s obsession with Noah goes back a long time, and it reflects the intensely meaningful nature of the material he chooses. In an excellent New Yorker profile, Tad Friend writes:

In the mid-nineties [before his first film was made], Aronofsky wrote down ten film ideas he wanted to pursue. All six of his films have come from that list, and all have been informed by his early years: the stress and the bloody toes his sister incurred in ballet practice became Nina’s in Black Swan; his parents’ cancer scares informed Izzi’s cancer in The Fountain. After he wrote a prose poem about Noah for his seventh-grade English teacher, Vera Fried, he got to read it over the P.A. system—”The rain continued through the night and the cries of screaming men filled the air”—and was transformed from a math geek into a writer. He rewarded Fried by giving her a walk-on in Noah as a one-eyed hag.

I love this story, because I can relate to it: I suspect that every writer has a short list of stories that he or she would love to write one day, and Aronofsky has been lucky and tenacious enough to see many of them on the big screen. (Black Swan was the kind of unexpected international success that gives a director one free pass for his next movie, and Aronofsky, to his credit, seems to have cashed it in on the greatest possible scale.) In my own case, I’ve got a private roster of ideas that I’ve been carrying around in my head for a long time, many for close to two decades, and I’ve occasionally had the chance to get them in print. The Icon Thief was my attempt to write a conspiracy novel that would reflect—and at least partially exorcise—the love I felt in high school for Foucault’s Pendulum, and my desire to write something about the vision of Ezekiel, which dates back to around the same period, informed a good chunk of City of Exiles. As for the others, I’m developing one right now in the form of a new novel, although I’m not sure where it will end up, and I hope to get around to the rest one of these days. And if I don’t tell you what any of them are, it’s only because I want to keep them all for myself.

In practice, though, it’s easy to postpone such ideas in favor of ones that seem more immediately pressing, both because we’re afraid that we may not be able to do them justice and because we think we’ve got more time than we really have. This can be a dangerous assumption to make, as George R.R. Martin points out in a recent issue of Vanity Fair. After discussing the early death of his friend, the writer Tom Reamy, Martin says:

But Tom’s death had a profound effect on me, because I was in my early thirties then. I’d been thinking…well, I have all these stories that I want to write, all these novels I want to write, and I have all the time in the world to write them, ‘cause I’m a young guy, and then Tom’s death happened, and I said, Boy. Maybe I don’t have all the time in the world. Maybe I’ll die tomorrow. Maybe I’ll die ten years from now…After Tom’s death, I said, “You know, I gotta try this. I don’t know if I can make a living as a full-time writer or not, but who knows how much time I have left? I don’t want to die ten years from now or twenty years from now and say I never told the stories I wanted to tell because I always thought I could do it next week or next year.

I can relate to this, too. Life is short and art is long, and it seems like there’s no excuse for putting off the stories you love for a day that may never come. But it’s also important to leave room on that bucket list for surprises, and even to depart from it occasionally to see what else you might discover. If there’s one problem with tackling nothing but your own passion projects, it’s that you’re too close to the subject matter to evaluate your work on its own merits: I’ve often done my best work when I’ve been able to start a project from a position of detachment, feeling my way into a passionate engagement with the material from the outside. In the end, like most things in an artist’s life, it’s a matter of balance, and it’s important to keep a middle ground between the stories you’ve always wanted to write and those tricky, intractable ideas that seduce you when you least expect it. (It’s perhaps no accident that Aronofsky’s two best movies, Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler, were based on stories by others, however closely they may have overlapped with the director’s own obsessions.) For most of us, we don’t need to choose: a writer’s life includes many stories written on impulse, under contract, or because it was all we were capable of doing at the time. And that’s fine. Because on a real writer’s bucket list, there’s only one item, which is to keep writing at all costs.

