The man with the plan

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Reservoir Dogs, a film that I loved as much as just about every other budding cinephile who came of age in the nineties. Tom Shone has a nice writeup on its legacy in The New Yorker, and while I don’t agree with every point that he makes—he dismisses Kill Bill, which is a movie that means so much to me that I named my own daughter after Beatrix Kiddo—he has insights that can’t be ignored: “Quentin [Tarantino] became his worst reviews, rather in the manner of a boy who, falsely accused of something, decides that he might as well do the thing for which he has already been punished.” And there’s one paragraph that strikes me as wonderfully perceptive:

So many great filmmakers have made their debuts with heist films—from Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run to Michael Mann’s Thief to Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket to Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects—that it’s tempting to see the genre almost as an allegory for the filmmaking process. The model it offers first-time filmmakers is thus as much economic as aesthetic—a reaffirmation of the tenant that Jean-Luc Godard attributed to D. W. Griffith: “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” A man assembles a gang for the implementation of a plan that is months in the rehearsal and whose execution rests on a cunning facsimile of midmorning reality going undetected. But the plan meets bumpy reality, requiring feats of improvisation and quick thinking if the gang is to make off with its loot—and the filmmaker is to avoid going to movie jail.

And while you could nitpick the details of this argument—Singer’s debut was actually Public Access, a movie that nobody, including me, has seen—it gets at something fundamental about the art of film, which lies at the intersection of an industrial process and a crime. I’ve spoken elsewhere about how Inception, my favorite movie of the last decade, maps the members of its mind heist neatly onto the crew of a motion picture: Cobb is the director, Saito the producer, Ariadne the set designer, Eames the actor, and Arthur is, I don’t know, the line producer, while Fischer, the mark, is a surrogate for the audience itself. (For what it’s worth, Christopher Nolan has stated that any such allegory was unconscious, although he seems to have embraced it after the fact.) Most of the directors whom Shone names are what we’d call auteur figures, and aside from Singer, all of them wear a writer’s hat, which can obscure the extent to which they depend on collaboration. Yet in their best work, it’s hard to imagine Singer without Christopher McQuarrie, Tarantino without editor Sally Menke, or Wes Anderson without Owen Wilson, not to mention the art directors, cinematographers, and other skilled craftsmen required to finish even the most idiosyncratic and personal movie. Just as every novel is secretly about the process of its own creation, every movie is inevitably about making movies, which is the life that its creators know most intimately. One of the most exhilarating things that a movie can do is give us a sense of the huddle between artists, which is central to the appeal of The Red Shoes, but also Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, in which Tom Cruise told McQuarrie that he wanted to make a film about what it was like for the two of them to make a film.

But there’s also an element of criminality, which might be even more crucial. I’m not the first person to point out that there’s something illicit in the act of watching images of other people’s lives projected onto a screen in a darkened theater—David Thomson, our greatest film critic, has built his career on variations on that one central insight. And it shouldn’t surprise us if the filmmaking process itself takes on aspects of something done in the shadows, in defiance of permits, labor regulations, and the orderly progression of traffic. (Werner Herzog famously advised aspiring directors to carry bolt cutters everywhere: “If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!”) If your goal is to tell a story about putting together a team for a complicated project, it could be about the Ballet Lermontov or the defense of a Japanese village, and the result might be even greater. But it would lack the air of illegality on which the medium thrives, both in its dreamlife and in its practical reality. From the beginning, Tarantino seems to have sensed this. He’s become so famous for reviving the careers of neglected figures for the sake of the auras that they provide—John Travolta, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Keith Carradine—that it’s practically become his trademark, and we often forget that he did it for the first time in Reservoir Dogs. Lawrence Tierney, the star of Dillinger and Born to Kill, had been such a menacing presence both onscreen and off that that he was effectively banned from Hollywood after the forties, and he remained a terrifying presence even in old age. He terrorized the cast of Seinfield during his guest appearance as Elaine’s father, and one of my favorite commentary tracks from The Simpsons consists of the staff reminiscing nervously about how much he scared them during the recording of “Marge Be Not Proud.”

Yet Tarantino still cast him as Joe Cabot, the man who sets up the heist, and Tierney rewarded him with a brilliant performance. Behind the scenes, it went more or less as you might expect, as Tarantino recalled much later:

Tierney was a complete lunatic by that time—he just needed to be sedated. We had decided to shoot his scenes first, so my first week of directing was talking with this fucking lunatic. He was personally challenging to every aspect of filmmaking. By the end of the week everybody on set hated Tierney—it wasn’t just me. And in the last twenty minutes of the first week we had a blowout and got into a fist fight. I fired him, and the whole crew burst into applause.

But the most revealing thing about the whole incident is that an untested director like Tarantino felt capable of taking on Tierney at all. You could argue that he already had an inkling of what he might become, but I’d prefer to think that he both needed and wanted someone like this to symbolize the last piece of the picture. Joe Cabot is the man with the plan, and he’s also the man with the money. (In the original script, Joe says into the phone: “Sid, stop, you’re embarrassing me. I don’t need to be told what I already know. When you have bad months, you do what every businessman in the world does, I don’t care if he’s Donald Trump or Irving the tailor. Ya ride it out.”) It’s tempting to associate him with the producer, but he’s more like a studio head, a position that has often drawn men whose bullying and manipulation is tolerated as long as they can make movies. When he wrote the screenplay, Tarantino had probably never met such a creature in person, but he must have had some sense of what was in store, and Reservoir Dogs was picked up for distribution by a man who fit the profile perfectly—and who never left Tarantino’s side ever again. His name was Harvey Weinstein.

The last tango

When I look back at many of my favorite movies, I’m troubled by a common thread that they share. It’s the theme of the control of a vulnerable woman by a man in a position of power. The Red Shoes, my favorite film of all time, is about artistic control, while Blue Velvet, my second favorite, is about sexual domination. Even Citizen Kane has that curious subplot about Kane’s attempt to turn Susan into an opera star, which may have originated as an unkind reference to William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, but which survives in the final version as an emblem of Kane’s need to collect human beings like playthings. It’s also hard to avoid the feeling that some of these stories secretly mirror the relationship between the director and his actresses on the set. Vertigo, of course, can be read as an allegory for Hitchcock’s own obsession with his leading ladies, whom he groomed and remade as meticulously as Scotty attempts to do with Madeline. In The Shining, Jack’s abuse of Wendy feels only slightly more extreme than what we know Kubrick—who even resembles Jack a bit in the archival footage that survives—imposed on Shelley Duvall. (Duvall’s mental health issues have cast a new pall on those accounts, and the involvement of Kubrick’s daughter Vivian has done nothing to clarify the situation.) And Roger Ebert famously hated Blue Velvet because he felt that David Lynch’s treatment of Isabella Rossellini had crossed an invisible moral line.

The movie that has been subjected to this kind of scrutiny most recently is Last Tango in Paris, after interview footage resurfaced of Bernardo Bertolucci discussing its already infamous rape scene. (Bertolucci originally made these comments three years ago, and the fact that they’ve drawn attention only now is revealing in itself—it was hiding in plain sight, but it had to wait until we were collectively prepared to talk about it.) Since the story first broke, there has been some disagreement over what Maria Schneider knew on the day of the shoot. You can read all about it here. But it seems undeniable that Bertolucci and Brando deliberately withheld crucial information about the scene from Schneider until the cameras were rolling. Even the least offensive version makes me sick to my stomach, all the more so because Last Tango in Paris has been an important movie to me for most of my life. In online discussions of the controversy, I’ve seen commenters dismissing the film as an overrated relic, a vanity project for Brando, or one of Pauline Kael’s misguided causes célèbres. If anything, though, this attitude lets us off the hook too easily. It’s much harder to admit that a film that genuinely moved audiences and changed lives might have been made under conditions that taint the result beyond retrieval. It’s a movie that has meant a lot to me, as it did to many other viewers, including some I knew personally. And I don’t think I can ever watch it again.

