The master of time

I saw Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah for the first time seven years ago at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Those ten hours amounted to one of the most memorable moviegoing experiences of my life, and Lanzmann, who died yesterday, was among the most intriguing figures in film. “We see him in the corners of some of his shots, a tall, lanky man, informally dressed, chain-smoking,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review, and it’s in that role—the dogged investigator of the Holocaust, returning years afterward to the scene of the crime—that he’ll inevitably be remembered. He willed Shoah into existence at a period when no comparable models for such a project existed, and the undertaking was so massive that it took over the rest of his career, much of which was spent organizing material that had been cut, which produced several huge documentaries in itself. And the result goes beyond genre. Writing in The New Yorker, Richard Brody observes that Lanzmann’s film is “a late flowering of his intellectual and cultural milieu—existentialism and the French New Wave,” and he even compares it to Breathless. He also memorably describes the methods that Lanzmann used to interview former Nazis:

The story of the making of Shoah is as exciting as a spy novel…Lanzmann hid [the camera] in a bag with a tiny hole for the lens, and had one of his cameramen point it at an unsuspecting interview subject. He hid a small microphone behind his tie. A van was rigged with video and radio equipment that rendered the stealthy images and sounds on a television set. “What qualms should I have had about misleading Nazis, murderers?” Lanzmann recently told Der Spiegel. “Weren’t the Nazis themselves masters of deception?” He believed that his ruses served the higher good of revealing the truth—and perhaps accomplished symbolic acts of resistance after the fact. As he explained in 1985, “I’m killing them with the camera.”

The result speaks for itself, and it would be overwhelming even if one didn’t know the story of how it was made. (If the world were on fire and I could only save a few reels from the entire history of cinema, one of them would be Lanzmann’s devastating interview of the barber Abraham Bomba.) But it’s worth stressing the contrast between the film’s monumental quality and the subterfuge, tenacity, and cleverness that had to go into making it, which hint at Lanzmann’s secret affinities with someone like Werner Herzog. Brody writes:

The most audacious thing Lanzmann did to complete Shoah was, very simply, to take his time. His initial backers expected him to deliver a two-hour film in eighteen months; his response was to lie—to promise that it would be done as specified, and then to continue working as he saw fit. Lanzmann borrowed money (including from [Simone de] Beauvoir) to keep shooting, and then spent five years obsessively editing his three hundred and fifty hours of footage. He writes that he became the “master of time,” which he considered to be not only an aspect of creative control but also one of aesthetic morality. He sensed that there was just “one right path” to follow, and he set a rule for himself: “I refused to carry on until I had found it, which could take hours or days, on one occasion I am not likely to forget it took three weeks.”

Shoah is like no other movie ever made, but it had to be made just like every other movie, except even more so—which is a fact that all documentarians and aspiring muckrakers should remember. After one interview, Brody writes, “Lanzmann and his assistant were unmasked, attacked, and bloodied by the subject’s son and three young toughs.” Lanzmann spent a month in the hospital and went back to work.

When it finally came out in 1985, the film caused a sensation, but its reach might have been even greater three decades later, if only because the way in which we watch documentaries has changed. Lanzmann rightly conceived it as a theatrical release, but today, it would be more likely to play on television or online. Many of us don’t think twice about watching a nonfiction series that lasts for nine hours—The Vietnam War was nearly double that length—and Shoah would have become a cultural event. Yet there’s also something to be said for the experience of seeing it in a darkened auditorium over the course of a single day. As Ebert put it:

[Lanzmann] uses a…poetic, mosaic approach, moving according to rhythms only he understands among the only three kinds of faces we see in this film: survivors, murderers and bystanders. As their testimony is intercut with the scenes of train tracks, steam engines, abandoned buildings and empty fields, we are left with enough time to think our own thoughts, to meditate, to wonder…After nine hours of Shoah, the Holocaust is no longer a subject, a chapter of history, a phenomenon. It is an environment. It is around us.

That said, I’d encourage viewers to experience it in any form that they can, and there’s no denying that a single marathon session makes unusual demands. At the screening that I attended in Chicago, at least two audience members, after a valiant struggle, had fallen asleep by the end of the movie, which got out after midnight, and as the lights went up, the man in front of me said, “That last segment was too long.” He was probably just tired.

In fact, the final section—on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—is essential, and I often think of its central subject, the resistance fighter Simcha Rotem. In May 1943, Rotem attempted a rescue operation to save any survivors who might still be in the ghetto, making his way underground through the sewers, but when he reached the surface, he found no one:

I had to go on through the ghetto. I suddenly heard a woman calling from the ruins. It was darkest night, no lights, you saw nothing. All the houses were in ruins, and I heard only one voice. I thought some evil spell had been cast on me, a woman’s voice talking from the rubble. I circled the ruins. I didn’t look at my watch, but I must have spent half an hour exploring, trying to find the woman whose voice guided me, but unfortunately I didn’t find her.

Rotem, who is still alive today, moved from one bunker to another, shouting his password, and Lanzmann gives him the last words in a film that might seem to resist any ending:

There was still smoke, and that awful smell of charred flesh of people who had surely been burned alive. I continued on my way, going to other bunkers in search of fighting units, but it was the same everywhere…I went from bunker to bunker, and after walking for hours in the ghetto, I went back toward the sewers…I was alone all the time. Except for that woman’s voice, and a man I met as I came out of the sewers, I was alone throughout my tour of the ghetto. I didn’t meet a living soul. At one point I recall feeling a kind of peace, of serenity. I said to myself: “I’m the last Jew. I’ll wait for morning, and for the Germans.”

Musings of a cigarette smoking man

After the great character actor Harry Dean Stanton died earlier this week, Deadspin reprinted a profile by Steve Oney from the early eighties that offers a glimpse of a man whom many of us recognized but few of us knew. It captured Stanton at a moment when he was edging into a kind of stardom, but he was still open about his doubts and struggles: “It was Eastern mysticism that began to help me. Alan Watts’s books on Zen Buddhism were a very strong influence. Taoism and Lao-tse, I read much of, along with the works of Krishnamurti. And I studied tai chi, the martial art, which is all about centering oneself.” Oney continues:

But it was the I Ching (The Book of Changes) in which Stanton found most of his strength. By his bedside he keeps a bundle of sticks wrapped in blue ribbon. Several times every week, he throws them (or a handful of coins) and then turns to the book to search out the meaning of the pattern they made. “I throw them whenever I need input,” he said. “It’s an addendum to my subconscious.” He now does this before almost everything he undertakes—interviews, films, meetings. “It has sustained and nourished me,” he said. “But I’m not qualified to expound on it.”

I was oddly moved by these lines. The I Ching doesn’t tell you what the future will be, but it offers advice on how to behave, which makes it the perfect oracle for a character actor, whose career is inextricably tied up with luck, timing, persistence, and synchronicity.

Stanton, for reasons that even he might have found hard to grasp, became its patron saint. “What he wants is that one magic part, the one they’ll mention in film dictionaries, that will finally make up for all the awful parts from early in his career,” Oney writes. That was thirty years ago, and it never really happened. Most of the entry in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film is devoted to listing Stanton’s gigantic filmography, and its one paragraph of analysis is full of admiration for his surface, not his depths:

He is among the last of the great supporting actors, as unfailing and visually eloquent as Anthony Mann’s trees or “Mexico” in a Peckinpah film. Long ago, a French enthusiastic said that Charlton Heston was “axiomatic.” He might want that pensée back now. But Stanton is at least emblematic of sad films of action and travel. His face is like the road in the West.

This isn’t incorrect, but it’s still incomplete. In Oney’s profile, the young Sean Penn, who adopted Stanton as his mentor, offers the same sort of faint praise: “Behind that rugged old cowboy face, he’s simultaneously a man, a child, a woman—he just has this full range of emotions I really like. He’s a very impressive soul more than he is a mind, and I find that attractive.” I don’t want to discount the love there. But it’s also possible that Stanton never landed the parts that he deserved because his friends never got past that sad, wonderful face, which was a blessing that also obscured his subtle, indefinable talent.

Stanton’s great trick was to seem to sidle almost sideways into the frame, never quite taking over a film but immeasurably enriching it, and he’s been a figure on the edges of my moviegoing life for literally as long as I can remember. He appeared in what I’m pretty sure was one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater, Philip Borsos’s One Magic Christmas, which prompted Roger Ebert to write: “I am not sure exactly what I think about Harry Dean Stanton’s archangel. He is sad-faced and tender, all right, but he looks just like the kind of guy that our parents told us never to talk to.” Stanton got on my radar thanks largely to Ebert, who went so far as to define a general rule: “No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.” And my memory is seasoned with stray lines and moments delivered in his voice. As the crooked, genial preacher in Uforia: “Everybody’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.” Or the father in Pretty in Pink, after Molly Ringwald wakes him up at home one morning: “Where am I?” Or Paul in The Last Temptation of Christ, speaking to the aged Jesus: “You know, I’m glad I met you. Because now I can forget all about you.” One movie that I haven’t seen mentioned in most retrospectives of his career is Francis Coppola’s One From the Heart, in which Stanton unobtrusively holds his own in the corner of the film that killed Zoetrope Studios. Thomson describes his work as “funny, casual, and quietly disintegrating,” and when the camera dollies to the left near the beginning of the film as he asks Frederick Forrest’s character why he keeps buying so much junk, it’s as if he’s talking to Coppola himself.

Most of all, I’ve always loved Stanton’s brief turn as Carl, the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in which he offered the FBI agents “a cup of Good Morning America.” And one of the great pleasures of the revival of Twin Peaks was the last look it gave us of Carl, who informed a younger friend: “I’ve been smoking for seventy-five years—every fuckin’ day.” Cigarettes were curiously central to his mystique, as surely as they shaped his face and voice. Oney writes: “In other words, Stanton is sixty going on twenty-two, a seeker who also likes to drive fast cars, dance all night, and chain-smoke cigarettes with the defiant air of a hood hanging out in the high school boy’s room.” In his last starring role, the upcoming Lucky, he’s described as having “outlived and out-smoked” his contemporaries. And, more poignantly, he said to Esquire a decade ago: “I only eat so I can smoke and stay alive.” Smoking, like casting a hexagam, feels like the quintessential pastime of the character actor—it’s the vice of those who sit and wait. In an interview that he gave a few years ago, Stanton effortlessly linked all of these themes together:

We’re not in charge of our lives and there are no answers to anything. It’s a divine mystery. Buddhism, Taoism, the Jewish Kabbalah—it’s all the same thing, but once it gets organized it’s over. You have to just accept everything. I’m still smoking a pack a day.

If you didn’t believe in the I Ching, there was always smoking, and if you couldn’t believe in either one, you could believe in Stanton. Because everybody’s got to believe in something.