The best movies of the year

First, the bad news. This was a terrible year for movies. Some combination of recessionary cutbacks, the delayed effects of the writer’s strike, and a determination to convert every imaginable movie to muddy 3D resulted in stretches of up to two or three months when multiplexes were basically a wasteland. And even if this cinematic dead zone turns out to be temporary, it’s hard not to see it as karmic comeuppance for the Academy’s recent decision to bump the number of Best Picture nominees to ten, an act of desperation that is looking more misguided with every passing day. Still, there were some very good movies released this year, including one that ranks among the best I’ve ever seen. It’s almost enough to make me think that this year was better than it actually was:

1. Inception. After a decade of extraordinary productivity, Christopher Nolan is beginning to look like nothing so much as two great directors working as one: the first is obsessed with pushing the bounds of filmic complexity on the narrative level, while the other has devoted himself to mastering every aspect of modern blockbuster filmmaking. Inception is the ultimate result of this paradoxical partnership: it’s one of those rare movies in which every aspect of the production—acting, story, visual effects, art direction, stunts, music, editing, even costume design—is both immediately exhilarating and endless to meditation. I only wish there were more of it.

2. Toy Story 3. I was hard on this movie yesterday, so let’s set the record straight: this is the best Pixar film since Finding Nemo, and one of the finest animated movies ever made. It’s touching, exciting, thematically rich, and very funny, with an enormous cast of characters—both existing and new—who are so engaging that I’m sad we won’t have a chance to see them in other stories. (Fanfic, as usual, is ready to come to the rescue.) It’s enough to make me wish that I were ten years younger, just so I could have grown up with these toys—and movies—on my playroom shelves.

3. The Social Network. Over the past few years, David Fincher has gone from being a stylish but chilly visual perfectionist to a director who can seemingly do anything. Zodiac was the best movie ever made about serial killers and journalism, as well as the best Bay Area picture since Vertigo; The Social Network, in turn, is the best Harvard movie of all time, as well as a layered, trashy story of money and friendship, with an Aaron Sorkin script that manages to evoke both John Hughes and Citizen Kane. It’s almost enough to make me excited about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

4. Exit Through the Gift Shop. Even more than Inception, this was the best film of the year for inspiring endless heated debate. Months later, I’m still not sure what to think about the strange case of Banksy and Mr. Brainwash, which is some combination of cautionary tale, Horatio Alger story, fascinating reportage, and practical joke. I do know that it’s impossible to watch it without questioning your deepest assumptions about art, commerce, and the nature of documentary filmmaking. And even if it’s something of a put-on, which I think at least part of it is, it’s still the best movie of its kind since F for Fake.

5. The Ghost Writer. Roman Polanski’s modest but wickedly sophisticated thriller is a reminder that a movie doesn’t need to be big to be memorable. The ingredients couldn’t be simpler: a tight story, an impeccable cast (aside from Kim Cattrall’s distractingly plummy British accent), and an isolated house on the beach. The result is one of the great places in the movies, as real as Hannibal Lecter’s cell or the detective’s office in The Usual Suspects. By the end, we feel as if we could find our way around this house on our own, and the people inside it—especially the devastating Olivia Williams—have taken up residence in our dreams.

6. Fair Game. Aside from a pair of appealingly nuanced performances by Naomi Watts (as Valerie Plame) and Sean Penn (as Joseph Wilson), Fair Game doesn’t even try to be balanced: it’s a story of complex good against incredible, mustache-twirling evil, which would be objectionable from a narrative perspective if it weren’t so close to the truth. At its best, it’s reminiscent of The Insider, both in its sense of outrage and in the massive technical skill that it lavishes on intimate spaces. It’s impossible to watch it without being swept up again by renewed indignation.

7. The Town. True, it’s slightly confused about its main character, who comes off as more of a sociopath than the film wants to admit, and I have problems with the last ten minutes, in which Ben Affleck, as both director and star, slips from an admirable objectivity into a strange sort of self-regard. Still, for most of its length, this is a terrific movie, with one of the best supporting casts in years—notably Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, and the late Pete Postlethwaite. The result is a genre piece that is both surprisingly layered and hugely entertaining, with a fine sense of Boston atmosphere.