But let’s not pretend that it ends there. It reflects a dynamic that has existed between directors and actresses since the beginning, and all too often, we’ve forgiven it, as long as it results in great movies. We write critical treatments of how Vertigo and Psycho masterfully explore Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward women, and we overlook the fact that he sexually assaulted Tippi Hedren. When we think of the chummy partnerships that existed between men like Cary Grant and Howard Hawks, or John Wayne and John Ford, and then compare them with how directors have regarded their female collaborators, the contrast couldn’t be more stark. (The great example here is Gone With the Wind: George Cukor, the original director, was fired because he made Clark Gable uncomfortable, and he was replaced by Gable’s buddy Victor Fleming. Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland were forced to consult with Cukor in secret.) And there’s an unsettling assumption on the part of male directors that this is the only way to get a good performance from a woman. Bertolucci says that he and Brando were hoping to get Schneider’s raw reaction “as a girl, instead of as an actress.” You can see much the same impulse in Kubrick’s treatment of Duvall. Even Michael Powell, one of my idols, writes of how he and the other actors frightened Moira Shearer to the point of tears for the climactic scene of The Red Shoes—“This was no longer acting”—and says elsewhere: “I never let love interfere with business, or I would have made love to her. It would have improved her performance.”

So what’s a film buff to do? We can start by acknowledging that the problem exists, and that it continues to affect women in the movies, whether in the process of filmmaking itself or in the realities of survival in an industry that is still dominated by men. Sometimes it leads to abuse or worse. We can also honor the work of those directors, from Ozu to Almodóvar to Wong Kar-Wai, who have treated their actresses as partners in craft. Above all else, we can come to terms with the fact that sometimes even a masterpiece fails to make up for the choices that went into it. Thinking of Last Tango in Paris, I was reminded of Norman Mailer, who wrote one famous review of the movie and was linked to it in another. (Kael wrote: “On the screen, Brando is our genius as Mailer is our genius in literature.”) Years later, Mailer supported the release from prison of a man named Jack Henry Abbott, a gifted writer with whom he had corresponded at length. Six weeks later, Abbott stabbed a stranger to death. Afterward, Mailer infamously remarked:

I’m willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man’s talent. I am saying that culture is worth a little risk.

But it isn’t—at least not like this. Last Tango in Paris is a masterpiece. It contains the single greatest male performance I’ve ever seen. But it wasn’t worth it.

The strange loop of Westworld

In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, the critic Emily Nussbaum delivers one of the most useful takes I’ve seen so far on Westworld. She opens with many of the same points that I made after the premiere—that this is really a series about storytelling, and, in particular, about the challenges of mounting an expensive prestige drama on a premium network during the golden age of television. Nussbaum describes her own ambivalence toward the show’s treatment of women and minorities, and she concludes:

This is not to say that the show is feminist in any clear or uncontradictory way—like many series of this school, it often treats male fantasy as a default setting, something that everyone can enjoy. It’s baffling why certain demographics would ever pay to visit Westworld…The American Old West is a logical fantasy only if you’re the cowboy—or if your fantasy is to be exploited or enslaved, a desire left unexplored…So female customers get scattered like raisins into the oatmeal of male action; and, while the cast is visually polyglot, the dialogue is color-blind. The result is a layer of insoluble instability, a puzzle that the viewer has to work out for herself: Is Westworld the blinkered macho fantasy, or is that Westworld? It’s a meta-cliffhanger with its own allure, leaving us only one way to find out: stay tuned for next week’s episode.

I agree with many of her reservations, especially when it comes to race, but I think that she overlooks or omits one important point: conscious or otherwise, it’s a brilliant narrative strategy to make a work of art partially about the process of its own creation, which can add a layer of depth even to its compromises and mistakes. I’ve drawn a comparison already to Mad Men, which was a show about advertising that ended up subliminally criticizing its own tactics—how it drew viewers into complex, often bleak stories using the surface allure of its sets, costumes, and attractive cast. If you want to stick with the Nolan family, half of Chris’s movies can be read as commentaries on themselves, whether it’s his stricken identification with the Joker as the master of ceremonies in The Dark Knight or his analysis of his own tricks in The Prestige. Inception is less about the construction of dreams than it is about making movies, with characters who stand in for the director, the producer, the set designer, and the audience. And perhaps the greatest cinematic example of them all is Vertigo, in which Scotty’s treatment of Madeline is inseparable from the use that Hitchcock makes of Kim Novak, as he did with so many other blonde leading ladies. In each case, we can enjoy the story on its own merits, but it gains added resonance when we think of it as a dramatization of what happened behind the scenes. It’s an approach that is uniquely forgiving of flawed masterpieces, which comment on themselves better than any critic can, until we wonder about the extent to which they’re aware of their own limitations.

And this kind of thing works best when it isn’t too literal. Movies about filmmaking are often disappointing, either because they’re too close to their subject for the allegory to resonate or because the movie within the movie seems clumsy compared to the subtlety of the larger film. It’s why Being John Malkovich is so much more beguiling a statement than the more obvious Adaptation. In television, the most unfortunate recent example is UnREAL. You’d expect that a show that was so smart about the making of a reality series would begin to refer intriguingly to itself, and it did, but not in a good way. Its second season was a disappointment, evidently because of the same factors that beset its fictional show Everlasting: interference from the network, conceptual confusion, tensions between producers on the set. It seemed strange that UnREAL, of all shows, could display such a lack of insight into its own problems, but maybe it isn’t so surprising. A good analogy needs to hold us at arm’s length, both to grant some perspective and to allow for surprising discoveries in the gaps. The ballet company in The Red Shoes and the New York Inquirer in Citizen Kane are surrogates for the movie studio, and both films become even more interesting when you realize how much the lead character is a portrait of the director. Sometimes it’s unclear how much of this is intentional, but this doesn’t hurt. So much of any work of art is out of your control that you need to find an approach that automatically converts your liabilities into assets, and you can start by conceiving a premise that encourages the viewer or reader to play along at home.

Which brings us back to Westworld. In her critique, Nussbaum writes: “Westworld [is] a come-hither drama that introduces itself as a science-fiction thriller about cyborgs who become self-aware, then reveals its true identity as what happens when an HBO drama struggles to do the same.” She implies that this is a bug, but it’s really a feature. Westworld wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if it weren’t being produced with this cast, on this network, and on this scale. We’re supposed to be impressed by the time and money that have gone into the park—they’ve spared no expense, as John Hammond might say—but it isn’t all that different from the resources that go into a big-budget drama like this. In the most recent episode, “Dissonance Theory,” the show invokes the image of the maze, as we might expect from a series by a Nolan brother: get to the center to the labyrinth, it says, and you’ve won. But it’s more like what Douglas R. Hofstadter describes in I Am a Strange Loop:

What I mean by “strange loop” is—here goes a first stab, anyway—not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out.

This neatly describes both the park and the series. And it’s only through such strange loops, as Hofstadter has long argued, that any complex system—whether it’s the human brain, a robot, or a television show—can hope to achieve full consciousness.

My alternative canon #1: A Canterbury Tale

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 two weeks, 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.