Invitation to look

Note: This post discusses plot elements from last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

In order to understand the current run of Twin Peaks, it helps to think back to the most characteristic scene from the finale of the second season, which was also the last episode of the show to air for decades. I’m not talking about Cooper in the Black Lodge, or any of the messy, unresolved melodrama that swirled around the other characters, or even the notorious cliffhanger. I mean the scene at Twin Peaks Savings and Loan that lingers interminably on the figure of Dell Mibbler, an ancient, doddering bank manager whom we haven’t seen before and will never see again, as he crosses the floor, in a single unbroken shot, to get a glass of water for Audrey. Even at the time, when the hope of a third season was still alive, many viewers must have found the sequence agonizingly pointless. Later, when it seemed like this was the last glimpse of these characters that we would ever have, it felt even less explicable. With only so many minutes in any given episode, each one starts to seem precious, especially in a series finale, and this scene took up at least two of them. (Now that we’ve finally gotten another season, I’m not sure how it will play in the future, but I suspect that it will feel like what it must have been intended to be—a precarious, unnecessary, but still pretty funny gag.) Anecdotally speaking, for a lot of viewers, the third season is starting to feel like that bank scene played over and over again. In theory, we have plenty of room for digressions, with eighteen hours of television to fill. But as the tangents and apparent dead ends continue to pile up, like the scene last night in which the camera spends a full minute lovingly recording an employee sweeping up at the Roadhouse, it sometimes feels like we’ve been tricked into watching Dell Mibbler: The Return.

Yet this has been David Lynch’s style from the beginning. Lynch directed only a few hours of the initial run of Twin Peaks, but his work, particularly on the pilot, laid down a template that other writers and directors did their best to follow. And many of the show’s iconic images—the streetlight at the corner where Laura was last seen, the waterfall, the fir trees blowing in the wind—consist of silent shots that are held for slightly longer than the viewer would expect. One of the oddly endearing things about the original series was how such eerie moments were intercut with scenes that, for all their quirkiness, were staged, shot, and edited more or less like any other network drama. The new season hasn’t offered many such respites, which is part of why it still feels like it’s keeping itself at arm’s length from its own history. For better or worse, Lynch doesn’t have to compromise here. (Last night’s episode was perhaps the season’s most plot-heavy installment to date, and it devoted maybe ten minutes to advancing the story.) Instead, Lynch is continuing to educate us, as he’s done erratically throughout his career, on how to slow down and pay attention. Not all of his movies unfold at the same meditative pace: Blue Velvet moves like a thriller, in part because of the circumstances of its editing, and Wild at Heart seems like an attempt, mostly unsuccessful, to sustain that level of frantic motion for the film’s entire length. But when we think back to the scenes from his work that we remember most vividly, they tend to be static shots that are held so long that they burn themselves into our imagination. And as movies and television shows become more anxious to keep the viewer’s interest from straying for even a second, Twin Peaks remains an invitation to look and contemplate.

It also invites us to listen, and while much of Lynch’s fascination with stillness comes from his background as a painter, it also emerges from his interest in sound. Lynch is credited as a sound designer on Twin Peaks, as he has been for most of his movies, and the show is suffused with what you might call the standard-issue Lynchian noise—a low, barely perceptible hum of static that occasionally rises to an oceanic roar. (In last night’s episode, Benjamin Horne and the character played by Ashley Judd try vainly to pin down the source of a similar hum at the Great Northern, and while it might eventually lead somewhere, it also feels like a subtle joke at Lynch’s own expense.) The sound is often associated with electronic or recording equipment, like the video cameras that are trained on the glass cube in the season premiere. My favorite instance is in Blue Velvet, when Jeffrey stumbles across the tableau of two victims in Dorothy’s apartment, one with his ear cut off, the other still standing with his brains shot out. There’s a hum coming from the shattered television set, and it’s pitched at so low a level that it’s almost subliminal, except to imperceptibly increase our anxiety. You only really become aware of it when it stops, after Jeffrey closes the door behind him and, a little later, when Frank shoots out the television tube. But you can’t hear it at all unless everything else onscreen is deathly quiet. It emerges from stillness, as if it were a form of background noise that surrounds us all the time, but is only audible when the rest of the world fades away. I don’t know whether Lynch’s fascination with this kind of sound effect came out of his interest in stillness or the other way around, and the most plausible explanation is that it all arose from the same place. But you could build a convincing reading of his career around the two meanings of the word “static.”

Taken together, the visual and auditory elements invite us to look on in silence, which may be a reflection of Lynch’s art school background. (I don’t know if Lynch was directly influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, a work of art that obsessed me so much that I wrote an entire novel about it, but they both ask us to stand and contemplate the inexplicable without speaking. And when you see the installation in person at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as I’ve done twice, the memory is inevitably entwined with the low hum of the room’s climate control system.) By extending this state of narrative suspension to the breaking point, Twin Peaks is pushing in a direction that even the most innovative prestige dramas have mostly avoided, and it still fascinates me. The real question is when and how the silence will be broken. Lynch’s great hallmark is his use of juxtaposition, not just of light and dark, which horrified Roger Ebert so much in Blue Velvet, but of silence and sudden, violent action. We’ve already seen hints of this so far in Twin Peaks, particularly in the scenes involving the murderous Ike the Spike, who seems to be playing the same role, at random intervals, that a figure of similarly small stature did at the end of Don’t Look Now. And I have a feeling that the real payoff is yet to come. This might sound like the wishful thinking of a viewer who is waiting for the show’s teasing hints to lead somewhere, but it’s central to Lynch’s method, in which silence and stillness are most effective when framed by noise and movement. The shot of the two bodies in Dorothy’s apartment leads directly into the most dramatically satisfying—and, let it be said, most conventional—climax of Lynch’s career. And remember Dell Mibbler? At the end of the scene, the bank blows up.

The art of the anti-blurb

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, the critic Dan Chiasson offers up an appraisal of the poet Bill Knott, who died in 2014. To be honest, I’d either never heard of Knott or forgotten his name, but I suspect that he might have been pleased by this. Knott, who taught for decades at Emerson College, spent his entire career sticking resolutely to the edges of the literary world, distancing himself from mainstream publishers and electing to distribute his poems himself in cheap editions on Amazon. Chiasson relates:

The books that did make it to print usually featured brutal “anti-blurbs,” which Knott culled from reviews good and bad alike: his work was “grotesque,” “malignant,” “tasteless,” and “brainless,” according to some of the big names of the day.

Here are a few more of the blurbs he reprinted: “Bill Knott’s ancient, academic ramblings are part of what’s wrong with poetry today. Ignore the old bastard.” “Bill Knott bores me to tears.” “Bill Knott should be beaten with a flail.” “Bill Knott’s poems are so naïve that the question of their poetic quality hardly arises…Mr. Knott practices a dead language.” According to another reminiscence by the editor Robert P. Baird, Knott sometimes took it even further: “On his various blogs, which spawned and deceased like mayflies, he posted collages of rejection slips and a running tally of anti-blurbs: positive reviews and compliments that he’d carved up with ellipses to read like pans.” Even his actual negative reviews weren’t enough—Knott felt obliged to create his own.

The idea of a writer embracing his attackers has an obvious subversive appeal. Norman Mailer, revealingly, liked the idea so much that he indulged in it no fewer than three times, and far less nimbly than Knott did. After the release of The Deer Park, he ran an ad in The Village Voice that amounted to a parody of the usual collage of laudatory quotes—“The year’s worst snake pit in fiction,” “Moronic mindlessness,” “A bunch of bums”—and noted in fine print at the bottom, just in case we didn’t get the point: “This advertisement was paid for by Norman Mailer.” Two decades later, he decided to do the same thing with Marilyn, mostly as a roundabout way of responding to a single bad review by Pauline Kael. As the editor Robert Markel recalls in Peter Manso’s oral biography:

The book was still selling well when [Mailer] came in with his idea of a full two-page ad. Since he was now more or less in the hands of [publisher] Harold Roth, there was a big meeting in Harold’s office. What he wanted to do was exactly what he’d done with The Village Voice ad for The Deer Park: present all the positive and negative reviews, including Kael’s, setting the two in opposition. Harold was very much against it. He thought the two pages would be a stupid waste of money, but more, it was the adversarial nature of the ad as Norman conceived it.

Ultimately, Mailer persuaded Roth to play along: “He implied he’d made a study of this kind of thing and knew what he was talking about.” And five years down the line, he did it yet again with his novel Ancient Evenings, printing up a counter display for bookstores with bad reviews for Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Leaves of Grass, and his own book, followed by a line with a familiar ring to it: “The quotations in this poster were selected by Norman Mailer.”

This compulsiveness about reprinting his bad reviews, and his insistence that everyone know that he had conceived and approved of it, is worth analyzing, because it’s very different from Knott’s. Mailer’s whole life was built on sustaining an image of intellectual machismo that often rested on unstable foundations, and embracing the drubbings that his books received was a way of signaling that he was tougher than his critics. Like so much else, it was a pose—Mailer hungered for fame and attention, and he felt his negative reviews as keenly as anyone. When Time ran a snarky notice of his poetry collection Deaths for the Ladies, Mailer replied, “in a fury of incalculable pains,” with a poem of his own, in which he compared himself to a bull in the ring and the reviewer to a cowardly picador. He recalled in Existential Errands:

The review in Time put iron into my heart again, and rage, and the feeling that the enemy was more alive than ever, and dirtier in the alley, and so one had to mend, and put on the armor, and go to war, go out to war again, and try to hew huge strokes with the only broadsword God ever gave you, a glimpse of something like Almighty prose.

This is probably a much healthier response. But in the contrast between Mailer’s expensive advertisements for himself and Knott’s photocopied chapbooks, you can see the difference between a piece of performance art and a philosophy of life truly lived. Of the two, Mailer ends up seeming more vulnerable. As he admits: “I had secret hopes, I now confess, that Deaths for the Ladies would be a vast success at the bar of poetry.”

Of course, Knott’s attitude was a bit of a pose as well. Chiasson once encountered his own name on Knott’s blog, which referred to him as “Chiasson-the-Assassin,” which indicates that the poet’s attitude toward critics was something other than indifference. But it was also a pose that was indistinguishable from the man inside, as Elisa Gabbert, one of Kott’s former students, observed: “It was kind of a goof, but that was his whole life. It was a really grand goof.” And you can judge them by their fruits. Mailer’s advertisements are brilliant, but the product that they’re selling is Mailer himself, and you’re clearly supposed to depart with the impression that the critics have trashed a major work of art. After reading Knott’s anti-blurbs, you end up questioning the whole notion of laudatory quotes itself, which is a more productive kind of skepticism. (David Lynch pulled off something similar when he printed an ad for Lost Highway with the words: “Two Thumbs Down!” In response, Roger Ebert wrote: “It’s creative to use the quote in that way…These days quotes in movie ads have been devalued by the ‘quote whores’ who supply gushing praise to publicists weeks in advance of an opening.” The situation with blurbs is slightly different, but there’s no question that they’ve been devalued as well—a book without “advance praise” looks vaguely suspicious, so the only meaningful fact about most blurbs is that they exist.) Resistance to reviews is so hard for a writer to maintain that asserting it feels like a kind of superpower. If asked, Mailer might have replied, like Bruce Banner in The Avengers: “That’s my secret. I’m always angry.” But I have a hunch that the truth is closer to what Wolverine says when Rogue asks if it hurts when his claws come out: “Every time.”

Don’t stay out of Riverdale

In the opening seconds of the series premiere of Riverdale, a young man speaks quietly in voiceover, his words playing over idyllic shots of American life:

Our story is about a town, a small town, and the people who live in the town. From a distance, it presents itself like so many other small towns all over the world. Safe. Decent. Innocent. Get closer, though, and you start seeing the shadows underneath. The name of our town is Riverdale.

