The Rotary Club Booster

L. Ron Hubbard was unquestionably one of the more incredible figures of the twentieth century, but popular culture, which hasn’t been shy about going after Scientology itself, has tended to steer clear of his life and personality as a source for stories. One exception is Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which is less about Hubbard than an electrifying mediation on the nature of dianetic auditing. Another is Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which features a villain, whom we glimpse only briefly, with the evocative name of L. Bob Rife. Hubbard isn’t the only inspiration here—there are equally obvious affinities to Ted Turner—but many of the parallels are intriguing. Rife is a seafaring media mogul who starts a religion using a form of mind control based on the phenomenon of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. It perpetuates itself through a franchise of churches called Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates, as the lead character, Hiro, explains:

[Rife] constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands…L. Bob Rife has taken xenoglossia and perfected it, turned it into a science…[His followers] will act out L. Bob Rife’s instructions as though they have been programmed to. And right now, he has about a million of these people poised off the California coast.

And Hiro concludes darkly: “L. Bob Rife’s glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam.”

A big chunk of Snow Crash is devoted to a reinterpretation of Sumerian religion as a form of neurolinguistic programming, most of which is delivered in the form of long conversations between the characters. (This is actually the least successful part of the novel—it seems to be trying to pull off what Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea did in The Illuminatus Trilogy, but it ends up sounding more like an anticipation of Dan Brown, complete with people who say things like “Bear with me.”) The central figure is the mythological hero Enki, who developed a linguistic virus that led to the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. After stumbling across this fact, another character in the novel, Lagos, begins to look for additional information in the remains of cuneiform tablets:

The surviving Sumerian myths exist in fragments and have a bizarre quality. Lagos compared them to the imaginings of a febrile two-year-old. Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated—the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind…There is a great deal of monotonous repetition. There is also a fair amount of what Lagos described as “Rotary Club Boosterism”—scribes extolling the superior virtue of their city over some other city.

Eventually, Lagos manages to reconstruct the original virus, which Rife then steals for his own benefit. To stretch the analogy a bit, you could say that the Enki myth plays much the same role for Rife that the Xenu material does for Hubbard, except that within the plot of Snow Crash, it happens to be real.

But the part that really catches my eye is the odd reference to religion as a form of “Rotary Club Boosterism.” If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that this is remarkably close to what the journalist William Bolitho says of Muhammad in his book Twelve Against the Gods:

The start of Mahomet’s adventure, or in its more usual synonym, the basis of the Mahomedan religion, is this preoccupation of his with the fortunes of his native town. Squeamish pedantry may object to the triviality of the phrase which fits nevertheless with a precision no other can give: Mahomet was a “home-town booster,” and this conception will unlock the many obscurities of his life and his doctrine, with which the most subtle theological speculations and the most careful minutiae of history are incapable of coping with. The door by which he enters is this: “How can we attract the whole world, at least the whole of Arabia, yearly to the Ka’ba?” And the vision of One God, greatest common denominator of religion, is the solution, not the prime inspiration. In fact Mahomedanism is a religion, because Mecca’s problem, as a religious town, was religious. The rhapsodies, the epilepsies of the man while he is still struggling toward his invention, are the symptoms of a process which they sometimes assist and sometimes retard; if they were taken as analogous to the painful mental straining of a Rotarian enthusiast racking his brain for a world-beating slogan for the town of his heart it might be irreverent…but it would not be a joke; nor a mistake.

The italics are mine. And one of Bolitho’s fans was none other than L. Ron Hubbard, who once described Muhammad in a lecture as “a good small-town booster.”

The use of the phrase “Rotary Club Boosterism” in this context is so peculiar that I can hardly help concluding that Stephenson is quoting Bolitho. As far as I can tell, he’s never made this connection in public, although it isn’t hard to believe that he would have read Twelve Against the Gods, since his appetite for this kind of material seems limitless. (The fact that Elon Musk is also a big fan of the book makes me want to trace its subterranean passage from the hand of one futurist to another, which would be an adventure in itself.) I don’t know Stephenson’s work well enough to talk about it further, so I’m just going to throw it out here in case someone else finds it useful—which brings us, in a way, back to Snow Crash. Hiro’s job, as described by Stephenson, is that of a “freelance stringer” who assembles and distributes information like this for its own sake:

The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster. He uploads it to the CIC database—the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore…Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC’s clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put in it, Hiro gets paid.