I’ve frequently said that The Red Shoes is my favorite movie of all time, but it isn’t even the most remarkable film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The Red Shoes succeeds in large part by following through on its promises: it takes place in a fascinating world and tells a story of high melodrama, with an obvious determination to deliver as much color and atmosphere to the audience as possible, and its brilliance emerges from how consistently it lives up to its own impossible standards. A Canterbury Tale, which came out five years earlier, is in many respects more astonishing, because it doesn’t seem to have any conventional ambitions at all. It’s a deliberately modest film with a story so inconsequential that it verges on a commentary on the arbitrariness of all narrative: three young travelers, stranded at a small village near Canterbury during World War II, attempt to solve the mystery of “the glue man,” an unseen figure who throws glue at the hair of local women to discourage them from going out at night—and that, incredibly, is it. When the glue man’s identity is revealed, it’s handled so casually that the moment is easy to miss, and not even the protagonists themselves seem all that interested in the plot, which occupies about ten minutes of a film that runs over two hours in its original cut. And the fact that the movie itself was openly conceived as a light propaganda picture doesn’t seem to work in its favor.

Yet this is one of the most beautiful movies ever made, a languid series of funny, moving, and evocative set pieces that reminded me, when I first saw it, of Wong Kar-Wai magically set loose in wartime Britain. There are the usual flourishes of cinematic playfulness from Powell and Pressburger—including a cut from a medieval falcon to a modern warplane that anticipates Kubrick in 2001—but the tone is atypically relaxed and gentle, with even less plot than in its spiritual sequel I Know Where I’m Going! Despite the title, it doesn’t have much to do with Chaucer, except that the lead characters are all pilgrims who have been damaged in different ways and are healed by a journey to Canterbury. (Years later, I stayed at a tiny hotel within sight of the cathedral, where I verified that the movie was on sale at its gift shop.) It’s nostalgic and vaguely conservative, but it also looks ahead to the New Wave with its visual zest, greediness for location detail, and willingness to take happy digressions. The cast includes the lovely ingenue Sheila Sim, who later married Richard Attenborough, and Eric Portman as Colpeper, the local magistrate, who, in a typically perverse touch from the Archers, is both their virtuous embodiment of high Tory ideals and kind of a creepy weirdo. Sim died earlier this year, but when she looks up at the clouds in the tall grass with Portman, she lives forever in my heart—along with the film itself, which keeps one foot in the past while somehow managing to seem one step ahead of every movie that came after it.

Red shoe diaries

Earlier this week, my daughter, who is three years old, watched her first live-action movie. It was The Red Shoes. And although it might seem like I planned it this way—The Red Shoes, as I’ve said here on multiple occasions, is my favorite movie of all time—I can only protest, unconvincingly, that it was a total accident. Beatrix has been watching animated features for a while now, including a record number of viewings of My Neighbor Totoro, but she had never seen a live-action film from start to finish, and I’d already been thinking about which one to try to show her first. If you’d asked me, I’d have guessed that it would probably be Mary Poppins. But over the weekend, Beatrix started asking me about my own favorite films, and The Red Shoes naturally came up, along with a few others. (The first movie we discussed, for some reason, was The Shining, which led to an awkward plot summary: “Well, it’s about a family, sort of like ours, and the daddy is a writer, like me…”) I said that it was about dance, which piqued her interest, and I suggested that she might like to see the self-contained ballet sequence from the middle of the movie. She did, so we watched together it that night. When it was over, she turned to me and said: “I want to watch the rest.” I agreed, expecting that she would tune out and lose interest within the first twenty minutes. But she didn’t, and we ended up watching the whole thing over two evenings.

At first, I was understandably thrilled, but the overnight intermission gave me time to start worrying. The Red Shoes is a great movie, but its climax is undeniably bleak, and I spent a restless night wondering how Beatrix would handle the scene in which the ballerina Victoria Page falls to her death before an oncoming train. (It didn’t help that during the first half, Beatrix had said cheerfully to me: “I’m Vicky!”) The next morning, when she asked to watch the rest, I sat her down on my knee and explained what happened at the end. She told me that she would be okay with it, and that if it bothered her, she wouldn’t look at the screen, as long as I warned her in time. That’s more or less how it went: when we got to the ending, I told her what was coming, and she turned her head toward the back of the couch until I said the coast was clear. When the movie was over, I asked her what she thought. She said that she liked it a lot—but I also noticed that her eyes were glistening. It’s the first film of any kind she’s ever seen, in fact, that didn’t have a happy ending, and when she’s asked me why grownups enjoy watching sad movies, I’ve struggled with the response. I say that sometimes it’s good to feel emotions that you don’t experience in your everyday life, or that a sad movie can make you appreciate your own happiness, or that you can take pleasure in how well a sad story is told. But she didn’t seem all that convinced, and to be honest, neither am I.

It was especially enlightening to watch The Red Shoes through her eyes. It’s a movie with a strikingly fatalistic view of life and art: Lermontov tells Vicky that she can’t be married to Julian and be a great dancer at the same time, and the film implicitly confirms his judgment. “You cannot have it both ways,” Lermontov says grimly. “A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never.” It doesn’t seem to leave Vicky with much in the way of a middle ground. Yet although I’ve watched this movie endlessly over the last twenty years, I realized, seeing it again with my daughter, that I’m not sure if this reflects Powell and Pressburger’s true opinion or if it’s simply a narrative convention that they needed to enable the story’s tragic ending. For that matter, it doesn’t need to be one or the other: it feels a lot like a conclusion into which they were forced by the material, which is as valid a way as any for an artist to discover what he or she really thinks. And you don’t need to accept the movie’s bleaker aspects—I mostly don’t—to appreciate its merits as entertainment. Still, this isn’t a distinction that you’re likely to understand at the age of three, so I found myself telling Beatrix that the movie’s apparent message wasn’t necessarily true. It’s possible, I think, to have a satisfying creative career and a happy personal life: it’s certainly hard, but less than an order of magnitude harder than succeeding as an artist in the first place.

I don’t know how much of this Beatrix understood, but then again, I’m never entirely sure about what’s going on in her head. (On the night before we finished The Red Shoes, I passed by her bedroom and noticed that she was lying in bed with her eyes open. Looking straight at me, she said: “I’m thinking about the movie.”) And I wouldn’t be surprised if we quickly moved on to the next thing: Beatrix still says that her favorite movie is Ponyo, which makes me very happy. But hey, you never know. The Red Shoes has been responsible for more careers in dance than any other movie, and I know from firsthand experience how much impact a passing encounter with a piece of pop culture can have on your inner life. I’m not sure I want Beatrix to be a ballerina, which, if anything, is the one career that offers even less of a prospect of success than the one I’ve chosen for myself. But I want her to care about art, and to appreciate, as Lermontov tells Vicky, that a great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit. On a more modest level, I want her to understand that we watch sad movies for a reason, even if it’s hard to explain, and that it’s both normal and good for the emotions they evoke to be as intense as the ones we feel in real life. Of course, she’ll probably come to that conclusion on her own. The other day, Beatrix looked at me and said: “I want to watch the movie about the girl at the restaurant.” It took me a while to realize that she was talking about Chungking Express. I replied: “You will soon.” And I meant it.

The poetry of motion

Over the last few days, my daughter, who turns three in December, has become obsessed by a movie called Ballet 422. It’s a documentary, released earlier this year and now streaming on Netflix, about the creation of an original work for the New York City Ballet by dancer and choreographer Justin Peck. I hadn’t even heard of it until last week, and I cued it up for Beatrix mostly out of desperation: I was reaching the end of a long day that had encompassed visits to the library, a sushi restaurant for lunch, a bookstore, and two parks, and as usual, when it was time to make dinner, I was scrambling to find something that could keep her distracted. But the movie sucked her in from the very first shot—of dancers arriving for their morning exercises—and it never let her go. Since then, she’s asked to see again it multiple times, and we’ll sometimes end up watching it twice on the same day. And in retrospect, it’s the kind of movie that was made to hold her interest. There’s no narration, no talking heads, no grownup’s idea of a plot: just the camera calmly recording attractive people as they engage in intensely interesting creative work. (Documentaries, in general, seem like a promising avenue for the two of us to explore. An attempt to interest her over the weekend in Bering Sea Gold on the Discovery Channel didn’t go as well, but I’m tempted to see what she thinks of Happy People, Werner Herzog and Dmitry Vasyukov’s look at life in the Siberian taiga.)