8. The Secret in Their Eyes. Technically, this Argentine movie—which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film—came out last year, but I’d feel irresponsible if I didn’t include it here. Like The Lives of Others, which it superficially resembles, it’s one of those foreign films, aware of but unimpressed by the conventions of Hollywood, that seems so rich and full of life that it passes beyond genre: it’s funny, romantic, and unbearably tense, and contains one of the most virtuoso action sequences this side of Children of Men. I don’t know what to call it, but I love it.

9. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. A week doesn’t go by in which I don’t think fondly of Knives Chau, Scott Pilgrim’s hapless but unexpectedly resourceful Chinese-Canadian love interest. The film in which Knives finds herself is equally adorable: it has enough wit and invention for three ordinary movies, and it’s one of the few comedies of recent years that knows what to do with Michael Cera. It’s something of a mess, and its eagerness to please can be exhausting, but it still contains more delights per reel than any number of tidier films.

10. The American. Despite opening at the top of the box office over Labor Day weekend, this odd, nearly perfect little movie was mostly hated or dismissed by audiences soon after its release. The crucial thing is to adjust your expectations: despite what the commercials say, this isn’t a thriller so much as a loving portrait of a craftsman—in this case, an assassin—at work, as well as a visual essay on such important subjects as the Italian countryside, a woman’s naked body, and George Clooney’s face. It’s perilously close to ridiculous, but until its ludicrous final shot, it casts its own kind of peculiar spell.

Honorable mention goes to Winter’s Bone, A Prophet, Tangled, and How to Train Your Dragon, as well as to parts of The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, and even Black Swan, which really deserves a category of its own. (As for Tron: Legacy, well, the less said about that, the better.)

Psycho, Black Swan, and the problem of surprise

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to a memorable showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at the CSO, with a live orchestra playing Bernard Herrmann’s magnificent score. It was the second time in just over a year that I’d watched Psycho with a live audience—I saw it last August in Grant Park—and it’s always a lot of fun: everyone is appropriately jaded by the film’s most famous scene, but then there’s that second murder, which is much less well known, and which invariably results in a big scream from the audience, fifty years after the movie’s original release.

Before the screening, we attended a discussion of the film with the AV Club’s Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias, where Phipps shared the following story (which, if you haven’t seen Psycho, I’d advise you to skip):

I took a friend to see Psycho…Not only had he never seen Psycho, he had somehow managed to remain ignorant of its twist. We sat in front of a pair of elderly women who decided to provide a running commentary about the film, specifically about how much things had changed since the 1960s. “Gas sure was cheap back then,” one commented as Janet Leigh pulled into a gas station. “Cars sure were big back then,” the other responded. (It might just be my memory making the story better, but I could swear one of them also said, “It sure was dark back then.”) It was annoying. But not as annoying as the moment shortly after Leigh’s death, when one said, “Isn’t he pretending to be his mother or something?”

Phipps says that he then saw his friend “tense up with rage.” Well, sure. These days, it’s so rare for anyone to see Psycho without any previous knowledge that those women deserved, if not to be stabbed in the shower, then at least to watch that awful psychiatrist’s speech over and over again.

Not long after seeing Psycho at the CSO, I had a plot point for Black Swan spoiled for me, appropriately enough, by an anonymous commenter on the AV Club. Needless to say, I tensed up with rage, and was afraid that the movie had been ruined. But when I mentioned this on Twitter, Scott Tobias responded: “No worries. The film will work for you (or not) regardless.” And, strangely enough, he was right. I don’t think my experience of the movie was any less compelling because I knew where the story was going. I may even have enjoyed it slightly more.

So what makes Black Swan different from Psycho? One difference, obviously, is that it’s a greater crime to spoil a classic: Psycho is one of a handful of movies that will probably be watched a hundred years from now, while the jury is still out on Black Swan. More important, though, is the nature of Psycho’s secrets, which fundamentally undermine the movie that the audience is anticipating: first the star is murdered, and then the killer turns out to be something…unexpected. Black Swan’s spoilers are inherent in its premise: we know from early on that this movie will be about a young woman going mad, and the only surprise lies in what form that madness will take.