Much later, we realize that the speaker is Jughead of Archie Comics fame, played by former Disney child star Cole Sprouse, which might seem peculiar enough in itself. But what I noticed first about this monologue is that it basically summarizes the prologue of Blue Velvet, which begins with images of roses and picket fences and then dives into the grass, revealing the insects ravening like feral animals in the darkness. It’s one of the greatest declarations of intent in all of cinema, and initially, there’s something a little disappointing in the way that Riverdale feels obliged to blandly state what Lynch put into a series of unforgettable images. Yet I have the feeling that series creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who says that Blue Velvet is one of his favorite movies, knows exactly what he’s doing. And the result promises to be more interesting than even he can anticipate.

Riverdale has been described as The O.C. meets Twin Peaks, which is how it first came to my attention. But it’s also a series on the CW, with all the good, the bad, and the lack of ugly that this implies. This the network that produced The Vampire Diaries, the first three seasons of which unexpectedly generated some of my favorite television from the last few years, and it takes its genre shows very seriously. There’s a fascinating pattern at work within systems that produce such narratives on a regular basis, whether in pulp magazines or comic books or exploitation pictures: as long as you hit all the obligatory notes and come in under budget, you’re granted a surprising amount of freedom. The CW, like its predecessors, has become an unlikely haven for auteurs, and it’s the sort of place where a showrunner like Aguirre-Sacasa—who has an intriguing background in playwriting, comics, and television—can explore a sandbox like this for years. Yet it also requires certain heavy, obvious beats, like structural supports, to prop up the rest of the edifice. A lot of the first episode of Riverdale, like most pilots, is devoted to setting up its premise and characters for even the most distracted viewers, and it can be almost insultingly on the nose. It’s why it feels obliged to spell out its theme of dark shadows beneath its sunlit surfaces, which isn’t exactly hard to grasp. As Roger Ebert wrote decades ago in his notoriously indignant review of Blue Velvet: “What are we being told? That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.”

As a result, if you want to watch Riverdale at all, you need to get used to being treated occasionally as if you were twelve years old. But Aguirre-Sacasa seems determined to have it both ways. Like Glee before it, it feels as if it’s being pulled in three different directions even before it begins, but in this case, it comes off less as an unwanted side effect than as a strategy. It’s worth noting that not only did Aguirre-Sacasa write for Glee itself, but he’s also the guy who stepped in rewrite Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which means that he knows something about wrangling intractable material for a mass audience under enormous scrutiny. (He’s also the chief creative officer of Archie Comics, which feels like a dream job in the best sort of way: one of his projects at the Yale School of Drama was a play about Archie encountering the murderers Leopold and Loeb, and he later received a cease and desist order from his future employer over Archie’s Weird Fantasy, which depicted its lead character as coming out of the closet.) Riverdale often plays like the work of a prodigiously talented writer trying to put his ideas into a form that could plausibly air on Thursdays after Supernatural. Like most shows at this stage, it’s also openly trying to decide what it’s supposed to be about. And I want to believe, on the basis of almost zero evidence, that Aguirre-Sacasa is deliberately attempting something almost unworkable, in hopes that he’ll be able to stick with it long enough—on a network that seems fairly indulgent of shows on the margins—to make it something special.

Most great television results from this sort of evolutionary process, and I’ve noted before—most explicitly in my Salon piece on The X-Files—that the best genre shows emerge when a jumble of inconsistent elements is given the chance to find its ideal form, usually because it lucks into a position where it can play under the radar for years. The pressures of weekly airings, fan response, critical reviews, and ratings, along with the unpredictable inputs of the cast and writing staff, lead to far more rewarding results than even the most visionary showrunner could produce in isolation. Writers of serialized narratives like comic books know this intuitively, and consciously or not, Aguirre-Sacasa seems to be trying something similar on television. It’s not an approach that would make sense for a series like Westworld, which was produced for so much money and with such high expectations that its creators had no choice but to start with a plan. But it might just work on the CW. I’m hopeful that Aguirre-Sacasa and his collaborators will use the mystery at the heart of the series much as Twin Peaks did, as a kind of clothesline on which they can hang a lot of wild experiments, only a certain percentage of which can be expected to work. Twin Peaks itself provides a measure of this method’s limitations: it mutated into something extraordinary, but it didn’t survive the departure of its original creative team. Riverdale feels like an attempt to recreate those conditions, and if it utilizes the Archie characters as its available raw material, well, why not? If Lynch had been able to get the rights, he might have used them, too.

What comes next

In the memoir I. Asimov, which Isaac Asimov wrote when he knew that he was dying from complications of an HIV infection acquired years earlier from a blood transfusion, its author says:

Comparatively early in life I managed to have it ground into my brain that there was no disgrace in dying after seventy, but that dying before seventy was “premature” and was a reflection on a person’s intelligence and character.

Asimov blamed this on the Bible verse that tells us that “the years of our life are threescore and ten,” and he observes that his opinion was “unreasonable, of course; quite irrational.” Still, I have a hunch that many of us continue to share that view, if only subconsciously. This year may or may not have had a greater number of celebrity deaths than usual, but it certainly seemed that way, and many of the ones that stung the most—David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Carrie Fisher—were of artists who were between the ages of fifty and seventy. They had been around for enough to feel like legends, but not quite old enough for us to think that their stories were over, and it felt, in some cases, as if we’d been deprived of another decade or two of work. (It’s a measure of Bowie’s hold over my imagination that even after we’ve lost so many others, his death is still the one that hurts the most, and I think that the post I wrote after hearing the news might be the best thing I’ve ever written on this blog.)

When a science fiction writer dies, there’s an additional pang of regret that he or she didn’t live “to see the future,” which, if anything, is even more irrational. But that doesn’t make it wrong. In the May 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell published the complete chart of Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History, which extended from the present day to past the year 2100. In his editor’s note, Campbell wrote:

It might be of very real interest to you to trace in on this suggestion of the future your own life line. My own, I imagine, should extend up to about 1980—a bit beyond the time of “Roads Must Roll” and “Blowups Happen.” My children may see the days of “Logic of Empire.” Where does your life line fall? Where will your children’s end?

Campbell, in fact, had no intention of dying at all. In a biographical sketch from the early fifties, he said: “It’s my intention to live at least two hundred years, because I damn well want to find out how this mess comes out, and that’s the only way I know of that I can do it.” A few years later, he extended the timeline, saying that he planned “to see what happens next—if I have to hang around for another five hundred years or so to do so!” Toward the end of the sixties, when he was painfully conscious of his failing health, he wrote, more modestly, that he hoped to keep editing the magazine for another thirty years, noting that he would be “just shy of ninety” in 1998.

Campbell’s fullest statement on human longevity came in an editorial titled “Oh King, Live Forever!”, which was published in the April 1949 issue of Astounding. Campbell began with the statement:

At some point in the history of the world and the history of medical science, a point will be reached such that a child born at that time can, if he chooses—and has reasonable luck so far as mechanical damage goes—live practically forever. This point in time will be some forty or more years before the perfection of the full requirements for continuous life—and this point may already have passed, without our knowing it.

He continued by saying that it shouldn’t be too hard to extend the human lifespan by a few decades, and he concluded:

The first advance of thirty years would be no “eternal youth” treatment. But—science tends to advance exponentially. That thirty-year reprieve might give just the time needed for research to extend your life another forty years. And that forty years might—

It’s an argument that perfectly anticipates those of such later transhumanists as Ray Kurzweil, author of books like Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. And for all I know, it might be right—someday.

As it turned out, Campbell was only sixty-one when he died, and while his death was sudden, it was far from unexpected: he had been suffering from gout, high blood pressure, and other ailments for years. It’s easy to regret that both he and Asimov failed to make it to the twenty-first century. But Campbell lived to see the moon landing. So did Asimov, who once wrote, like Campbell, that he hoped to keep on living as long as he was still curious to see how the story would turn out. In his movie review of The Sea Inside, which is about a quadriplegic who demands the right to die, Roger Ebert made a similar statement:

I believe I would want to live as long as I could, assuming I had my sanity and some way to communicate…If a man is of sound mind and not in pain, how in the world can he decide he no longer wants to read tomorrow’s newspaper?

When he wrote those words, Ebert—who once called Campbell “my hero”—was a few years away from his own very public struggle with mortality. But the desire to see what happens next is very strong, and it’s particularly moving when you think of the times through which Campbell, Asimov, and the rest all lived. It’s been a rough twelve months, and I can’t say that I’m particularly sorry to say goodbye to 2016. But I still want to know what comes next.

The excerpt opinion

“It’s the rare writer who cannot have sentences lifted from his work,” Norman Mailer once wrote. What he meant is that if a reviewer is eager to find something to mock, dismiss, or pick apart, any interesting book will provide plenty of ammunition. On a simple level of craft, it’s hard for most authors to sustain a high pitch of technical proficiency in every line, and if you want to make a novelist seem boring or ordinary, you can just focus on the sentences that fall between the high points. In his famously savage takedown of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, Martin Amis quotes another reviewer who raved: “There is not a single ugly or dead sentence.” Amis then acidly observes:

Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences—unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as “Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler” or “Eric Pickford answered” or “Pazzi worked like a man possessed” or “Margot laughed in spite of herself” or “Bob Sneed broke the silence.”

Amis knows that this is a cheap shot, and he glories in it. But it isn’t so different from what critics do when they list the awful sentences from a current bestseller or nominate lines for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. I laugh at this along with anyone else, but I also wince a little, because there are few authors alive who aren’t vulnerable to that sort of treatment. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out: “You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.”

This is even more true of authors who take considerable stylistic or thematic risks, which usually result in individual sentences that seem crazy or, worse, silly. The fear of seeming ridiculous is what prevents a lot of writers from taking chances, and it isn’t always unjustified. An ambitious novel opens itself up to savaging from all sides, precisely because it provides so much material that can be turned against the author when taken out of context. And it doesn’t need to be malicious, either: even objective or actively sympathetic critics can be seduced by the ease with which a writer can be excerpted to make a case. I’ve become increasingly daunted by the prospect of distilling the work of Robert A. Heinlein, for example, because his career was so long, varied, and often intentionally provocative that you can find sentences to support any argument about him that you want to make. (It doesn’t help that his politics evolved drastically over time, and they probably would have undergone several more transformations if he had lived for longer.) This isn’t to say that his opinions aren’t a fair target for criticism, but any reasonable understanding of who Heinlein was and what he believed—which I’m still trying to sort out for myself—can’t be conveyed by a handful of cherry-picked quotations. Literary biography is useful primarily to the extent that it can lay out a writer’s life in an orderly fashion, providing a frame that tells us something about the work that we wouldn’t know by encountering it out of order. But even that involves a process of selection, as does everything else about a biography. The biographer’s project isn’t essentially different from that of a working critic or reviewer: it just takes place on a larger scale.

And it’s worth noting that prolific critics themselves are particularly susceptible to this kind of treatment. When Renata Adler described Pauline Kael’s output as “not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless,” any devotee of Kael’s work had to disagree—but it was also impossible to deny that there was plenty of evidence for the prosecution. If you’re determined to hate Roger Ebert, you just have to search for the reviews in which his opinions, written on deadline, weren’t sufficiently in line with the conclusions reached by posterity, as when he unforgivably gave only three stars to The Godfather Part II. And there isn’t a single page in the work of David Thomson, who is probably the most interesting movie critic who ever lived, that couldn’t be mined for outrageous, idiotic, or infuriating statements. I still remember a review on The A.V. Club of How to Watch a Movie that quoted lines like this:

Tell me a story, we beg as children, while wanting so many other things. Story will put off sleep (or extinction) and the child’s organism hardly trusts the habit of waking yet.