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I’ve written here before, perhaps at excessive length, about the oddly prominent role that ballet has assumed in my inner life. I’m not a dancer, or even much of a real balletomane, but there’s a thread in my thoughts about art that runs through The Red Shoes, my favorite movie of all time, through Ballets Russes, the most moving documentary I’ve ever seen. And in the process, I’ve become increasingly convinced that ballet is the art form that tells us more than any other about the nature of art itself. Along with singing and oral storytelling, it’s the medium that requires the minimum amount of necessary equipment, aside from a functioning human body, but it can also blossom, step by step, into Diaghilev’s idea of the full gesamtkunstwerk, in which all the arts find unified expression. And it’s also the form in which art’s essential transience feels the most visible. Even if it’s preserved on film, or in the notes by the choreographer, a dance exists in the moment, leaving nothing but a memory behind, which I’m starting to feel is fundamentally true about all kinds of art, even those that seem superficially more lasting. I doubt that my daughter senses much of this—she’s more interested in all the pretty people, their movements, and their makeup—but as I watch her face as she watches it, I can’t help but reflect on the role that art plays in giving a shape to a life.

I’d also like to think that Beatrix is receiving a quiet education in the art of documentary filmmaking.  Jody Lee Lipes’s movie is the kind of unobtrusive, absorbing work that is so easy to take for granted and so very hard to do well. Instead of imposing himself on the material, as a lesser director might have done, he holds himself—and us—at a slight distance, and the result is defined as much by what it leaves out as by what it includes. We don’t learn anything about Peck’s background or his personal life, and we pick up information about the other participants on the fly. Everyone we meet is intently focused on the business at hand, and the camera takes it all in with a serene equanimity that allows us to forget how difficult it must have been to capture. In a profile in the New York Times, Lipes recalls how he had to work within considerable constraints:

The deadline to create the work gives the film a tautness that was reinforced by the filmmakers’ tight budget: They could afford only limited shooting. Mr. Lipes said his wife, Ellen Bar, a producer of the film, was especially helpful in guiding his choices, since she is a former City Ballet dancer and the dance company’s director of media projects.

“I would say, ‘Should we shoot today?’ ” Mr. Lipes recalled. “And Ellen would say, ‘This is the first time Justin is going to see the orchestra perform the piece; we have to be there.’”

In other words, Lipes’s film becomes an understated emblem of the exact kind of restraint and ingenuity that it celebrates. The “deadline” mentioned above refers to the fact that Peck had only a couple of months to put together his ballet: a hole had unexpectedly appeared in the company’s roster, and he was asked to fill it. Another movie might have used this detail to set up an artificial ticking clock, but Ballet 422 doesn’t go out of its way to emphasize it. Like dance itself, in which artistic self-effacement and discipline are channeled into the creation of overwhelming emotion on stage, the movie’s air of detachment becomes almost a fetish. And yet its closing scenes—in which Peck watches his premiere along with the rest of the audience, strips off his suit and tie, gets into costume, and joins the corps de ballet onstage for the last performance of the evening—are indescribably moving. This last sequence includes the only showy edit in the entire movie, as the image of a ring of dancers cuts to the matching circle of the fountain at Lincoln Center. From there, it moves to a view of the entire plaza, seen from far overhead, and as the credits roll, I always find myself thinking of my own life. I spent a memorable year in my twenties, not all that much younger than Peck, living just a short walk way from that fountain. And when I look away from the screen now, I see my own daughter dancing before it.

My ten great movies #1: The Red Shoes

Like all great films, but much more so, The Red Shoes—which I think is the greatest movie ever made—works on two levels, as both a story of life and a story of film. As the latter, it’s simply the most inventive movie ever made in Technicolor, second only to Citizen Kane in its abundance of tricks and flourishes. These range from small cinematic jokes (like its use of the scrolling title Forty-five minutes later, subsequently borrowed by Scorsese in The Aviator, to indicate the passage of time within a single shot) to effects of unforgettable emotional power (like the empty spotlight on the stage in the final scene). It’s the definitive work by a pair of filmmakers who had spent the previous decade on an unparalleled streak, making more great films in ten years than five ordinary directors could produce in an entire career. And The Red Shoes was the movie they had been building toward all along, because along with everything else, it’s the best film we have about the artistic process itself.

And even here, it works on multiple levels. As a depiction of life at a ballet company, it may not be as realistic as it seems—Moira Shearer, among others, has dismissed it as pure fantasy—but it feels real, and it remains the most romantic depiction of creative collaboration yet captured on film. (It inspired countless careers in dance, and certainly inspired me to care deeply about ballet, an art form toward which I’d been completely indifferent before seeing this movie.) And as an allegory, it’s unsurpassed: Lermontov’s cruelty toward Vicky is really a dramatization of the dialogue between art and practicality that takes place inside every artist’s head. This may be why The Red Shoes is so important to me now: from the moment I first saw it, it’s been one of my ten favorite films, but over the years, and especially after I decided to become a writer, my love for it has increased beyond what I feel toward almost any other work of art. Yet Vicky’s final words still haunt me, as does Lermontov’s offhand remark, which stands as a permanent warning, and enticement, to artists of all kinds: “The red shoes are never tired.”

The dancer from the dance

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 one piece of pop culture would you use to teach an artificial intelligence what it means to be human?”

When I was growing up, one of the books I browsed through endlessly was Murmurs of Earth by Carl Sagan, which told the story behind the Voyager golden records. Attached to the two Voyager spacecraft and engraved with instructions for playback, each record was packed with greetings in multiple languages, sounds, encoded images of life on earth, and, most famously, music. The musical selection opens with the first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, which is about as solid a choice as it gets, and the remaining tracks are eclectic and inspired, ranging from a Pygmy girls’ initiation song to Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” (The inclusion of “Johnny B. Goode” led to a legendary joke on Saturday Night Live, purporting to predict the first message from an alien civilization: “Send more Chuck Berry.”) Not included, alas, was “Here Comes the Sun,” which the Beatles were happy to contribute, only to be vetoed by their record company. Evidently, EMI was concerned about the distribution of royalties from any commercial release of the disc—which says more about our society than we’d like any alien culture to know.

Of course, the odds of either record ever being found and played are infinitesimal, but it was still a valuable exercise. What, exactly, does it mean to be us, and how can we convey this to a nonhuman intelligence? Other solutions have been proposed, some simpler and more elegant than others. In The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas writes:

Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.

If such thought experiments so often center on music, it’s because we intuitively see it as our most timeless, universal production, even if that’s as much a cultural construct as anything else. All art, Walter Pater says, aspires to the condition of music, in which form and content can’t be separated, so it’s natural to regard it as the best we have to offer.

Yet music, for all its merits, only hints at a crucial aspect of human existence: its transience. It’s true that every work of music has a beginning and an end, but once written, it potentially exists forever—if not as a single performance, then as an act of crystalized thought—and it can be experienced in pretty much the form that Bach or Beethoven intended. In that sense, it’s an idealized, aspirational, and not particularly accurate representation of human life, in which so much of what matters is ephemeral and irreproducible. We may never have a chance to explain this to an alien civilization, but it’s likely that we’ll have to convey it sooner or later to another form of nonhuman consciousness that arises closer to home. Assuming we’re not convinced, like John Searle, of the philosophical impossibility of artificial intelligence, it’s only a matter of time before we have to take this problem seriously. And when we do, it’s our sense of mortality and impermanence that might pose the greatest obstacle to mutual comprehension. Unless its existence is directly threatened, as with HAL in 2001, an A.I., which is theoretically immortal, might have trouble understanding how we continue to find meaning in a life that is defined largely by the fact that it ends.