Is there a lesson here for writers? I’d like to think of it as another example of the power of constraints. Psycho tells us that it’s a film of suspense, then radically destroys our expectations of what to expect from such a movie. Black Swan, by contrast, establishes from its opening scenes that it’s a psychological horror film, then does pretty much what we expect, even if it gives itself more stylistic leeway than Psycho does. The former kind of surprise, needless to say, is much more powerful than the latter, but it only works if the story first lays down the rules that it intends to break. In a film in which anything can happen, it’s hard to expect the audience to be surprised—or moved—by what eventually does.

Black Swan: Take off The Red Shoes

The only person standing in your way is you.

—Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), in Black Swan

It’s safe to say that no other movie this year, aside perhaps from Inception, filled me with so much unnatural anticipation as Black Swan. Ever since my first encounter with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, which I think is the best movie ever made, I’ve had an uninformed but highly emotional interest in ballet, especially ballet on film. Darren Aronofsky, coming off The Wrestler, is easily one of the ten most interesting directors in America. And while Natalie Portman has been making a career, as Pauline Kael once said of Meryl Streep, of seeming to overcome being miscast, she’s still an actress for whom I have a lot of affection and respect (even if she seems determined to squander it).

The result, unfortunately, comes precariously close to being a bad movie. It’s chilly and lurid at the same time; the story is both overcooked and underconceived; and it descends so rapidly into overwrought melodrama that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. (At its worst, it’s nothing but one long mirror scare.) And yet it’s a work of undeniable skill and commitment, with extraordinary images and moments, and even at its worst, it’s still more interesting to think about than many conventionally good movies. On our way home, my wife asked me if I thought it would become a midnight movie classic. I think it will become something even better: it’s the kind of movie where, if it had come out before I was born, I might have skipped school to see it in revival on the big screen. (I did that only once in high school, and that was to see Last Tango in Paris.)

But Black Swan is still a deeply problematic movie, in ways that I don’t think Aronofsky intended. The story, without giving too much away, is that of a young ballet dancer’s descent into madness. And it plunges you into that madness so quickly, almost from the very first shot, that there’s no sense of loss as her sanity slips away. From the beginning, Portman’s character, Nina, comes off as hopelessly fragile and neurotic, and she’s never given the kind of emotional grounding—a scene with friends, say, or even a moment of ordinary human behavior—that might have made her story genuinely tragic, rather than a chilling exercise. What Black Swan needs, above all else, is a first act, set in the real world, before Aronofsky releases all of his lovingly conceived visual and aural shocks.

As it stands, it’s tempting to see Nina as a surrogate for the director himself (though it should be noted that Aronofsky did not write Black Swan, which is based on a screenplay by Andres Heinz, Mark Heyman, and John J. McLaughlin). Nina is repeatedly told that she has perfect technique, but needs to lose herself in the moment, a criticism that can be leveled, not without reason, at Aronofsky. Even more than Christopher Nolan, Aronofsky is the most left-brained of all directors with access to stars and large budgets, and he might well argue that, objectively speaking, Black Swan is perfect. Which is probably true. But subjectively, in ordinary human terms, it’s dangerously close to ridiculous.

Aronofsky has obviously seen The Red Shoes, and includes one scene—an audition filmed from the point of view of a pirouetting ballerina—that is clearly intended as homage. And both movies are about dancers whose leading roles become tragically literal, and ultimately destroy their lives. The difference, though, is that The Red Shoes implicitly contains all of Black Swan, and embeds it in a much larger story about art, love, and the wider world that Aronofsky only shows us in fragments. Vicky, in The Red Shoes, is destroyed by the conflict between art and life. For Nina, there is no life, only art, and thus no conflict: she’s a creature of art in a movie that cares about nothing else. And by the end, it’s unclear why she, and nobody else, has gone crazy.