And this:

You came into this book under deceptive promises (mine) and false hopes (yours). You believed we might make decisive progress in the matter of how to watch a movie. So be it, but this was a ruse to make you look at life.

The reviewer quoted these sentences as examples of the book’s deficiencies, and they were duly excoriated in the comments. But anyone who has really read Thomson knows that such statements are part of the package, and removing them would also deny most of what makes him so fun, perverse, and valuable.

So what’s a responsible reviewer to do? We could start, maybe, by quoting longer or complete sections, rather than sentences in isolation, and by providing more context when we offer up just a line or two. We can also respect an author’s feelings, explicit or otherwise, about what sections are actually important. In the passage I mentioned at the beginning of this post, which is about John Updike, Mailer goes on to quote a few sentences from Rabbit, Run, and he adds:

The first quotation is taken from the first five sentences of the book, the second is on the next-to-last page, and the third is nothing less than the last three sentences of the novel. The beginning and end of a novel are usually worked over. They are the index to taste in the writer.

That’s a pretty good rule, and it ensures that the critic is discussing something reasonably close to what the writer intended to say. Best of all, we can approach the problem of excerpting with a kind of joy in the hunt: the search for the slice of a work that will stand as a synecdoche of the whole. In the book U & I, which is also about Updike, Nicholson Baker writes about the “standardized ID phrase” and “the aphoristic consensus” and “the jingle we will have to fight past at some point in the future” to see a writer clearly again, just as fans of Joyce have to do their best to forget about “the ineluctable modality of the visible” and “yes I said yes I will Yes.” For a living author, that repository of familiar quotations is constantly in flux, and reviewers might approach their work with a greater sense of responsibility if they realized that they were playing a part in creating it—one tiny excerpt at a time.

“To spare another man’s life…”

Note: This post is the sixtieth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 59. You can read the previous installments here.

Why do our villains always have to die? Roger Ebert says somewhere—I haven’t been able to track down the exact reference—that he’d be happier if a movie ended with the hero sealing the bad guy’s fate with a few well-chosen lines of dialogue, followed by a closeup of the bastard’s face as he absorbs his predicament. And there’s no question that this would be much more satisfying than the anticlimactic death scenes that most stories tend to deliver. It’s safe to say that if a book or screenplay goes through the trouble of creating a nice, hateful antagonist, it’s usually for the sake of his ultimate comeuppance: we want to see him pay for what he’s done, and hopefully suffer in the process. In practice, the manner in which he ends up being dispatched rarely lives up to the punishment we’ve mentally assigned to him in advance. For one thing, it’s often too fast. We want him to perish at a moment of total recognition, and the nature of most fictional deaths means that the realization is over almost before it begins. (This may be the real reason why so many villains are killed by falling from a great height. It leaves the hero’s hands relatively clean, however illogically, and it also allows for at least a few seconds of mute astonishment and understanding to cross the bad guy’s face. The story goes that during the filming of Die Hard, director John McTiernan let Alan Rickman drop a second before he was expecting it. Rickman was understandably furious, but the look he gives the camera is worth it: there are few things more delicious than seeing him lose that mask of perfect, icy control.)

All things being equal, it’s best to allow the villain to live to deal with the consequences. But there are also situations in which a death can feel dramatically necessary. I’ve never forgotten what Robert Towne once said about a similar plot point at the end of Chinatown. Originally, Towne had wanted the movie to conclude on an ambiguous note, but he was overruled by Roman Polanski. Years later, Towne said:

In hindsight, I’ve come to feel that Roman was probably right about the ending, that I don’t think that what I had in mind could have been done; that an end with that ambiguity and ambivalence that I had in mind simply could not satisfactorily be done as the tag to a movie with that much complexity; the end had to have a level of stark simplicity that at the time I thought was excessively melodramatic. Roman rightly believed that the complexities had to conclude with a simple severing of the knot.

Chinatown, of course, ends with anything but the villain getting what he deserves, but the principle is largely the same. In some respects, it’s a matter of contrast. A story that consists of one act of violence after another might benefit from a more nuanced ending, while one that teases out its complexities would go out best with a stark, sudden conclusion. I’ve always preferred the brutally abbreviated last scene of The Departed to that of Infernal Affairs, for instance, because that twisty, convoluted story really needs to close with a full stop. As De Niro says at the end of Casino: “And that’s that.”

And a villain’s death can be necessary in order to close off the story completely: it’s like scorching the end of a nylon rope to prevent it from unraveling. Death is nothing if not definitive, and it can seem unfair to the viewer or reader to leave the narrative open at one end after they’ve come so far already. The decision as to whether or not to spare the villain is a tricky one, and it can be determined by forces from much earlier in the narrative. In his director’s commentary for Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, Christopher McQuarrie says that they spent countless drafts trying to figure out ways for Ethan to kill Solomon Lane, only to find that none of the results seemed satisfying. The reason, they discovered, was that Lane hadn’t done enough to make Ethan hate him in particular: it just wasn’t personal, so it didn’t need to end with anything so intimate as a fight to the death. A story’s internal mechanics can also push the ending in the other direction. The original draft of The Icon Thief, which persisted almost until the book went out to publishers, had all three of the primary antagonists surviving, and in fact, Maddy even asks Ilya to spare Sharkovsky’s life. In the rewrite, I realized that Lermontov had to die to balance out the death of another character earlier in the novel, which in itself was a very late addition, and that Maddy had to be the one to take that revenge. This kind of narrative bookkeeping, in which the writer cooks the numbers until they come out more or less right, is something that every author does, consciously or otherwise. In this case, it was a choice that ended up having a huge impact on the rest of the series, and it influenced many other judgment calls to come, to an extent that I’m not sure I recognized at the time.

Chapter 59 of Eternal Empire, for example, is maybe the bloodiest sequence in the entire trilogy, in emotional impact if not in raw body count: it includes the deaths of two major characters and a fair amount of collateral damage. I get rid of Asthana, whom I liked so much that I kept her around for an entire novel after I originally planned to dispose of her, and Vasylenko, whose presence has haunted the series from the start. Looking back on it, I’m pretty happy with Asthana’s swan song, which consists of a complicated set of feints and maneuvers against Wolfe. It’s fair to both characters, and it gives Asthana a second or two to process how she’s been outsmarted. (I wasn’t thinking of Arrested Development, but it’s hard for me to read it now without imagining Asthana saying to herself: “I’ve made a huge mistake.”) But I’m not particularly pleased by how I handled Vasylenko’s death, which is too bad, since by all rights it ought to be the climax of all three books. In some ways, I wrote myself into a corner: there’s really no plausible way to keep Vasylenko alive, or to extend his confrontation with Ilya for longer than a couple of paragraphs, and in my eagerness to write a definitive ending to the series, I may have rushed past the moment of truth. In my defense, the chapter has to provide closure for multiple pairs of characters—Ilya and Maddy, Ilya and Wolfe, Ilya and Vasylenko, Wolfe and Asthana—and I do what I can to give each of them the valediction they deserve. If I had to do it over again, I might have toyed with switching Asthana and Vasylekno’s final scenes, in order to close the novel on a position of greater strength, but this probably wouldn’t have been possible. The Icon Thief ended with Maddy asking Ilya to spare another man’s life; Eternal Empire had to conclude with her asking for the opposite. They don’t end in the same way. But Maddy isn’t the same person she was when we started…

Turning every page

In a note at the end of The Passage of Power, the biographer Robert A. Caro describes an important source of information about the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and he concludes: “While no one (including me) has counted the number of pages…the number may be in the area of forty thousand. I don’t know how many of these pages I’ve read, but I’ve read a lot of them.” And you can feel his sense of quiet satisfaction as he says this. The four volumes that have been published of The Years of Lyndon Johnson are all great reads, but for my money, some of the best drama unfolds in the endnotes, which provide a kind of stealth parallel memoir by Caro as he plows his way through a mountain of available material. In the case of someone like Johnson, the problem isn’t a lack of data, but its overwhelming abundance: his presidential library alone contains something like forty-four million documents. Dealing with this kind of overload, which represents more than one author could read in multiple lifetimes, forces a writer to develop strategies for managing the sheer volume of possible research. You start with a list of subjects that you know will be relevant and drill down from there, following up on other leads as they emerge; you find that certain witnesses are more valuable than others, and you make a point of reading whatever they have to say; or you engage in a sort of longitudinal survey, revisiting the same ideas over time. The result, when you’re done, is both systematic and scattershot, and that’s how it should be. But eventually, you come back to what Caro’s old managing editor Alan Hathaway said to him at Newsday: “Turn every goddamn page.”

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been doing what I can to follow that advice, attacking the research for my upcoming book on two fronts. The first consists simply of going through every issue of Astounding Science Fiction, Unknown, and Analog published in editor John W. Campbell’s lifetime. So far, I’ve worked my way through about fifteen years of these magazines, from the beginning of the Great Depression to the end of World War II, with another quarter of a century to go. Obviously, I can’t stop to read, or even skim, every story, and I usually end up focusing on the editorials, the filler items, and the responses to the letters to the editor—in short, anything that Campbell himself wrote. (As for the stories themselves, I can only echo Caro by saying that I don’t know how many I’ve read, but I’ve read a lot.) Sometimes an advertisement or a piece of art will catch my eye: you could write an entire book about the International Correspondence Schools ads that opened nearly every issue, or the cigarette ads that appeared on every back cover. And the mere act of turning the pages reveals patterns that might otherwise be invisible. It gives you an overview, like a time-lapse video, of the magazine’s evolution, and I’ve found my ideas about certain topics changing perceptibly. I’ve begun to recognize how the epochal changes in the history of science fiction were really the result of many incremental shifts, and how the seeds of the golden age were planted in the work of Campbell’s predecessors, Harry Bates and F. Orlin Tremaine. This approach doesn’t allow for much in the way of granular analysis, of which I plan to do more than my share elsewhere, but the perspective that it provides has structured my thinking in profound ways.

My other source of raw data is Campbell’s correspondence. His surviving letters, which often preserve both sides of the exchange, amount to about thirty thousand pages, and this doesn’t even include hundreds of additional documents in repositories like the Heinlein Archives. The late Perry Chapdelaine published a selection of it in three huge volumes, which are invaluable, but barely scratch the surface. As I’ve known for a long time, the real treasure trove lies in the form of the seven microfilm reels in which Chapdelaine copied the entire collection, only three copies of which appear to have ever been made. (The original letters are archived at San Diego State University, but it would be difficult for me to spend the weeks or months there required to go through it properly.) Almost since this project began, I’ve been trying to get my hands on the microfilm, and last week—after a series of setbacks and snafus, including the revelation that one complete set seems to have disappeared—I managed to cobble together the whole thing with reels from the Library of Congress and Texas A&M University, along with a huge assist from the public library in Oak Park. As a result, I’ve been spending most of my recent afternoons at the library’s microfilm reader. Frankly, I hadn’t been aware of the advances in microfilm viewing technology, and I imagined myself sitting in a basement carrel like Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs. In fact, the library’s setup is wonderful: it allows me to scroll quickly through the images, adjust the focus and contrast, and even take screen shots for later reference. Despite the relative convenience, though, it still presents big challenges. Many of the letters, which are photographs of carbon copies, are impossible to read, and they’re preserved in a seemingly arbitrary order. My best guess is that it will take me something like fifteen hours just to visually inspect every letter in a single reel, much less figure out what is and isn’t important.