When I ask myself what form of art expresses this fact the most vividly, it has to be dance. And although I’d be tempted to start with The Red Shoes, my favorite movie of all time, there’s an even better candidate: the extraordinary documentary Ballets Russes, available now for streaming on Hulu, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. (I didn’t even realize this until I looked up its release date shortly before typing this sentence, which is just another reminder of how quickly time slips away.) Just as the Voyager record was a kind of exercise to determine what art we find most worthy of preservation, the question of what to show a nonhuman intelligence is really more about what works can teach us something about what it means to be human. Ballets Russes qualifies as few other movies do: I welled up with tears within the first minute, which juxtaposes archival footage of dancers in their prime with the same men and women sixty years later. In the space of a cut, we see the full mystery of human existence, and it’s all the more powerful when we reflect that these artists have devoted their lives to creating a string of moments that can’t be recaptured—as we all do, in our different ways. An artificial intelligence might wonder if there was any point. I don’t have an answer to that. But if one exists at all, it’s here.

Making it simple, keeping it complex

Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

—Ward Cunningham

The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.

—Sol LeWitt

When I begin, I usually improvise a melody and sing words—and often those words are just clichés. If it is an old songwriting cliché, most of the time I throw it away, but sometimes I keep it, because they’re nice to have. They’re familiar. They’re like a breather for the listener. You can stop wondering or thinking for a little while and just float along with the music.

—Paul Simon

The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

—Fernando J. Corbató

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

—Alan Perlis

The nail doesn’t have to look like a house; it is not a house. It is a nail. If the house is going to stand, the nail must do the work of a nail. To do the work of a nail, it has to look like a nail.

—David Mamet

Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.

—Kevin Kelly

While it might seem that richness suggests excess and maximal inclusion, we actually need to be selective about the elements we include, or the novel will not be rich so much as an incomprehensible blur, a smear of language. Think about the very real limitations of Pynchon as a novelist: many complain about his flat characters and slapstick humor, but without those elements to manage the text and simplify it, his already dangerously complex fiction would become unreadable.

—Mike Meginnis

Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and complex. The better way is to go deeper with simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

—Jonathan Ive

A great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit.

—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Red Shoes

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity. But I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

—Attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The films of a life

The other week, while musing on Richard Linklater’s Boyhood—which I still haven’t seen—I noted that we often don’t have the chance to experience the movies that might speak most urgently to us at the later stages of our lives. Many of us who love film encounter the movies we love at a relatively young age, and we spend our teens and twenties devouring the classics that came out before we were born. And that’s exactly how it should be: when we’re young, we have the time and energy to explore enormous swaths of the canon, and we absorb images and stories that will enrich the years to come. Yet we’re also handicapped by being relatively inexperienced and emotionally circumscribed, at least compared to later in life. We’re wowed by technical excellence, virtuoso effects, relentless action, or even just a vision of the world in which we’d like to believe. And by the time we’re old enough to judge such things more critically, we find that we aren’t watching movies as much as we once were, and it takes a real effort to seek out the more difficult, reflective masterpieces that might provide us with signposts for the way ahead.   

What we can do, however, is look back at the movies we loved when we were younger and see what they have to say to us now. I’ve always treasured Roger Ebert’s account of his shifting feelings toward Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which he called “a page-marker in my own life”:

Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw La Dolce Vita in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom “the sweet life” represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello’s world; Chicago’s North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello’s age.

When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was ten years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him.

And when we realize how our feelings toward certain movies have shifted, it can be both moving and a little terrifying. Life transforms us so insidiously that it’s often only when we compare our feelings to a fixed benchmark that we become aware of the changes that have taken place. Watching Citizen Kane at twenty and again at thirty is a disorienting experience, especially when you’re hoping to make a life for yourself in the arts. Orson Welles was twenty-five when he directed it, and when you see it at twenty, it feels like both an inspiration and a challenge: part of you believes, recklessly, that you could be Welles, and the possibilities of the next few years of your life seem limitless. Looking back at it at thirty, after a decade’s worth of effort and compromise, you start to realize both the absurdity of his achievement and how singular it really is, and the movie seems suffused with what David Thomson calls Welles’s “vast, melancholy nostalgia for self-destructive talent.” You begin to understand the ambivalence with which more experienced filmmakers regarded the Wellesian monster of energy and ambition, and it quietly affects the way you think about Kane‘s reflections on time and old age.

The more personal our attachment to a movie, the harder these lessons can be to swallow. The other night, I sat down to watch part of The Red Shoes, my favorite movie of all time, for the first time in several years. It’s a movie I thought I knew almost frame by frame, and I do, but I hadn’t taken the emotional component into account. I’ve loved this movie since I first saw it in high school, both for its incredible beauty and for the vision it offered of a life in the arts. Later, as I rewatched it in college and in my twenties, it provided a model, a warning, and a reminder of the values I was trying to honor. Now, after I’ve been through my own share of misadventures as a writer, it seems simultaneously like a fantasy and a bittersweet emblem of a world that still seems just out of reach. I’m older than many of the characters now—although I have yet to enter my Boris Lermontov phase—and my heart aches a little when I listen to Julian’s wistful, ambitious line: “I wonder what it feels like to wake up in the morning and find oneself famous.” If The Red Shoes once felt like a promise of what could be, it’s starting to feel to me now like what could have been, or might be again. Ten years from now, it will probably feel like something else entirely. And when that time comes, I’ll let you know what I find.

Writing what you never knew you needed

I’ve said more than once that whenever I start a new writing project, I’m trying to end up with a story that I want to read. That’s the kind of thing writers tend to say when asked why they’re drawn to certain types of material, and in a limited sense, it’s true. When I look back at my body of work, it’s clear that it reflects my own particular tastes in fiction: I like tight, detailed narratives with an emphasis on plot and unusual ideas, and for the most part, that’s the kind of story I’ve written. To the extent that the outcome ever surprises me, it’s usually because of the subject matter—I’ll often decide to write a story about a world I know little about, trusting in research and brainstorming to take me into unexpected places. That element of the unknown goes a long way toward keeping the process interesting, and one of the trickiest parts of being a writer is balancing the desire to express one’s own personality with the need to discover something new. The result, if I’ve done it right, is a story that contains a touch of the unanticipated while also looking more or less like the unwritten work I had in mind. Or, as the artist Carl Andre puts it: “A creative person is a person who simply has a desire…to add something to the world that’s not there yet, and goes about arranging for that to happen.”

But there’s an inherent shortcoming to this approach, which lies in the fact that the works of art that matter the most to us often show us something we never knew we needed. When I think about the movies I love, for instance, they tend to be films that blindsided me completely, either with their stories themselves or with the way in which they were told. Knowing what I know about myself, it doesn’t come as a surprise that I’d enjoy the hell out of a movie like Gravity or Inception, but I never would have expected that my favorite movie of all time would turn out to be The Red Shoes, or that I’d passionately love recent films as different as Once, In Bruges, and Certified Copy. These are movies that snuck into my heart, rather than selling me in advance on their intentions, and I feel all the more grateful because they modestly expanded my sense of the possible. As much as I admire a director like Christopher Nolan, there’s no question that he’s primarily adept at delivering exactly the kind of movie that I think I want: a big, expensive, formally ambitious entertainment with just enough complexity to set it apart from the work of other skilled popular filmmakers. And while Nolan’s career has been extraordinary, it’s of a different order entirely from that of, say, Wong Kar-Wai, who at his best made small, messy, gorgeous movies that I never could have imagined on my own.