Stephenson finishes: “[Hiro] has been learning the hard way that 99 percent of the information in the library never gets used at all.” Which is probably true of this blog, too. But here’s one more piece.

The inherent vice of the movies

Earlier this week, I caught up with two of the titles on the list of movies I’ve wanted to see from the last twelve months—a harder matter than it might first appear, since I haven’t seen a film in theaters since Interstellar. They were Inherent Vice, which I rented, and Mad Max: Fury Road, which I was able to see, thankfully, on the big screen. And while they may seem like an unlikely pair, they have more in common than first meets the eye. Both are the work of legendary directors operating near the top of their respective games, and both push in intriguing ways against our assumptions about how a movie ought to be structured. Inherent Vice is deliberately designed to undermine any expectations we might have about a profluent plot, with an endless series of incidents following one another in a way that teases but frustrates our hopes of a larger pattern, while Fury Road comes as close as any movie can to a single uninterrupted action scene. Both create the sense of an entire world existing beyond the edges of the frame, and both are too dense to be fully processed in a single viewing. And although Fury Road is considerably easier to love, both serve, in their own inimitable ways, as reminders of how rich the movie medium can be, and how rarely we see it taken to its full potential.

And what’s especially noteworthy is that each film arrived at its final shape by following a path that had little to do with how movie scripts are usually written. Paul Thomas Anderson adapted Inherent Vice by transcribing Thomas Pynchon’s novel in its entirety, sentence by sentence, into one massive screenplay, reasoning that the resulting doorstop would be easier for him to edit: “I can understand this format,” he explained to the New York Times. With Fury Road, George Miller took the opposite approach, but for much the same reason:

Because it’s almost a continuous chase, you have to connect one shot to the other, so the obvious way to do it was as a storyboard, and then put words in later. So, I worked with five really good storyboard artists. We just sat in a big room and, instead of writing it down, we’d say “Okay, this guy throws what we call a thunder stick at another car and there’s an explosion.” You can write that, but exactly where the thunder stick is, where the car is and what the explosion looks like, it’s very hard to get those dimensions, so we’d draw it. We ended up with about 3,500 panels. It almost becomes equivalent to the number of shots in the movie.

In starting from storyboards, Miller—who won an Oscar for Happy Feet—may have been harking back to the technique of the great animated movies, which were planned as a series of thumbnail sketches rather than as a conventional script. And in both cases, the approach was dictated simultaneously by the formats the directors understood and by the demands of the material: a challenging literary adaptation on one hand, an action extravaganza on the other. The result, in each instance, is a movie that inspires a unique set of feelings in the viewer. Inherent Vice encourages us to stop trying to piece together a coherent story, which is probably impossible, and just lie back and wait for the next gag or visual joke. Fury Road leaves us in a state of similar serenity, but by very different means: by its final half hour, we’re in the kind of blissful high that Pauline Kael liked to describe, and instead of feeling pummeled, as we might with Michael Bay, we’re carried along on a gentle wave of adrenaline. It’s a reminder that a script, which has been fetishized as an object in itself, is really a blueprint, and that it can and should take whatever form seems most useful. Books like Save the Cat! and similar manuals have distilled scripts down to such a formula that act breaks and turning points are supposed to happen on particular page numbers, which is as much a convenience for harried studio readers as it is a recipe for storytelling. But it’s not the only way.