Yet it’s already paying off. As I’ve learned through my encounters with every page of Astounding, there’s a big difference between confronting primary sources without any intermediation and reading the same material after it has been edited and curated. It’s like looking at a life as it unfolds, almost day by day, with all the messiness you’d expect, and you develop odd intuitions: when I’m scrolling rapidly through the microfilm, I can recognize certain writers at a glance, based on the kind of typewriter they used, and I can quickly sort the letters into different categories. Most of it is routine correspondence, but there are hidden gems as well. On April 17, 1962, for instance, a young reporter from the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette sent Campbell a query letter about a story he hoped to submit on PLATO, a computer-assisted educational system developed by the University of Illinois. He wrote: “It seems to me that PLATO is a nightmarish mechanical personification of the stiffened, calcified mind of Orthodox Science.” Campbell replied: “This sounds interesting. Let’s see it!” No other letters from the exchange survive, and I wouldn’t even bother mentioning it here if the reporter in question weren’t Roger Ebert. At the time, he was nineteen years old—or Isaac Asimov’s age when he sold his first short story—and five years away from becoming a film critic. It’s hard not to wonder what might have happened if Campbell, whom Ebert once called “my hero,” had taken him under his wing, and although I doubt it will even end up in the book, the discovery of this unexpected encounter between two of the most important men in my life is the kind of thing that makes it all worthwhile. And I never would have found it if I hadn’t turned every page.

“This had never been a game of chance…”

Note: This post is the fifty-eighth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 57. You can read the previous installments here.

Earlier this week, in my discussion of Michael Cimino and The Deer Hunter, I managed to avoid mentioning its single most famous—and controversial—plot point. Here’s what William Goldman had to say on the subject in Adventures in the Screen Trade:

Does anyone remember, say, the last part of Deer Hunter? Saigon is going up in flames, and Robert De Niro…is out of service and back in Pennsylvania. He hears about his old buddy, Christopher Walken, who’s still back there…Do you know what Walken has been doing all this time? He’s been playing that game of Russian roulette with real bullets. (The Russian roulette ploy was made up by the movie’s creators, by the way; it didn’t happen in reality.) For months and months, Walken has been taking on all comers in this loony tunes Russian roulette, and…he’s undefeated, untied, and unscored on.

It would take a computer a while to give the odds against that happening, but never mind, because now we’re into the confrontation scene. De Niro versus Walken at Russian roulette. If you looked at the billing of the picture on your way in, did you ever doubt who was going to win?

Obviously, De Niro survives and Walken dies. Goldman concludes that The Deer Hunter, for all its trappings of realism, is ultimately “a comic book movie,” and he adds: “What Deer Hunter told me was what I already knew and believed in: No matter how horrid the notion of war, Robert De Niro would end up staring soulfully at the beautiful, long-suffering Meryl Streep.” And while the film’s Russian roulette sequences are far from its only implausible element, they’ve always served as a focal point for the movie’s critics, both because of their air of racism and because they were invented by the screenwriters out of thin air. What really fascinates me, though, is that these scenes were actually the seed of the entire story, and they came before Vietnam, Pennsylvania, or anything else. The producer Michael Deeley had bought a script called The Man Who Came to Play about games of Russian roulette in Las Vegas, which he called “a very clever piece of writing,” and it was rewritten by Cimino and his collaborator Deric Washburn to take place during the war. You could almost say that these scenes, as arbitrary as they seem in relation to the real Vietnam experience, are what is truly essential, and the rest—all that loving atmosphere at the steel mill and the wedding and the deer hunt and Chopin’s Nocturne—is incidental. And despite my mixed feelings about the movie, I have to concede that Cimino’s fundamental instinct, which was that the Russian roulette element would provide a spine strong enough for him to tell literally any story he wanted, was brilliant. As Roger Ebert, who liked The Deer Hunter far more than I did, wrote, it becomes “the organizing symbol of the film.”

Elsewhere, I’ve said that discovering this kind of narrative trick can feel like stumbling across a new industrial process, and I don’t think that’s ever been more true than it is here. Russian roulette, as a tool for generating suspense, is a writer’s dream: it’s infinitely expansible and compressible, meaning that it can be used to fill thirty seconds of screen time or serve as the motor that drives an entire third act, and it requires a minimum of setup. I’ve often suspected that the whole legal procedural genre sprang up around the fact that a jury delivering its verdict is the most foolproof scene in all of drama: even if the outcome is foreordained, when the foreman passes the folded note to the judge and the defendant is asked to rise, there’s always an increase in tension and anticipation. The trouble—if you’re a writer with the right amount of laziness, which is just another word for the pragmatic use of your limited resources—is you can’t just jump into a verdict scene without any preparation. It requires a fair amount of work to get there. Russian roulette, for better or worse, is a self-contained component: you can slide it in almost anywhere and it works, if only on the most primitive levels of the brain. It delivers violence, or the threat of it, at an unpredictable time in a structured way. I can’t think of anything else in fiction or real life that comes even close to it. Fortunately, perhaps, it’s the sort of thing that can only be done once on this kind of scale. As much as I dislike The Deer Hunter, I almost feel that Cimino deserved to win Best Picture, if only because he recognized the opportunity that the device presented and capitalized on it before anyone else ever could.

Of course, this hasn’t prevented other opportunistic writers from occasionally making use of it. (Among other things, it provides the backbone for the final act of my favorite episode of The X-Files.) And I resort to it here, in Chapter 57 of Eternal Empire, for all the reasons that I mentioned above. Pragmatically, the scene could be about anything or nothing: Maddy has been brought back by her enemies to the isolated dacha in Sochi, and the chapter’s only function is to crank our concern for her safety up to as high a pitch as possible, in roughly five pages, before Wolfe and Ilya storm the compound. A scene like this has to walk a fine line, and I do what I can to give Maddy as much agency as I can, as she tries to turn her captors against one another. But when Vasylenko takes out his revolver and removes all of the cartridges except for one, suddenly it’s all business, and you can almost sense me, as the writer, looking ahead to the next chapter and seeing that I have only a page or two to get my point across. It helps, obviously, that we’re in Russia itself, and Vasylenko’s brief excursus on the history of the game—which I lifted from James H. Billington’s The Icon and the Axe—goes a long way toward justifying it in my eyes. And Maddy’s final revelation, which is that none of this has been a game of chance, is really a character’s glimpse of her author. Like Cimino, I’ve rigged the game to get her here. In the end, the scene works, and Vasylenko doesn’t even need to pull the trigger. That’s the beauty of it. And it’s also why it still makes me a little uneasy…

My alternative canon #9: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Note: I’ve often discussed my favorite movies on this blog, but I also love films that are relatively overlooked or unappreciated. For the rest of the week, I’ll be looking at some of the neglected gems, problem pictures, and flawed masterpieces that have shaped my inner life, and which might have become part of the standard cinematic canon if the circumstances had been just a little bit different. You can read the previous installments here. 

Over the last twenty years, Bill Murray has been quietly building a body of work that amounts to the most surprising third act of any actor in recent memory. Murray always had a tendency to float through his roles, and one of the pleasures of a movie like Ghostbusters or Groundhog Day is the chance it affords to watch him maintain his sardonic equanimity through the strangest of circumstances. Yet it took the combined insights of Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola to realize that there was a darker, more wounded side to his persona. The quintessential Murray character is so detached from his surroundings that it might well lead, after a decade or two of smart remarks, to a graying, wistful cynic bewildered by his own lack of human connection. There had already been hints of a great character actor in the making in the string of small parts that he took starting with Ed Wood and Wild Things, and when combined with this newfound sense of melancholy, it became clear that something special had emerged: a performer whose history as a star could enlarge the emotional scope of a movie in a handful of scenes. (You see a similar phenomenon with Sean Connery in The Untouchables and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which make him seem like the most valuable supporting actor who ever lived.) Murray has filled a corner of most of Anderson’s movies since Rushmore, and in some cases, as in The Darjeeling Limited, it feels as if the director just wanted to have him around on the set—and who could blame him? But it’s only in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that Murray takes center stage, and the result is both Anderson’s greatest commercial failure and a movie that seems to get richer, funnier, and more moving with time.

The Life Aquatic inspired one of my favorite reviews by the late Roger Ebert, who said: “I can’t recommend it, but I would not for one second discourage you from seeing it.” Earlier, Ebert wrote: “My rational mind informs me that this movie doesn’t work. Yet I hear a subversive whisper: Since it does so many other things, does it have to work, too? Can’t it just exist?” And the fact that it exists at all feels like a weird kind of miracle. It’s a film that seems to have been written and directed by a couple of bright twelve-year-olds, and I mean this as the highest possible praise: few other movies have come so close to putting the inner world of my childhood on film, shot through with veins of something sadder and more regretful. (I’m also inordinately susceptible to the world of Jacques Cousteau, and I wrote an entire novelette, “The Boneless One,” in homage to the fantasy of taking to sea in a research yacht.) But none of it would hold together without Murray at its heart. It takes his air of a man without a country and makes it wonderfully literal, and its star is too wry a performer to allow the story to become overly sentimental or precious: Murray knows that Zissou is kind of an asshole, and the improvised moment when he casually pulls a gun on Cate Blanchett to prove a point provides a necessary grace note to a movie that might otherwise have become insufferably whimsical. Anderson has said that he was inspired to make it by the mental image of the yacht seen in cross section, and it’s undoubtedly a lovely sight. But if the result works at all, it’s because it gives us a glimpse of the inside of Murray as well.

My alternative canon #4: One From the Heart

Note: I’ve often discussed my favorite movies on this blog, but I also love films that are relatively overlooked or unappreciated. Over the next week and a half, I’ll be looking at some of the neglected gems, problem pictures, and flawed masterpieces that have shaped my inner life, and which might have become part of the standard cinematic canon if the circumstances had been just a little bit different. You can read the previous installments here. 

Your feelings toward a movie can evolve over time, as in any other kind of romance. Occasionally, you can be persuaded to fall halfway in love with a film before you’ve even watched it, with a critic or an enthusiastic friend serving as the equivalent of a matchmaker, and that initial glow can blind you to even the most glaring of faults. Sooner or later, though, you start to see it more clearly, and you realize that it wasn’t meant to be—even if you’ll never forget how it once made you feel. One From the Heart, which in itself is a story about the ups and downs of a longtime relationship, is that kind of movie for me. I doubt if many viewers still seek it out these days, but for a few years in the early eighties, it was one of the biggest stories in Hollywood. Francis Ford Coppola, coming off the hell and unlikely vindication of Apocalypse Now, had envisioned a new kind of movie studio, in which artists of all backgrounds could come together in a process of ongoing collaboration: it would be part theater troupe, part circus, part laboratory for audacious experiments. The test case would be a modest screenplay by Armyan Bernstein about a bored couple, Hank and Frannie, who take other lovers for a single night, then drift back together again. It’s a trifle of a story even by the standards of romantic comedy, but something in it seized Coppola’s imagination: he decided to set it in Las Vegas, which would give him an excuse to build gigantic sets at the Zoetrope Studios, and to test his new technology for computer-assisted review and editing. (Or, as an industry wisecrack quoted by Roger Ebert put it: “[Coppola] took an $8 million project and used the latest advances in video to bring it in for $23 million.”)