The same is true of fiction. Looking back over the list of my own favorite novels, surprisingly few resemble the stories I’ve tried to write myself. I love these books because they come from places that I haven’t explored firsthand, whether it’s the sustained performance of a massive novel of ideas like The Magic Mountain or a bejeweled toy like Dictionary of the Khazars. When it comes to novels that stick more closely to the categories that I understand from the inside, like The Day of the Jackal or The Silence of the Lambs, my appreciation is a little different: it’s a respect for craft, for the flawless execution of a genre I know well, and although nothing can diminish my admiration for these books, it’s altogether different from the feeling I get from a novel that comes to us as a fantastic mythical beast, or as a dispatch from some heretofore unexplored country. And it doesn’t need to be deliberately difficult or obscure. Books from Catch-22 to The Time Traveler’s Wife have left me with the sense that I’ve finished reading something that nobody else, least of all me, could have pulled off. (It’s also no accident that it took me a long time to get around to many of the books I’ve mentioned above. More than even the most difficult movies, few of which demand more than two or three hours of our attention, a novel that doesn’t resemble the ones we’ve read before demands a considerable leap of faith.)

That said, I don’t know if it’s possible for writers to feel that away about their own work, especially not for something the size of a novel, in which any flashes of outside inspiration need to share space with months or years of continuous effort. (A short story or poem, which can be conceived and written in a more compressed window of time, is more likely to retain some of that initial strangeness.) But it does imply that writing only the kinds of stories we already like goes only part of the way toward fulfilling our deepest artistic needs. A reader who spends his or her life reading only one kind of book—romance, fantasy, science fiction—ends up with a limited imaginative palate, and a big part of our literary education comes from striking out into books that might seem unfamiliar or uninviting. For writers, this means following a story wherever it takes us, giving up some measure of control, and even deliberately pushing forward into areas of writing that we don’t fully understand, trusting that we’ll find something new and worthwhile along the way. Like all ventures into the unknown, it carries a degree of risk, and we may find that we’ve invested time and energy that we can’t recover into a story that was never meant to be. But it’s far more dangerous to never take that risk in the first place.

Let’s twist again, like we did last summer

Let’s face it: surprises are no longer very surprising. These days, with every thriller and horror movie and serialized drama required to deliver a mandatory plot twist or two, it’s hard to react to any but the most unexpected developments with more than a yawn—or, at best, a mental ranking of how the twist stacks up against the best of its predecessors. Twists aren’t necessarily bad in themselves: it can be fun to watch a show like The Vampire Diaries pile up one implausible plot development after another, and very occasionally, you still see a twist with real impact. (This usually happens in a genre when you aren’t expecting it, which partially explains why the most pleasing twist I saw all year was in Wreck-It Ralph.) But it’s no wonder that audiences have become jaded. We’ve all seen television shows bump off major characters in the middle of the season, or movies that reveal that the victim was the killer the entire time, and by now, we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns. Once surprises become obligatory, they start to feel like mechanical impositions from the outside, when the finest twists arise organically from the material, or at least should seem like they do.

At first, it might seem that the best way to surprise the audience is for the author to surprise himself, by a development that arises unexpectedly in a work already in progress. If the writer doesn’t see a plot twist coming, the logic goes, the reader isn’t likely to anticipate it either. There’s some merit to this argument, and in fact, each of my own novels contains a major plot point that I didn’t foresee until I was halfway through the first draft. In The Icon Thief, this involves the murder of a major character who was originally going to die in any case, but whose ultimate fate ended up not only affecting the novel’s ending, but the rest of the series. City of Exiles surprised me in a somewhat different way: I’d written the first half of the book on the assumption that one of the characters had an important secret. When the time came to actually write it, however, I found that I couldn’t make it work. Consequently, I had no choice but to dig through the cast of characters I’d already developed to see if someone else was available to play this particular role. The result surprised me a lot, and because the first half of the novel remains largely as it was originally written, I’d like to think that it surprises readers as well.

But there are limits to this kind of surprise, which is why, in Eternal Empire, I’ve taken pains to weave the twists more securely into the fabric of the story itself. A twist that occurs to the author partway through the story has the advantage of being unexpected, but it can also seem arbitrary, or like an afterthought. The very best surprises, by contrast, are implicit in the premise of the narrative itself. By now, the ending of The Sixth Sense has become a cliché, but we shouldn’t allow this to undermine our appreciation of what remains the most elegant of all modern twist endings. It’s an ending that forces us to reevaluate much of what we’ve seen before, casting previous scenes in a new light, and it more or less demands a second viewing of the movie to fully appreciate. This isn’t the kind of thing that you can make up on the fly. Love it or hate it, it’s compelling in a way that few such twists ever are, because it isn’t just the ending that surprises us: we’ve been set up for it throughout the entire movie. (And as much as M. Night Shyamalan seems to have fallen short of his own early standard, that’s more than I can say for J.J. Abrams, who seems to think that a surprise is something you create by pretending it’s there in the marketing materials.)

In short, as Lermontov says in The Red Shoes, “Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat.” Good writing is based on paradoxes of craft, and just as an unpolished prose style is generally the result of painstaking work, and an apparently unstructured plot requires more planning than any other, a good surprise demands methodical work in advance. Like any form of sleight of hand, it hinges on making the result of careful preparation seem casual, even miraculous. And that sad part is that it’s unlikely to be rewarded. The best kind of surprise is one that makes us realize that we aren’t being told the story that we thought we were, which strikes a lot of people as something slightly unpleasant: as I noted in my review of The Cabin in the Woods, most viewers only like to be surprised when they’re told so in advance, not when a work of art deliberately frustrates their assumptions. A mechanical plot twist may feel like a surprise, but it’s really just fulfilling our expectations for the genre. This isn’t necessarily bad; I’ve been guilty of it myself. But it’s no substitute for the real thing.

“When the door of the guest room opened…”

(Note: This post is the twenty-eighth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 27. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Stories are about convergence. At least, they are these days. The very oldest stories we know—fairy tales, folklore, biblical narratives—tend to follow a single protagonist from one event to another, as do the earliest stories we write as children. It didn’t take long, however, for storytellers to discover the power of converging action. We see this kind of structure as early as The Odyssey, which opens with Telemachus, Penelope, and the suitors at Ithaca before cutting away to our hero, with the implicit promise that the two threads of the narrative will converge before the poem is done. Ever since, writers have understood that two or more stories, properly arranged, can add up to more than the sum of their parts: given a pair of characters in initially separate storylines, the reader naturally wonders what the two parts of the plot have to do with each other, and looks ahead to their ultimate collision. This kind of anticipation is central to suspense, which is really just another word for any narrative in which we’re curious about what happens next, and the techniques of intercutting, parallel action, and intersection are among the most powerful weapons in a writer’s arsenal.

And the true potential of convergence wasn’t fully realized until the coming of film. Every cut in a movie is a form of narrative juxtaposition, with edits that marry segments of footage that might have been filmed days or weeks apart, and filmmakers quickly realized how useful a tool this could be. We see this at the climax of a movie like Argo, for instance, which manipulates the audience beautifully as it cuts between pursuer and pursued, and also at higher, more sophisticated narrative levels. I’ve spoken many times about how deeply influenced I’ve been by the structure of L.A. Confidential, which follows its three very different cops on separate investigations that converge ever more insidiously as the plot unfolds. Even more lovely is the structure of The Red Shoes, my favorite movie of all time, which follows Julian and Vicky as they enter the world of ballet, allowing them to cross paths occasionally, only to reveal, deliciously, that they’ve fallen in love while our attention has been elsewhere. And it’s for reasons like this that all of my published novels have been conceived with such a tripartite structure in mind.