And it’s significant that these departures from the norm owe their existence to acclaimed directors, working from their own scripts, with the clout and support to make it happen. Your average screenplay is written from a place of minimal power: to be read in the first place, much less to make it through the development process, it needs to look like every other screenplay that crosses an executive’s desk. And while I’m skeptical of the auteur theory, it’s worth asking if the grinding sameness of so many movies is an inevitable consequence of the screenwriter’s imperiled position. A writer knows that he could be replaced at any point by someone else who can follow the beat sheets, so he paradoxically has an incentive to make his work as generic as possible. You could say that blandness is the inherent vice of the modern screenplay format itself—a property that causes material to deteriorate because of an essential quality of its components. “Eggs break, chocolate melts, glass shatters,” as the narrator of Inherent Vice reminds us, and scripts written according to a fixed template will bore us. Inherent Vice and Fury Road are both throwbacks to a time before these formulas took over the world: Miller has his own movies to serve as inspiration, while Inherent Vice harks back consciously to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, much of which is about Philip Marlowe literally trying to save his cat. We deserve more movies like this. And the fact that the system is designed to deny them to us should make us a little furious.

Birds of a feather

A while back, for the book Inventory by The A.V. Club, the director Paul Thomas Anderson shared his list of “Two movies that without fail or question will make me stop dead in my tracks and watch them all the way to the very end, no matter what else is happening or needs to get done.” The films were The Birdcage and The Shining. His second choice probably won’t raise many eyebrows—The Shining‘s fingerprints are all over his work, particularly There Will Be Blood—but the first one might give us pause. Yet when I watched it over the weekend, I had no trouble seeing why Anderson finds it so appealing. There’s the astonishing opening shot, for instance, which zooms across the waters of South Beach and continues in an unbroken movement into the club where Robin Williams is greeting patrons and overseeing his floor show of drag queens. Among other things, it’s impossible not to see it as an influence on the opening tracking shot of Boogie Nights, which would come out the following year. (The cinematographer here, incidentally, was Emmanuel Lubezki, who would go on to do spectacular work for the likes of Terrence Malick and Alfonso Cuarón and win an Oscar for his indispensable contributions to Gravity.)

After almost twenty years, it’s fair to say that The Birdcage holds up as an unexpectedly rich, sophisticated slice of filmmaking. Like many of Anderson’s own films, it has a deep bench of supporting players anchored by a generous lead performance: I felt like watching it primarily as a reminder of how good Robin Williams could be with the right direction and material, and what stands out the most is his willingness to dial down his natural showiness to highlight the more flamboyant performances taking place on all sides. He’s essentially playing the straight man—well, sort of—to Nathan Lane and Hank Azaria, but his restrained energy and intelligence give all the actors around him an additional kick. Not surprisingly, for a movie directed by Mike Nichols from a script by Elaine May, it’s often subversively clever, like a Woody Allen film disguised as a studio crowdpleaser. Lane’s very first line is a reference to The Red Shoes, and the film is packed with nods to gay culture, like the way Lane’s show begins with the opening notes of “The Man Who Got Away,” a la Judy at Carnegie Hall, that probably went over the heads of much of its audience. But I don’t think even I would have watched it nearly as attentively or affectionately without the clue from Anderson.

And Anderson clearly knew what he was doing. Whenever you’re asked to provide a list of your favorite movies or other works of art, there are several competing impulses at play: you’re torn between providing a list of major milestones, the films that speak to you personally, or simply the ones that you enjoy the most. There’s also an awareness that a surprising choice can be notable in its own right. After composing his final list for the Sight and Sound poll of the greatest movies of all time, Roger Ebert wrote:

Apart from any other motive for putting a movie title on a list like this, there is always the motive of propaganda: Critics add a title hoping to draw attention to it, and encourage others to see it. For 2012, I suppose [The Tree of Life] is my propaganda title.

Whether or not Anderson was thinking explicitly in these terms, there’s no question in my mind that he listed The Birdcage so prominently as a way of highlighting it in the reader’s mind. This is a great movie, he seems to be saying, that you may not have sufficiently appreciated, and listing it here without comment does more to lock it in the memory than any number of words of critical analysis.

That’s the real pleasure—and value—of lists like this, which otherwise can start to seem like pointless parlor games. We don’t learn much from the debates over whether Vertigo really deserves to be ranked above Citizen Kane, but it can be enlightening to discover that Quentin Tarantino’s favorite films include titles like “The Bad News Bears,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Rolling Thunder,” and “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” (Going through the Sight and Sound lists of great directors is like a miniature education in itself: after seeing that both Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola named Andrej Wadja’s Ashes and Diamonds in their top ten, there’s no way that I can’t not see this movie.) Once we’ve worked our way through the established canon, as determined by a sober critical consensus, the next step ought to be seeking out the movies that people we admire have singled out for love, especially when they take us down unexplored byways. After watching one movie through Anderson’s eyes, I wish he’d tossed out a few more titles, but maybe it’s best that he left us with those two. And the next time The Birdcage comes up on television, it’ll stop me dead in my tracks.