In other words, it was just the kind of doomed, lunatic project that excites me as a moviegoer, and it was even a musical, too. Not surprisingly, after my first viewing, I was convinced that I loved it. Over time, the flush of enthusiasm faded: the plot is so inconsequential that it seems to evaporate as you watch it, and most of the visual and aural delights on display never quite land as intended. (The one exception is the soundtrack by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle, which I still think is one of the greatest ever recorded. It deserves to be part of everyone’s musical life.) But I can’t quite forget it, either. I was first turned onto it by a pair of reviews by Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times, the first of which was a rave, the second—written a decade later—a mediation on her own disillusionment. In retrospect, they anticipate my own experience with One From the Heart with eerie accuracy. When Benson first saw it, she thought it was “enchanting,” but a return visit brought her to her senses: “But ah, my foes, and oh my friends, the stuff that sticks the marvelous bits together now seems, frankly, strained beyond the most passionate loyalty.” That’s pretty much how I feel about it today, too, even if its immaculate opening credits and gorgeous title song still fill me with a wistful sense of what might have been. Few other movies have left such an incongruous dual legacy: it’s both a lightweight, frothy confection and the film that derailed the career of the most promising American director since Orson Welles. But it’s still worth seeking out. As Benson concludes: “Who knows, it may become the love of your life.”

The watchful protectors

In the forward to his new book Better Living Through Criticism, the critic A.O. Scott imagines a conversation with a hypothetical interlocutor who asks: “Would it be accurate to say that you wrote this whole book to settle a score with Samuel L. Jackson?” “Not exactly,” Scott replies. The story, in case you’ve forgotten, is that after reading Scott’s negative review of The Avengers, Jackson tweeted that it was time to find the New York Times critic a job “he can actually do.” As Scott recounts:

Scores of his followers heeded his call, not by demanding that my editors fire me but, in the best Twitter tradition, by retweeting Jackson’s outburst and adding their own vivid suggestions about what I was qualified to do with myself. The more coherent tweets expressed familiar, you might even say canonical, anticritical sentiments: that I had no capacity for joy; that I wanted to ruin everyone else’s fun; that I was a hater, a square, and a snob; even—and this was kind of a new one—that the nerdy kid in middle school who everybody picked on because he didn’t like comic books had grown up to be me.

Before long, it all blew over, although not before briefly turning Scott into “both a hissable villain and a make-believe martyr for a noble and much-maligned cause.” And while he says that he didn’t write his book solely as a rebuttal to Jackson, he implies that the kerfuffle raised a valuable question: what, exactly, is the function of a critic these days?

It’s an issue that seems worth revisiting after this weekend, when a movie openly inspired by the success of The Avengers rode a tide of fan excitement to a record opening, despite a significantly less positive response from critics. (Deadline quotes an unnamed studio executive: “I don’t think anyone read the reviews!”) By some measures, it’s the biggest opening in history for a movie that received such a negative critical reaction, and if anything, the disconnect between critical and popular reaction is even more striking this time around. But it doesn’t seem to have resulted in the kind of war of words that blindsided Scott four years ago. Part of this might be due to the fact that fans seem much more mixed on the movie itself, or that the critical consensus was uniform enough that no single naysayer stood out. You could even argue—as somebody inevitably does whenever a critically panned movie becomes a big financial success—that the critical reaction is irrelevant for this kind of blockbuster. To some extent, you’d be right: the only tentpole series that seems vulnerable to reviews is the Bond franchise, which skews older, and for the most part, the moviegoers who lined up to see Dawn of Justice were taking something other than the opinions of professional critics into account. This isn’t a superpower on the movie’s part: it simply reflects a different set of concerns. And you might reasonably ask whether this kind of movie has rendered the role of a professional critic obsolete.

But I would argue that such critics are more important than ever, and for reasons that have a lot to do with the “soulless corporate spectacle” that Scott decried in The Avengers. I’ve noted here before that the individual installments in such franchises aren’t designed to stand on their own: when you’ve got ten more sequels on the release schedule, it’s hard to tell a self-contained, satisfying story, and even harder to change the status quo. (As Joss Whedon said in an interview with Mental Floss: “You’re living in franchise world—not just Marvel, but in most big films—where you can’t kill anyone, or anybody significant.”) You could be cynical and say that no particular film can be allowed to interfere with the larger synergies at stake, or, if you’re in a slightly more generous mood, you could note that this approach is perfectly consistent with the way in which superhero stories have always been told. For the most part, no one issue of Batman is meant to stand as a definitive statement: it’s a narrative that unfolds month by month, year by year, and the character of Batman himself is far more important than any specific adventure. Sustaining that situation for decades on end involves a lot of artistic compromises, as we see in the endless reboots, resets, spinoffs, and alternate universes that the comic book companies use to keep their continuities under control. Like a soap opera, a superhero comic has to create the illusion of forward momentum while remaining more or less in the same place. It’s no surprise that comic book movies would employ the same strategy, which also implies that we need to start judging them by the right set of standards.

But you could say much the same thing about a professional critic. What A.O. Scott says about any one movie may not have an impact on what the overall population of moviegoers—even the ones who read the New York Times—will pay to see, and a long string of reviews quickly blurs together. But a critic who writes thoughtfully about the movies from week to week is gradually building up a narrative, or at least a voice, that isn’t too far removed from what we find in the comics. Critics are usually more concerned with meeting that day’s deadline than with adding another brick to their life’s work, but when I think of Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael, it’s sort of how I think of Batman: it’s an image or an attitude created by its ongoing interactions with the minds of its readers. (Reading Roger Ebert’s memoirs is like revisiting a superhero’s origin story: it’s interesting, but it only incidentally touches the reasons that Ebert continues to mean so much to me.) The career of a working critic these days naturally unfolds in parallel with the franchise movies that will dominate studio filmmaking for the foreseeable future, and if the Justice League series will be defined by our engagement with it for years to come, a critic whose impact is meted out over the same stretch of time is better equipped to talk about it than almost anyone else—as long as he or she approaches it as a dialogue that never ends. If franchises are fated to last forever, we need critics who can stick around long enough to see larger patterns, to keep the conversation going, and to offer some perspective to balance out the hype. These are the critics we deserve. And they’re the ones we need right now.

“But I still can’t figure out why…”

Note: This post is the thirty-fourth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 33. You can read the previous installments here.

When the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo escaped from prison for the second time earlier this summer, the media drew the obvious comparisons. The Guardian called it “a Hollywood-style escape,” while Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker wrote:

A jail break is a kind of math problem, and when we read about these incidents there is a tendency to marvel at the ingenuity on display and to start identifying with, and even rooting for, the escapee. This is probably only natural. Chapo is hardly the first antihero to seize the popular imagination, and the most reliable formula of the Hollywood thriller is to place your protagonist in a situation from which there is no escape, and then watch while he escapes.

All of the elements were there: a cell covered by security cameras, except for one crucial corner; a secret tunnel complete with lights, air ducts, and even a motorcycle modified to run on rails; and, of course, a frantic manhunt and search for the escapee’s accomplices. Compared to the rather grubby details of the previous month’s New York prison escape, it felt like a slick, efficient production, if not particularly original. (As Keefe observes: “Chapo, famously, has a thing for tunnels.”)

If the result reminded many observers of a movie, it was also because we associate that kind of elaborate escape effort, involving a huge amount of outside support, with fiction. And for good reason. In real life, there’s rarely the infrastructure or the desire to break a single human being out of prison, no matter how powerful he or she might have been on the outside. Roger Ebert put his finger on this point in his review of Die Hard 2, which turns on the rescue of a different sort of drug tyrant, this time modeled on Noriega—although not, incidentally, named Mr. Falcon:

A more serious problem involves the whole rescue operation itself. When Manuel Noriega was taken captive and returned to the United States to stand trial, there was little serious effort to save him: At the end, he was a refugee in his own country, reduced to seeking asylum in the residence of a Vatican diplomat. Would anyone have the means, the money and the will to mount such a vast and complicated terrorist operation simply to save one drug-connected dictator? Even if he does bear an uncanny resemblance to Fidel Castro? I doubt it.

Ebert concludes: “But on the other hand, I don’t care.” The attempted escape is really just the engine to drive the plot, and from a writer’s point of view, it’s the escape that enables the plan, not the other way around.

This may be why prison break stories are much more effective when told from the point of view of the man behind bars. When the story focuses on the plotters on the outside, their motivations always seem somewhat forced: it’s unclear why any prisoner would be worth all that trouble, particularly in criminal enterprises that tend to quickly reassemble themselves under a new hierarchy, and which could be run as easily from within jail as outside it. (Goodfellas conveys this beautifully.) For the prisoner himself, though, the reasons are abundantly clear. The details of the escape in The Shawshank Redemption are as implausible, in their own way, as in any pulp thriller, but we accept and are even moved by them because they’re expressions of Andy and Red’s desire for freedom. A prison break told from the inside is an allegory for the human condition; from the outside, it feels like another mechanical pursuit of a MacGuffin. And it’s inherent to the way these stories are structured. A plot in which a prisoner is rescued by others, no matter how many justifications we invent, both distances us emotionally from the action and arouses all kinds of intellectual objections. The difference between a story in which we don’t believe a single second and one in which we’re involved at every moment can turn on something as basic as that question of emphasis.

Of course, sometimes a writer doesn’t have a choice. Much of Eternal Empire focuses on the escape from prison of Vasylenko, a Russian vor whose situation sets off most of the alarms I mention above: he’s an old man, more than capable of running a criminal network from the inside, and dangerous enough that most of his associates would probably be glad just to be rid of him. So why break him out at all? After some thought, I hit on a fairly interesting rationale. In Chapter 33, Wolfe lampshades all of the obvious objections, and then figures it out:

There’s one thing a thief can do that nobody else can. He can talk to other thieves…Vasylenko is useful only as a symbol. An icon in the form of a man. He can open doors, guarantee safe passage, draw on the full resources of the brotherhood. But only if he’s there in person.

I still like this explanation, because it very helpfully drives the rest of the plot: Vasylenko has to be physically transported at great risk to Moldova, one of the few countries where the old ways still have force, to facilitate the larger conspiracy in which he plays only a small part. Ilya, his companion in the escape, has more personal motivations. And between the two of them, they provide just enough of a reason for the reader to want to see where they’re going next…

The title search

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 topic: “What pop-culture title duplication do you find most annoying?”

At the thrift store up the street from my house, there’s a shelf that an enterprising employee has stocked with a selection of used books designed to make you look twice: The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Paris Wife, The Tiger’s Wife, A Reliable Wife, American Wife, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and probably some others I’ve forgotten. It’s funny to see them lined up in a row, but there’s a reason this formula is so popular: with an average of just three words, it gives us the germ of a story—at least in terms of its central relationship—and adds a touch of color to distinguish itself from its peers. As with the premises of most bestsellers, the result is both familiar and a little strange, telling us that we’re going to be told the story of a marriage, which is always somewhat interesting, but with a distinctive twist or backdrop. It’s perhaps for analogous reasons that the three most notable mainstream thrillers of the past decade are titled The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and The Girl on the Train, the last of which is still awaiting its inevitable adaptation by David Fincher. Girl, in the context of suspense, has connotations of its own: when used to refer to an adult woman, it conveys the idea that she looks harmless, but she isn’t as innocent as she seems. (And I’m far from immune from this kind of thing: if there’s one noun that challenges Girl when it comes to its omnipresence in modern thriller titles, it’s Thief.)