That said, the trouble with this sort of plot is that a lot of moving parts need to be set in motion, and given room to develop, before their convergence can have any meaning. This is one reason why The Icon Thief and City of Exiles can seem, at least to some readers, to take their sweet time in revealing what they’re really about: unlike a novel that follows a single character all the way through, these books need to establish three distinct storylines, with their attendant backstory and exposition, before finally bringing them together. Extend the process too long, and the reader becomes tired and confused; cover the ground too quickly, and you lose some of the frisson that comes when the pieces finally entwine. Finding a balance that will allow these storylines to gather the necessary momentum, while also giving the reader a satisfying experience in the meantime, has been one of the most challenging aspects of writing these books, and I’m not always sure I pull it off. There are times, for instance, when I wish that The Icon Thief were a little bit faster out of the gate. But when the threads do converge, I’d like to think that the effect is worth the wait, as in Chapter 27, when Maddy and Powell properly meet at last.

Although I haven’t checked in a while, I’m pretty sure that this is one of the longest chapters in the novel, and for good reason. I’ve spent close to half of the book establishing these two characters, and now, after the heist that Maddy witnessed and which Powell failed to prevent, they have a lot to talk about. Ilya, my third protagonist, isn’t present, but he’s certainly there in spirit—and it’s here, as Powell questions Maddy about what she saw, that all the pieces of the narrative finally become one. In some ways, this is the hinge moment of the entire novel, and the rest of the book will be devoted to working out the implications of the components I’ve laid out so far. Of course, it isn’t enough to simply bring the pieces together without some additional complication. In this case, it comes after Powell is gone, when Maddy and Ethan leave the mansion and, somewhat to their surprise, end up spending the night together. This is the second big convergence in this chapter, and one that will have significant consequences for the rest of the story, as it starts to subtly shift in tone from intrigue to paranoia. In some ways, this is where the story really begins. But the pieces have been waiting to come together for a long time…

“You’ve heard of these circles, of course…”

(Note: This post is the twelfth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 11. You can read the earlier installments here.)

People in my novels like to talk. And they’re not alone. It’s hard to write a conspiracy thriller without the occasional chapter in which the characters sit down to hash out the history of the Vehmgericht or the Priory of Sion—and this doesn’t just apply to the likes of Dan Brown, but to the very heights of the genre, including The Illuminatus Trilogy, or even Gravity’s Rainbow. More specifically, when my characters engage in one of their marathon bull sessions, I’m working out my own issues with Foucault’s Pendulum, still one of my favorite novels, but one that consists of nothing but talk. (There’s also a hint here of the talkier moments on The X-Files, in which the two leads spitball comically elaborate theories in big chunks of dialogue that both actors have since derided as impossible to perform.) I try to cut back on this kind of thing as much as possible, but sometimes there’s no way around it: these are novels about information and interpretation, in which hundreds of facts need to be marshaled and set in order, and dialogue remains the best way of doing this.

And yet it can be hard to organize such material in a way that remains dramatically interesting. The Icon Thief contains at least ten chapters in which massive amounts of information need to be conveyed to the reader in dialogue, and each one presents different problems. Chapter 11, the first such chapter in the novel, turned out to be one of the most challenging. In it, Maddy goes to meet her former employer, a gallery owner named Alexey Lermontov, to whom the reader is introduced for the first time. In the ensuing conversation, they discuss the background of Anzor Archvadze, the oligarch who bought Study for Étant Donnés; delve into Maddy’s own history at the gallery; lay in some information about Duchamp and his circle; introduce the enigma of the Rosicrucians, with references to Jacques Villon, Joséphin Péladan, Erik Satie, and the Section D’Or; and set up the central action of the next dozen chapters, as Maddy tries to attend a party at Archvadze’s house. And all this takes place over the course of a chapter that covers only seven pages in the print edition.

Obviously, feeding all this information to the reader isn’t easy, but as I look back at the chapter now, I think it does a pretty good job. I structure the whole chapter as a walk and talk, allowing the action to move from Lermontov’s gallery to Central Park, and while this may not be the most original device in the world, as Aaron Sorkin knows, it works: a conversation that would seem static if confined to a single room benefits a lot from a change of scene. Late in the revision process, I made another crucial edit, implying that Lermontov has spoken about the Rosicrucians to Maddy before. This allows me to skip a lot of exposition, on the assumption that Maddy already knows something about the subject, and makes the gallerist’s interest in the society more plausible—if only because, as I’ve mentioned already, a reader is more likely to accept this sort of plot point when it’s presented as a fait accompli. And I cut as much as possible from this chapter in successive drafts, until what remained was fairly concise and streamlined. As a result, if Chapter 10 is where the book takes off on a visceral level, Chapter 11 is where the heart of the novel, the intellectual story, really begins.

Lermontov is named after Anton Walbrook’s character in The Red Shoes, and in my own mind, I always picture Walbrook in this role. I’ll also admit to copying from my betters for one of the central ideas in this chapter, in which Maddy wonders if Lermontov’s interest in the Rosicrucians arises from his being gay, which has made him more receptive to the idea of secret codes and knowledge. This is lifted directly from a brilliant passage in Sodom and Gomorrah, in which Proust writes:

[This is] a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs…which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true…

Alexey Lermontov is one of my favorite characters in this novel, and, as I’ll explain much later, he turned out to have hidden depths that came as a surprise even to me. For now, we see him only on the surface, with his personality revealed by such accessories as the late Picasso in its priceless frame by the House of Heydenryk. (Apparently he has very good taste: after the book was published, I heard from the president of this framing company, who was glad to see their work displayed in such a positive context, “as opposed to using one of our frames as a murder weapon.”)

By any other name

The next time you’re talking to a writer and get stuck for topics of conversation, here’s a tip: ask him where he gets the names of his characters. Not every name has an interesting meaning, of course, aside from the fact that it sounded good to the author at the time. But in my experience, most writers tend to invest a lot of thought and energy into coming up with character names, to the point where the names of even minor players have a long story behind them. In some ways, it’s not unlike choosing a name for a baby: you need to think of every possible scenario in which the name might backfire, whether because it calls up unwanted associations or lends itself too easily to a playground taunt. If it’s the name of a character in a novel, much less a series, you need to be particularly careful, because you’re going to be living with it for a long time. As a result, I generally spend a full day, maybe two, at the beginning of any novel project just coming up with names for ten or twelve important characters, which is much less fun than it sounds.

So what are the rules, if any? The critic James Wood has noted, quite fairly, that characters in a novel usually have different names, which is inherently unrealistic: “Whereas, in real life, doesn’t one always have at least three friends named John, and another three named Elizabeth?” Wood is perfectly right, of course, but even he would probably be the first to admit that this is an acceptable break from reality—like the fact that a character in a movie can always find a parking space when he needs one—that allows us to save time and confusion. Unless there’s a good reason why we should be uncertain as to which John or Elizabeth we’re reading about, it’s always wise to keep your characters’ names different and distinctive. In my own work, I try to avoid giving important characters names that start with the same letter, a rule that many other writers also seem to follow. (Now that I’m on my third novel with a shared cast of characters, this rule has become a real pain, but I still stick with it when I can.)