A boyhood at the movies

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s question: “What’s your favorite movie of the year so far?”

I don’t think there’s another movie this year that I’ve been more excited to watch than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Anyone who has visited Linklater’s IMDb page over the last decade or so has been curious to see how this project—which he’s been filming off and on for more than twelve years—would turn out, and the rapturous response indicates that the wait has been worth it. I’ve always been deeply moved by depictions of growth and aging in film, whether imagined, as in The Last Temptation of Christ or Saving Private Ryan, or real, as in the wonderful documentary Ballets Russes, and Boyhood, which follows actor Ellar Coltrane as he ages before our eyes from grade school to college, seems like the ultimate realization of this theme, which the movies can depict so mysteriously. The irony, of course, is that I probably won’t see it for a while, because I have a daughter of my own at home. And I have a feeling that the viewers who would benefit the most from this movie—the parents of small children—will probably wait for it to show up on video, even as art houses are packed this weekend with twentysomethings with kids still in their future.

As I’ve noted here all too often, now that I’m a father, my moviegoing habits have been severely curtailed. (The only new films I’ve seen so far this year are The LEGO Movie and The Grand Budapest Hotel, both of which I liked, even if the parts in the latter seem just as interchangeable as those in the former—it’s the ultimate Wes Anderson construction set.) And while I’ve thought a great deal what this means for my love of movies now, it only recently occurred to me to consider its implications for my cinematic education in the past. When I look back at my life, it seems likely that I’ll have seen most of the movies I love in my teens and twenties, when I was single, possessed of disposable income, and willing to make the long trek to an independent theater or midnight screening. Those trips to the Brattle or the UC Theatre were a central part of my young adulthood, and the way I think about the movies was deeply shaped by my early experiences. In retrospect, I was lucky: the act of sitting in a darkened roomful of strangers to see a scratchy print of Ikiru seems increasingly remote from the lives of budding cinephiles, so I feel like I came along at just the right time.

But the fact that I saw so many of these movies when my firsthand knowledge of the world was so limited seems like an important factor as well. When you’re young and impressionable, you tend to be drawn to works of art that speak to you in a language you understand, either because they resonate with your own life or because they’re exhilarating on a formal or visceral level. As a teenager, I never had much interest in movies that reflected my life back to me—it took me years to get into John Hughes, for instance—but I fell in love with films that appealed to my senses in new ways. I was a devotee of Kubrick before I started middle school, largely because his virtues were the kind that I could immediately understand and admire: scope, symmetry, meticulousness, and intimate attention to image and sound. Even if you’ve never been out of your hometown or a narrow emotional comfort zone, you can react instinctively to films that thrill your eyes and ears. And the canon of my own favorite movies is still primarily a young man’s list, even if I’ve since come to appreciate the depths that the best of them conceal beneath their spectacular surfaces.

Of course, that’s the path that most of us follow: we’re drawn to the movies at a young age, gradually refine our tastes to look beyond their surface aspects, and end up with a personal pantheon populated both by old favorites and by films that we might have found difficult or uninviting at an earlier stage. At the moment, though, I sometimes fear that the process has been arrested for me just at the point when I’m ready to make new discoveries. The list of filmmakers who honestly confront the problems of marriage or old age is vanishingly small compared to those who construct beautiful fantasies, and even in the work of highly gifted directors, like Paul Thomas Anderson, we can sometimes sense enormous talent and will compensating for a lack of experience. It’s revealing that the most essential movie of them all, Citizen Kane, is a young man’s systematic impersonation of the old man he might one day become, and the difference between Welles as Kane and the incredible creation of his later years reminds us of how even the greatest movies can fail to predict what life has in store. Welles later made his aging a central part of his work, but far more of us have seen him in Kane than in Chimes at Midnight. And as we get older, as hard as it might be, it’s all the more crucial to make time for the films that speak to us now.