When you look at the huge range of words available in any language, it can feel strange to reflect that the number of marketable titles often feels like a limited pool. Whenever I’m about to write a new story, I check Amazon and the Internet Science Fiction Database to make sure that the title hasn’t been used before, and in many cases, I’m out of luck. (Occasionally, as with “Cryptids,” I’ll grab a title that I’m surprised has yet to be claimed, and it always feels like snagging a prime domain name or Twitter handle.) Titles stick to the same handful of variations for a lot of reasons, sometimes to deliberately evoke or copy a predecessor, sometimes—as with erotica—to enable keyword searches, and sometimes because we’ve agreed as a culture that certain words are more evocative than others. As David Haglund of Slate once observed, everyone seems to think that tacking American onto the start of a title lends it a certain gravitas. For many movies, titles are designed to avoid certain implications, while inadvertently creating new clichés of their own. Studios love subtitles that allow them to avoid the numerals conventionally attached to a sequel or prequel, which is why we see so many franchise installments with a colon followed by Origins, Revolution, Resurrection, or Genesis, or sequels that offer us the Rise of, the Age of, the Dawn of, or the Revenge of something or other. I loved both Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but I can’t help feeling that it’s a problem that their titles could easily have been interchanged.

Then, of course, there are the cases in which a title is simply reappropriated by another work: Twilight, The Host, Running Scared, Bad Company, Fair Game. This sort of thing can lead to its share of confusion, some of it amusing. Recently, while watching the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself, my wife was puzzled by a sequence revolving around the movie Crash, only to belatedly realize that it was referring to the one by David Cronenberg, not Paul Haggis. From a legal perspective, there’s no particular reason why a title shouldn’t be reused: titles can’t be copyrighted, although you could be sued for unfair competition if enough money were on the line. Hence the inadvisability of publishing your own fantasy series called Game of Thrones or The Wheel of Time, although Wheel of Thrones is still ripe for the taking. (In Hollywood, disputes over titles are sometimes used as a bullying tactic, as in the otherwise inexplicable case of The Butler, which inspired Warner Bros. to file for arbitration because it had released a silent film of the same name in 1916. There’s also the odd but persistent rumor that Bruce Willis agreed to star in Live Free or Die Hard on condition that he be given the rights to the title Tears of the Sun—which raises the question if it was worth the trouble. Such cases, which are based on tenuous legal reasoning at best, always remind me of David Mamet’s line from State and Main, which knows as much as any film about how movie people think: “I don’t need a cause. I just need a lawyer.”)

Which just reminds us that titles are like any other part of the creative process, except more so. We feel that our choices have a talismanic quality, even if their true impact on success or failure is minimal, and it’s only magnified by the fact that we only have a handful of words with which to make an impression. No title alone can guarantee a blockbuster, but we persist in thinking that it can, which may be why we return consistently to the same words or phrases. But it’s worth keeping an observation by Jorge Luis Borges in mind:

Except for the always astonishing Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (which the English, equally beautifully, called The Arabian Nights) I believe that it is safe to say that the most celebrated works of world literature have the worst titles. For example, it is difficult to conceive of a more opaque and visionless title than The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, although one must grant that The Sorrows of Young Werther and Crime and Punishment are almost as dreadful.

And that’s as true today as it ever was—it’s hard to think of a less interesting title than Breaking Bad. Still, the search continues, and sometimes, it pays off. Years ago, a writer and his editor were struggling to come up with a title for a debut novel, considering and discarding such contenders as The Stillness in the Water, The Silence of the Deep, and Leviathan Rising. Ultimately, they came up with over a hundred possibilities, none of them any good, and it was only twenty minutes before they were set to go to the printer that the editor finally gave up and said: “Okay, we’ll call the thing Jaws.”

The list of a lifetime

I miss Roger Ebert for a lot of reasons, but I always loved how fully he occupied the role of the celebrity critic while expanding it into something more. “Two thumbs up” has become a way of dismissing an entire category of film criticism, and Ebert was as responsible for its rise as anyone else, although he can hardly be blamed for his imitators. Yet he wouldn’t have been nearly as good at it—and he was damned good, especially when paired with Gene Siskel—if it hadn’t been built on a foundation of shrewdness, taste, and common sense that came through in every print review he wrote. He knew that a rating system was necessary, if only to give shape to his discussions with Gene, but he was also aware of its limitations. (For proof, you need only turn to his classic review of the Adam Sandler remake of The Longest Yard, which transforms, unexpectedly, into an extended essay on the absurdity of reconciling a thoughtful approach to criticism with “that vertical thumb.”) Read any critic for any length of time, whether it’s Pauline Kael or David Thomson or James Wood, and you start to see the whole business of ranking works of art, whether with thumbs or with words, as both utterly important and inherently ridiculous. Ebert understood this profoundly.

The same was true of the other major tool of the mainstream critic: the list. Making lists of the best or worst movies, like handing out awards, turns an art form into a horse race, but it’s also a necessary evil. A critic wants to be a valued guide, but more often, he ends up serving as a signpost, pointing up the road toward an interesting vista while hoping that we’ll take in other sights along the way. Lists are the most useful pointers we have, especially for viewers who are encountering the full variety of movies for the first time, and they’ve played an enormous role in my own life. And when you read Ebert’s essay on preparing his final list for the Sight & Sound poll, you sense both the melancholy nature of the task and his awareness of the power it holds. Ebert knows that adding a movie to his list naturally draws attention to it, and he pointedly includes a single “propaganda” title—here it’s Malick’s Tree of Life—to encourage viewers to seek it out. Since every addition requires a removal, he clarifies his feelings on this as well:

Once any film has ever appeared on my [Sight & Sound] list, I consider it canonized. Notorious or Gates of Heaven, for example, are still two of the ten best films of all time, no matter what a subsequent list says.

In short, he approaches the list as a game, but a serious one, and he knows that pointing one viewer toward Aguirre or The General makes all of it worthwhile.

I thought of his example repeatedly when I revised my list of my ten favorite movies. Four years had gone by since my last series of posts on the subject, and the passage of time had brought a bit of reshuffling and a pair of replacements: L.A. Confidential and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had given way to Vertigo and Inception. And while it’s probably a mistake to view it as a zero-sum game, it’s hard not to see these films as commenting on one another. L.A. Confidential remains, as I said long ago, my favorite of all recent Hollywood movies, but it’s a film that invests its genre with greater fluency and complexity without challenging the rules on a deeper level, while Vertigo takes the basic outline of a sleek romantic thriller and blows it to smithereens. As much as I love them both, there’s no question in my mind as to which one achieves more. The contest between Inception and Wrath of Khan is harder to judge, and I’m not sure that the latter isn’t ultimately richer and more rewarding. But I wanted to write about Inception ever so slightly more, and after this weekend’s handwringing over the future of original ideas in movies, I have a hunch that its example is going to look even more precious with time. Inception hardly needs my help to draw attention to it, but to the extent that I had a propaganda choice this time around, it was this one.

Otherwise, my method in ranking these films was a simple one. I asked myself which movie I’d save first—solely for my own pleasure—if the last movie warehouse in the world were on fire. The answer was The Red Shoes. Next would be Blue Velvet, then Chungking Express, and so on down the line. Looking at the final roster, I don’t think I’d make any changes. Like Ebert, who kept La Dolce Vita on his list because of how it reflected the arc of his own life, I’m aware that much of the result is a veiled autobiography: Blue Velvet, in particular, galvanized me as a teenager as few other movies have, and part of the reason I rank it so highly is to acknowledge that specific debt. Other films are here largely because of the personal associations they evoke. Yet any movie that encapsulates an entire period in my life, out of all the films I was watching then, has to be extraordinary by definition: it isn’t just a matter of timing, at least not if it lasts. (You could even say that a great movie, like Vertigo, is one that convinces many different viewers that it’s secretly about them.) Ebert knew that there was no contradiction in embracing The Tree of Life as both the largest cosmic statement since 2001 and an agonizingly specific evocation of his own childhood. Any list, like any critic, lives in two worlds, and each half gains meaning from the other. And when I think of my own list and the choices it made, I can only quote Ebert one last time: “To add a title, I must remove one. Which film can I do without? Not a single one.”

How the Vulcan got his ears

When the writer and director Nicholas Meyer was first approached about the possibility of working on the sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, his initial response was: “Star Trek? Is that the one with the guy with the pointy ears?” Meyer, who tells this story in his engaging memoir The View from the Bridge, went on to cleverly stage the opening scene of Wrath of Khan—which is probably the one movie, aside from Vertigo, that I’ve discussed more often on this blog than any other—so that those ears are literally the first thing we see, in a shot of a viewscreen taken from over Spock’s shoulder. Elsewhere, I’ve spoken at length about how Meyer’s detachment from the source material resulted in by far the best movie in the franchise, and one of the most entertaining movies I’ve ever seen: because he wasn’t beholden to the original series, he was free to stock it with things he liked, from the Horatio Hornblower novels to A Tale of Two Cities. But it’s revealing that he latched onto those ears first. As the reaction to Leonard Nimoy’s death last week amply proved, Spock was the keystone and entry point to that entire universe, and our love for him and what he represented had as much to do with his ears as with what was going on in the brain between them.

These days, Spock’s ears are so iconic that it can be hard to recognize how odd they once seemed. Spock was one of the few elements to survive from the original series pilot “The Cage,” and even at the time, the network was a little perturbed: it raised concerns over his allegedly satanic appearance, which executives feared “would scare the shit out of every kid in America.” (They would have cared even less for Gene Roddenberry’s earliest conceptions, in which Spock was described as having “a slightly reddish complexion.”) Accordingly, the first round of publicity photos for the show were airbrushed to give him normal ears and eyebrows. In any event, of course, Spock didn’t scare kids, or ordinary viewers—he fascinated them. And those ears were a large part of his appeal. As Meyer intuitively understood, they were a fantastic piece of narrative shorthand, a signal to anyone flipping through channels that something interesting was happening onscreen. Spock’s ears said as much about the show’s world and intentions as Kirk’s opening voiceover, and they did so without a word of dialogue.

Yet they wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if they hadn’t served as the visual introduction to a character who revealed greater depths the moment he began to speak. Spock was ostensibly a creature of pure logic, but he was much more, as Roger Ebert noted in his original review of Wrath of Khan:

The peculiar thing about Spock is that, being half human and half Vulcan and therefore possessing about half the usual quota of human emotions, he consistently, if dispassionately, behaves as if he possessed very heroic human emotions indeed. He makes a choice in Star Trek II that would be made only by a hero, a fool, or a Vulcan.

And while Robert Anton Wilson once claimed, with a straight face, that Spock was an archetypal reincarnation of the Aztec god Mescalito, whose pointed ears also appear on Peter Pan and the Irish leprechaun, his truest predecessor is as close as Victorian London. Meyer—whose breakthrough as a novelist was The Seven Per-Cent Solution—was the first to explicitly make the connection between Spock and Sherlock Holmes, whom Spock obliquely calls “an ancestor of mine” in The Undiscovered Country. Both were perfect reasoning machines, but they used logic to amplify, rather than undercut, their underlying qualities of humanity. “A great heart,” as Watson says, “as well as…a great brain.”

There’s a lesson here for storytellers of all kinds, and like most such examples, it’s easy to explain and all but impossible to replicate. Spock began as a visual conceit that could be grasped at once, deepened over time into a character whose basic qualities were immediately comprehensible and intriguing, and then became much more, aided in no small part by a magnificent performance by Nimoy. The autism advocate Temple Grandin has spoken of how much of herself she saw in Spock, a logical being trying to make his way in a world of more emotional creatures, and there’s no question that many Star Trek fans felt the same way. Spock, at least, carried his difference openly, and those who wear Starfleet pins on their lapels or don pointed ears at conventions are quietly allying themselves with that sense of otherness—which turns, paradoxically, into a sense of identity. “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human,” Kirk says at the end of Wrath of Khan, and what feels like a contradiction gets at something more profound. Humanity, whether in reality or in fiction, is something we have to earn with every choice we make. Spock’s journey as a character was so compelling that it arguably saved Star Trek three times over, and neither the franchise or science fiction as we know it would be the same if we hadn’t heard the story through his ears.

“Let’s get out of here!”

Over the weekend, Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times Magazine published a short essay on the most versatile line of dialogue in movies: “Let’s get out of here!” She quotes examples from films ranging from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Grease to Titanic, and she notes that Roger Ebert once “casually ranked” it as one of the most common lines in cinema, alongside “Look out!” and “Take this!” Heffernan doesn’t mention—or perhaps she was unaware—that the line’s apparent popularity is more than just a hunch, at least according to Guinness Film Facts and Feats, which states:

The most hackneyed line in movie scripts is “Let’s get outta here.” A survey of 150 American features of the period 1938-74 (revived on British television) showed that it was used at least once in 84 per cent of Hollywood productions and more than once in 17 percent.

And although this particular source is four decades out of date, I don’t doubt that an updated study would yield much the same result. A quick search on Subzin, which pulls in quotes from movie and television subtitles, reveals thousands of examples, including many instances from recent movies like Birdman, Fury, Lone Survivor, and Muppets Most Wanted.

Heffernan goes on to make the case, based on her readings of the scripts of this year’s Oscar nominees, that the line that resonates more with us now is “Stay.” It’s a little too anecdotal to be entirely convincing, and it smacks a bit of a Ctrl-F search. But I love the way she explains the appeal of the earlier phrase:

“Let’s get out of here” may be the five most productive monosyllables in American movies. It confers agency on whoever says it. It draws a line under what’s gone before. It propels action. It justifies a change of scene, no matter how abrupt. No wonder screenwriters can’t get enough of it.

In other words, it’s a kind of screenwriting multitool, a line that comes in handy in any number of situations. I’ve noted before that writers of all kinds are always on the lookout for reliable tricks, and “Let’s get out of here” might be the best of them all. It’s like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” but for real—something you can always say when you can’t think of anything else. If you’re writing a script or a story and you’re stuck on a line, you can have a character say those five little words, and more often than not, it’ll work.

And what makes “Let’s get out of here” so useful is that has all the qualities that Heffernan notes—it confers agency, drives the story forward, and prompts a change of scene—while being uninflected enough to pass unremarked. Your average cliché is rendered useless, or of limited utility, once it becomes familiar enough to be noticeable, but “Let’s get out of here” is to screenplay structure what a subordinating conjunction, like “in order that” or “as soon as,” is to ordinary grammar. It’s a connective that bridges two units of action, and it’s so commonplace that we don’t even hear it. Yet it still retains its power, in part because of the subtle way in which it differs from similar sentiments like “Let’s leave” or “Let’s go.” As Heffernan says:

“Let’s get out of here” is our bold spin on the innocuous “Let’s leave,” sending a signal to the nervous system that we’re slipping the knot, and we’re doing it together. The offhand contempt in the phrase is what makes it so satisfying: When we’re getting out of here, we’re not going to some idealized destination. Who knows where we’re going, really? Anywhere but here.

Occasionally, screenwriters try to invent a new phrase that serves the same purpose, but the results aren’t nearly as neat as the gold standard that has gradually evolved over time. There was a moment in the last decade when every other movie—Children of Men, The Hangover, Star Trek, Iron Man—seemed to include some version of the line “Walk with me.” You can see why it might catch a screenwriter’s eye: it’s pithy, it provides a neat justification for a walk and talk, and the imperative form is all business, as if the character has too much on his mind to simply say “Let’s take a walk.” The only trouble is that it doesn’t sound much like anything a real human being would say, unless he or she is mimicking a movie. It rings false, at least to me, and it always takes me out of the story for a second: I’m aware of the screenwriter straining just a tad too hard. And it isn’t necessary. “Let’s get out of here” is perfectly fine, and it works its magic without drawing attention to itself. (It also seems to appear more often in the movies themselves in their original scripts, implying that it was improvised on the set, which only shows how intuitive it is.) So there’s little point in tinkering with something that already works so beautifully: in movies, as in most kinds of storytelling, the only important thing is to get from here to there.

The monster in the mirror

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: “If you were a horror movie villain, what would be your hook?”

In horror movies, we’re supposed to relate to the victims, but some of the genre’s most enduring works implicate us into an uneasy identification with the monster. I’m not talking about the films that invite the audience to cheer as another mad slasher takes out a platoon of teenagers, or even more sophisticated examples like the original Halloween, which locks us into the killer’s eyes with its opening tracking shot. What I have in mind is something more like Norman Bates. Norman is “nutty as a fruitcake,” to use Roger Ebert’s memorable words, but he’s also immensely appealing and sympathetic in the middle sequence of Psycho, much more so than John Gavin’s square, conventional hero. The connection Norman has with Marion as she eats her sandwich in the parlor is real, or at least real enough to convince her to return the stolen money, and it fools us temporarily into thinking that this movie will be an adventure involving these two shy souls. Because what defines Norman isn’t his insanity, or even his mother issues, but his loneliness. As he says wistfully to Marion: “Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies. They moved away the highway.”

Which is only to say that in Norman, we’re confronted with a weird, distorted image of our own introversion, with his teenager’s room and Beethoven’s Eroica on the record player. Other memorable villains force us to confront other aspects of ourselves by taking these tendencies to their murderous conclusion. Hannibal Lecter is a strange case, since he’s so superficially seductive, and he was ultimately transformed into the hero of his own series. What he really represents, though, is aestheticism run amok. We’d all love to have his tastes in books, music, and food—well, maybe not entirely the latter—but they come at the price of his complete estrangement from all human connection, or an inability to regard other people as anything other than items on a menu. Sometimes, it’s literal; at others, it’s figurative, as he takes an interest in Will Graham or Clarice Starling only to the extent that they can relieve his boredom. Lecter, we’re told, eats only the rude, but “rude” can have two meanings, and for the most part, it ends up referring to those too lowly or rough to meet his own high standards. (Bryan Fuller, to his credit, has given us multiple reminders of how psychotic Lecter’s behavior really is.)

And if Lecter cautions us against the perversion of our most refined impulses, Jack Torrance represents the opposite: “The susceptible imagination,” as David Thomson notes, “of a man who lacks the skills to be a writer.” Along with so much else, The Shining is the best portrait of a writer we have on film, because we can all relate to Jack’s isolation and frustration. The huge, echoing halls of the Overlook are as good a metaphor as I’ve ever seen for writer’s block or creative standstill: you’re surrounded by gorgeous empty spaces, as well as the ghosts of your own ambitions, and all you can manage to do is bounce a tennis ball against the wall, again and again and again. There isn’t a writer who hasn’t looked at a pile of manuscript and wondered, deep down, if it isn’t basically the same as the stack of pages that Jack Torrance lovingly ruffles in his climactic scene with Wendy, and whenever I tell people what I’m working on at the moment, I can’t help but hear a whisper of Jack’s cheerful statement to Ullman: “I’m outlining a new writing project, and five months of peace is just what I want.”

There’s another monster who gets at an even darker aspect of the writer’s craft: John Doe in Seven. I don’t think there’s another horror movie that binds the process of its own making so intimately to the villain’s pathology: Seven is so beautifully constructed and so ingenious that it takes us a while to realize that John Doe is essentially writing the screenplay. Andrew Kevin Walker’s script was sensational enough to get him out of a job at Tower Records, but despite the moral center that Morgan Freeman’s character provides, it’s hard to escape the sense that the film delights more in its killer’s cleverness, which can’t be separated from the writer’s. Unlike Jack Torrance, John Doe is superbly good at what he does, and he’s frightening primarily as an example of genius and facility without heart. The impulse that pushes him to use human lives as pieces in his masterpiece of murder is only the absurdist conclusion of the tendency in so many writers, including me, to treat violence as a narrative tool, a series of marks that the plot needs to hit to keep the story moving. I’m not saying that the two are morally equivalent. But Seven—even in its final limitations, which Fincher later went on to explode in Zodiac—is still a scary film for any writer who ever catches himself treating life and death as a game.

The logic of tears

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 pop culture made you cry at an inopportune time?”

I’ve never been much of a crier. There have been plenty of novels that left me emotionally devastated, but none, as far as I can remember, that caused tears to flow, although The High King in fifth grade and The Magus in high school probably came the closest. Part of me sees this as a personal failing: I tend to read books with an eye toward craft, and I’m often too conscious of how the author is achieving the effects to be moved in the kind of raw, unmediated way that leads to real sobs. And it strikes me as a loss. Around the time he turned thirty, Charles Darwin found that he could no longer enjoy poetry—Shakespeare bored him “to the point of physical nausea”—and he memorably described what he saw as the human cost:

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

But the movies have always been a little different. Maybe it’s in the way they present themselves to us in a form that requires little, if any, intellectual intermediation, or the fact that we often watch them in a darkened room surrounded by strangers, but I’ve teared up at movies as dissimilar as Apocalypse Now, The Last Temptation of Christ, and the documentary Ballets Russes. (This last film probably holds the world record for speed: I’m pretty sure I choked up within the first thirty seconds.) As I’ve noted before, the films that get to me are the ones that make me reflect on my own mortality, and particularly on the passage of time. Many of them center on the image of a young man’s face juxtaposed with that of the same character in old age, which may be why the only movie that has destroyed me to the point of embarrassment in the theater is Saving Private Ryan. Subsequent viewings haven’t had quite the same impact, but after the closing scene, I stayed in my seat throughout most of the end credits, trying to get it together, which hasn’t happened before or since.

What’s funny is that many critics I respect, from Roger Ebert to David Thomson, have argued that the last scene isn’t necessary, and the movie as a whole might be stronger without it. (Although it’s only in rereading Thomson’s review now that I realize that Ryan’s wife is played by Kathleen Byron, who I later came to love through her performances in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and The Small Back Room.) On the whole, I agree with them. But there’s a wide gap between what you can objectively know as a critic and your subjective experience as a moviegoer. Pauline Kael puts this in somewhat defensive terms in her famously negative review of The Sound of Music:

Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and readymade are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.

I wouldn’t go so far with Saving Private Ryan, which, whatever its faults, can’t be described as cheap or readymade. But it’s worth remembering that it’s possible to regard movies on two levels at once, even if it seems hard to argue against the logic of your emotions. I can admit that the ending of Ryan is powerful as a necessary moment of audience catharsis, while also suspecting that denying that catharsis, which dissolves our higher faculties in tears, might have been the braver choice. As Ebert writes:

Saving Private Ryan is a powerful experience. I’m sure a lot of people will weep during it. Spielberg knows how to make audiences weep better than any director since Chaplin in City Lights. But weeping is an incomplete response, letting the audience off the hook. This film embodies ideas. After the immediate experience begins to fade, the implications remain and grow.

Which may be why I distrust tears a little. When we cry, it’s hard to think. Yet sometimes we can do both, and when we do, it’s worth asking what would have been left—or what we might have thought—if the tears had refused to come.