Laugh and let die

Note: Minor spoilers follow for American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Ever since the Golden Globes, there’s been a lot of talk about the state of modern cinematic comedy, and especially about how the category has expanded to include films that we wouldn’t necessarily classify with the likes of Airplane! Two of the year’s presumptive Oscar frontrunners, American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street, are ostensible comedies that are really closer in tone to Goodfellas, and along with the other nominees for the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy—Her, Nebraska, and Inside Llewyn Davis—they made for a rather melancholy slate. Which isn’t to say that these movies aren’t consistently, brutally funny. David O. Russell has become the hottest director in America thanks largely to his ability to marry a compassionate view of his characters to a prankish, almost anarchic humor, and Scorsese has long been a stealth comic master. (Most of Scorsese’s great classics, with the possible exception of Raging Bull, could be recut into savage comedies, although probably at the expense of a “Layla” montage or two.) And what we’re seeing here is less a new development than a confirmation that comedy can, and should, emerge from some unexpectedly dark places.

I’ve noted before that the line between comedy and tragedy is finer than you might suspect, even at the highest levels: give Romeo and Juliet a happy ending, and you have a play that is tonally indistinguishable from All’s Well That Ends Well. Shakespeare incorporates the threat of death into many of his problem comedies, and although it’s narrowly averted in the end, we’re still left with a sense that it could have gone either way. You might even argue that it’s the relative absence of death that allows American Hustle and Wolf to squeak into comedic territory. Nobody dies in American Hustle—unless you count a brief flashback, almost too quick to process, to an unrelated contract killing—and the stakes are exclusively emotional: Russell prefers to mine conflict from his characters, rather than generating suspense in more conventional ways, and we’re too interested in their interactions to be overly concerned about whether they’ll get away with their central con, much less get whacked by the mob. The Wolf of Wall Street doesn’t contain much in the way of death, either, and the most lamented character is a distant relative whose offscreen demise leaves millions of dollars inconveniently stranded in Switzerland. (Jordan Belfort’s grief at this, needless to say, is perfectly genuine.)

And yet the idea of risk, physical and emotional, is central to both movies, as it is to many of the greatest comedies. If contemporary comedies suffer from one flaw, it’s that they often take place in a sanitized world devoid of danger, when it’s really in response to danger that laughter is most cathartic. Many of the biggest laughs I’ve had at the movies have been at lines or moments that stand in contrast to a mood of mounting tension or excitement: think of the Indiana Jones trilogy, the films of Quentin Tarantino, or the Bruce Willis movie of your choice. It’s perhaps no accident that both American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street are joined, oddly, by musical homages to James Bond: a cover of “Goldfinger” plays in the background of Belfort’s lavish wedding, and Jennifer Lawrence’s showstopping rendition of “Live and Let Die” may be Hustle‘s single most memorable moment. The Bond movies, many of which are thinly disguised comedies in themselves, know that we’re more likely to be amused by a gag when it emerges in counterpoint to action or violence. Bond’s frequently derided one-liners—“Shocking!”—have become a cliché, but like most other clichés in these movies, they exist because they fundamentally work.

That may be why there are surprisingly few “pure” comedies among my own favorite movies. When a film wants nothing more than to make us laugh, I’m likely to find it a little unsatisfying: the best jokes are all about surprise, or catching us with our guard down, which is why a movie that tries to spring a gag every minute can start to seem thin and forced. (This also works the other way around: a movie that is unrelentingly grim can feel equally untrue to life.) Humor is at its most powerful when it’s set against a dramatic baseline, however exaggerated, that provides a contrast to the moments when the comedy erupts. The best movies of Wes Anderson, not to mention Woody Allen, are strangely preoccupied with death, and Kubrick’s genius lay in constructing movies that were so finely poised between comedy and tragedy that they evolve in our own minds between viewings: The Shining becomes a richer, more baroque comedy each time I see it, and Eyes Wide Shut is really a farce played at the speed of a dirge. My favorite description of any of Kubrick’s films is Paul Thomas Anderson’s take on Barry Lyndon: “When I saw it, I thought it was very serious, and then I saw it the second time, and I said, ‘This is fucking hilarious!'” And that’s the zone in which real comedy thrives.

Lessons from The Master

I met Paul Thomas Anderson once. It was years ago, in early 2000, when he came to Harvard to discuss Magnolia, which at that point had just entered wide release. At the time, I was a college sophomore working as a film critic for an online startup, and I managed to secure a private interview for after the presentation. Needless to say, I was excited: with the authority derived from a reviewing gig that paid fifty dollars a story, I’d already declared Anderson “the most extravagantly talented director of his generation.” At the auditorium at the Carpenter Center, I watched Magnolia for the second time—I’d go on to see it a total of three times on the big screen—and waited afterward while Anderson took questions from the audience. Standing next to me at the edge of the room was a young, very attractive girl I was positive I knew from somewhere, possibly from one of my classes. I was trying to remember where we’d met, and was on the verge of going up to say hello, when Anderson ended his talk, came over, and gave her a kiss. (It was Fiona Apple.)

Afterward, Anderson and I sat down and chatted for about twenty minutes. For various reasons, the interview was never published, but I still have the original microcassette recording of our conversation somewhere, although I’ve never listened to it since—I have a feeling that I’d be slightly mortified by my own performance. But Anderson was extremely generous with me, and looking back, I can see why: I was only nineteen years old, and Anderson, incredibly, was less than thirty. He was every much as patient and encouraging as I’d hope to be to a college kid under similar circumstances, and I left the interview feeling as if I’d been privileged to hang out with the closest thing I’d ever find to the young Orson Welles. And while I remember only bits and pieces of our conversation, one thing he said earlier that evening stood out: in response to a question from the crowd, he said that he admired Steven Spielberg, and would love to make a blockbuster movie one day that would reach a huge popular audience.

I’ve thought back to that comment more than once over the last twelve years, and after seeing his remarkable new movie The Master, it’s been on my mind a lot. Anderson, clearly, has not taken the Spielbergian route: ever since Punch-Drunk Love, his work has retreated all the more deeply into interiority, introspection, and strangeness. (The same year as Magnolia, I’d see another movie that impressed me just as much, never guessing that its director would go on to achieve Anderson’s dream of making complex, technically ambitious movies on a Spielbergian scale. It was Memento.) The Master may not be his most daunting film, but it’s a work that makes enormous demands of its viewers, although it offers equally considerable rewards: it’s saturated with craft and atmosphere, filled with wholly convincing period detail, and features one of the best performances in any recent American movie. In fact, for all his ingenuity and resourcefulness, Anderson’s smartest choice may have come right at the beginning, with the casting of Joaquin Phoenix, whose recent travails have transformed him into an eloquent, expressive, ravaged actor. It’s a very good movie that I’m going to revisit again and again.

Yet when I think back to his earlier work, and especially the popular ambitions that he once expressed, I can’t help but feel a sense of loss. The Master is a deeply weird movie, and it’s likely to alienate many of its viewers, but it’s also weird in more or less the way I expected, with none of the startling surprises of There Will Be Blood. (Its portrait of the cult led by Philip Seymour Hoffman is also slightly unfocused: the rest of the movie is so startlingly specific that it leaves us wanting more information about how this movement really works.) There are moments when the film seems on the verge of breaking out into something larger, but except for a pair of short scenes with Hoffman and Amy Adams, it sticks resolutely to Phoenix’s skewed, peculiar point of view. On its own merits, this works: The Master is manifestly the movie that Anderson wanted to make. But I still miss the teeming, sometimes immature, but always exhilarating variety of Boogie Nights and Magnolia. As I’ve recently begun to understand, these were the films of a young man, and what Anderson is doing now is valuable and important. This may no longer be a world in which his movies can reach a Spielbergian audience. But that’s the world in which I’d like to live.

Quote of the Day

Sometimes it’s better to confuse them for five minutes than let them get ahead of you for ten seconds.

—Paul Thomas Anderson

Stumbling into a story: top down or bottom up?

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
—Herman Melville

Writers, we like to believe, are drawn to their craft in order to express themselves, but in most cases, the urge to write a novel comes long before any sense of what the story will actually be about. Even the greatest works of art, which seem inevitable now, were often the result of a lengthy selection process. Milton, we’re told, drew up a list of nearly one hundred possible subjects for an epic poem, including the Arthur legend and various topics from British history, before finally deciding on Paradise Lost. This systematic search for a theme, working from the top down, is one way of finding a story; but for most of us, when the time comes to choose a subject, it often makes more sense to work from the bottom up, so that we arrive at our “central” theme almost by accident.

At first glance, this seems to contradict one of the most common assumptions about writing fiction, which is that the subject of a novel must be of great personal importance to the writer himself. In my experience, however, this isn’t necessarily the case. If anything, I’d advise most writers not to choose a deeply felt or meaningful subject, especially for a first novel, because it’s hard to be objective about it. The best writing, I’m convinced, is the product of detachment as much as deep emotional engagement, and of the two, detachment is probably the more valuable quality. Which isn’t to say that you should choose a subject to which you’re utterly indifferent—after all, it’s probably going to consume a year or more of your time. But it’s better to tether your emotional involvement to a small, even invisible corner of the novel, and let the main theme emerge from there.

The history of literature is filled with books where the large, obvious elements of the story—the ones that readers assume must have engaged the writer’s interest in the first place—were incidental or secondary to the author’s original intentions. The Stand began as a novel about the Patty Hearst case. I’ve been told, rightly or not, that Nabokov invented the vast alternate universe of Ada, which takes place in a parallel world called Antiterra, mostly so he could have his characters indifferently speak in English, Russian, and French. Umberto Eco has written at length about how important elements of The Name of the Rose, including its location, themes, and historical setting, arose from specific requirements of the plot, not the other way around. And in film, Paul Thomas Anderson once set out to make a small movie about a woman in Los Angeles, which grew from that seed, character by character, until it became Magnolia.

My own experience tells me that it’s very common, and possibly preferable, to stumble backwards into the subject of a long novel. When I first began researching The Icon Thief, it was only with the vague intention of writing a book about the New York art world, with overtones of conspiracy and information overload. A passing reference in an article about art collecting, which noted that recent sales were being driven by Russian money, made me think that Russia might be a good backdrop for the story I had in mind. The result, rather to my surprise, has been a sequence of two novels, and possibly a third, in which Russian history and politics has been hugely important, to the point where it will probably end up consuming four or more years of my life. A reader might think that I was drawn to the subject by an existing fascination with Russia, when, in fact, the reverse was true: I just sort of stumbled into it. And I’m very glad I did. Because in Russia, I guess, the mighty theme chooses you.

Great Directors: Stanley Kubrick

Essential films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut, Barry Lyndon, and many others.

Kubrick’s case is an unusual one. Film for film, he has the most impressive body of work of any director from the last half century of movies, and no other filmmaker can match him for ambition, intelligence, and attention to detail. Yet his example is dangerous. Kubrick gets away with habits that would be deadly in a lesser director—the obsessive perfectionism, the countless takes, the frequent indifference to recognizable human emotion—because he’s Kubrick. A talented director who had seen nothing but Kubrick’s films would end up with a very distorted sense of what movies can, or should, do; the result, at best, might be something like Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo. Far better, if an aspiring filmmaker had access to only one director’s work, to study Michael Curtiz, or even Steven Spielberg.

That said, Kubrick remains the most imposing of all modern directors, and his methods are justified because they resulted in a series of extraordinary films. The most striking thing about Kubrick’s work is that, the more you watch it, the more the comedies begin to feel like tragedies, and the tragedies like comedies. The Shining grows funnier, and better, each time I see it, while Eyes Wide Shut—my own favorite—has gradually come to seem like a screwball comedy slowed down to the speed of a dirge. His best movies, aside from the unique vision of 2001, are finely balanced between comedy and despair, which is the only sane response to the human condition, at least as Kubrick saw it. Paul Thomas Anderson, speaking of Barry Lyndon, said it best: “When I saw it, I thought it was very serious, and then I saw it the second time, and I said, ‘This is fucking hilarious!'” Which is exactly right.

Tomorrow: Orson Welles and the secrets of Kane.