In the case of The Icon Thief, the names of the characters came about in all kinds of ways. Maddy and Ethan were a pair of characters who had been kicking around in my head for at least ten years, ever since I had the idea, way back in college, of writing a novel or screenplay that combined elements of two of the greatest of all American movies, Vertigo and The Searchers. The project was ridiculously ambitious, even for me, and I finally scrapped it, although not without emerging with two characters whose first names were taken from the leads of those films: Madeline Elster and Ethan Edwards. Alan Powell, as I’ve mentioned before, was named for Michael Powell, although his first name was Dennis for many drafts before I changed it to something that suited him better. And Ilya Severin was originally Ilya Kaverin, which I discarded, after spending more than two years living with that name, upon deciding that it was just too similar to that of a certain iconic character from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

The rest of my characters have names that were chosen more or less at random. Rachel Wolfe, for instance, is just a name I like, combining the name of a close friend and an acquaintance in a way that strikes me as just right. John Reynard is a fun one: his first name is the most boring one imaginable, but his last name is that of a famously foxy trickster, which serves as a clue to some of his contradictions. Anzor Archvadze was one of the few plausibly Georgian names I could come up with that didn’t make my eyes cross, while Sharkovsky and Vasylenko were chosen for the sound, and Louis Barlow just looks like the name of an FBI assistant special agent in charge. And then we have the mysterious Alexey Lermontov, named, of course, for Anton Walbrook’s character in The Red Shoes. In my mind, he’s always been played by Walbrook, and I’d like to think that he gained something from the association, even if it’s just the slightest whisper of resonance from the character who, unforgettably, summed up the fate of the heroine in his ballet: “Oh, in the end, she dies.”

Smash through a writer’s eyes

It’s safe to say that of the millions of viewers who tuned in last night for the premiere of NBC’s Smash, few were hoping to see a show about a couple of writers. The deluge of ads that aired during the Super Bowl promise an old-fashioned backstage melodrama, and on that count, the series delivers. (Perhaps a little too well—even given the disorderly nature of most network pilots, it has at least one personal subplot too many.) But I decided to check out the show for somewhat different reasons, which means that I’m going to ignore most of its other attractions, including the very fetching Katharine McPhee, to talk about a version of Smash that doesn’t exist yet, and probably never will. Because as farfetched as it might seem, this show represents the best chance we’ve had in a long time for a series about what I modestly think is the most interesting subject in the world, which is the creative process at work.

For obvious reasons, most movies or TV shows about writers aren’t very good. This is partially because a writer’s life doesn’t lend itself to visual storytelling, unless you’re going to indulge in frequent fantasy sequences—as Smash is clearly quite willing to do. It’s solitary work, without a lot of dramatic moments, and it doesn’t lend itself to neat character arcs. The movies like to pretend that there’s an intimate relationship between an artist’s life and work, but in fact, there’s often no correlation between the two. Writers can produce their best work on lousy personal days, and vice versa; most attempts to write biographies of Shakespeare (or, even less forgivably, the Earl of Oxford) based on clues from the plays founder on the fact that he didn’t necessarily write tragedies when he was miserable, or comedies when he was happy. A writer’s life, perhaps ironically, is doomed to frustrate most of our expectations about good storytelling.

When you have two writers in the room, however, that’s something else entirely. It’s no accident that the best works of art about the creative process often center on a collaborative relationship, which generally means some form of theater. I’m thinking of The Red Shoes, of course, which is my favorite movie of all time, but also of works as different as Topsy-Turvy and The Dick Van Dyke Show, the latter of which made writing for television seem like the coolest job around. And while it’s far too early to include Smash in that select company, there are some positive signs. We have a very appealing pair of writers in Debra Messing and Christian Borle, who, to my eyes, are the real stars of this show. If nothing else, Messing and Borle have real chemistry—which is more than I can say for McPhee and her ambiguously gay boyfriend—and in their scenes together in the pilot, I saw a glimpse of a show that I could learn to love.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily the show that creator Theresa Rebeck has in mind—although her recent interview with the A.V. Club was very promising. And we’re probably going to see many more fantasy musical numbers and karaoke scenes before we plunge any deeper into a writer’s inner life. But the producers of any television show are writers, first and foremost, and there are moments in the Smash pilot that feel like closely observed moments of what it means to write for Broadway. Messing is initially skeptical of the idea of a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, for instance, until she realizes that it will give her a chance to write a baseball number—and I suspect that all writers have been drawn to projects for equally random reasons. This leads to the truest moment in the pilot, when Messing confesses her real reason for wanting to write Marilyn: “I don’t want anyone else to do her.”  That’s a sentiment that any writer can recognize. And if Smash can follow up on these hints, it could become something really special.

Hugo and the ghost of Michael Powell

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo opens with an image that has long been central to this director’s work: a boy looking through a window at the world outside. As most fans know, this image is autobiographical—Scorsese’s asthma kept him indoors for much of his childhood, forcing him to view the world from afar—and although this isn’t the young Henry Hill, staring longingly at the gangsters across the street, but Hugo Cabret and a CGI wonderland of Paris in the 1930s, it shouldn’t blind us to the fact that this is Scorsese’s most personal film since Goodfellas. It’s a curious movie: far from his best work, yet ultimately entrancing, for reasons that have less to do with its considerable technical merits than with its romantic notion of what the arts, especially cinema, can mean to one person over the course of his or her life. In particular, it’s about what movies mean to Scorsese, and to convey this, he employs no fewer than three fictional surrogates, often where you least expect them.

At first glance, of course, it’s the technological aspects that command our attention. Scorsese is clearly tickled to be working with a large budget and in three dimensions, and Hugo is one of the best arguments I’ve yet seen for 3D as something more than just a fad. Unlike Avatar, which largely unfolds in an airless, if gorgeous, universe of special effects, Hugo takes particular pleasure in small touches of reality: steam, ash, the particles of dust on a real set. Its 3D is less a gimmick than a way of immersing us in a new world, aided immeasurably by Robert Richardson’s cinematography and Dante Ferretti’s production design, and the result is captivating from the very first frame. And while the same isn’t quite true of the plot—Scorsese seems rather indifferent to some of the beats of the children’s book he’s adapting, and the first half hour is especially lumpy—the story eventually becomes absorbing as well, thanks largely to the invisible figure at its heart: the English filmmaker Michael Powell.

The action of Hugo, and this is a minor spoiler, revolves in great part around the director Georges Méliès, whom Hugo discovers, now neglected and depressed, operating a toy shop at Montparnasse Station. Later, Hugo introduces him to a film scholar, an enthusiastic student of Méliès’s work, who goes on to unearth and restore many of his lost films. And while the plot closely parallels that of Brian Selznick’s original novel, it isn’t hard to see what drew Scorsese to the story: it’s basically a fabulous recasting of his own relationship with Michael Powell, whose films he loved as a child, and whose life he finally entered after establishing himself as a director and student of film in his own right. Like Méliès, Powell, once hugely popular, was overlooked for decades, during what should have been the most productive years of his career—in Powell’s case, after the disastrous release of the controversial Peeping Tom. And Scorsese played a major role in his rediscovery, leading the way in recent years in the restoration of his major works, beginning with The Red Shoes. (It’s even possible to see a hint of Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor and Powell’s wife, in Méliès’s wife Jeanne d’Alcy, played here by Helen McCrory.)

As a result, Powell’s ghost hovers like a protective spirit above much of Hugo. (Among the many small references to the work of the Archers: in the film’s closing scene, Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley, wears the same white tie and tails as Lermontov at the end of The Red Shoes.) And Scorsese himself appears in three guises: as the young Hugo; as the movie scholar and Méliès fan René Tabard (nicely played by Michael Stuhlbarg); and, most interestingly, as Méliès himself. Scorsese is obviously far more interested in Méliès than in much of the surrounding story, and it’s hard not to read the final scene, as Méliès receives the Legion of Honor, in light of Scorsese’s string of late career awards. And while Scorsese has been far from neglected, he knows how it feels: he once feared that Raging Bull would be his last movie, and spent much of the 1980s in a relative wilderness. Like all artists, Scorsese has had moments, at one point or another, when he feared that his work had been in vain. If a film like Hugo is any indication, his legacy is secure.

My ten great movies #1: The Red Shoes

Like all great films, but much more so, The Red Shoes—which I think is the greatest movie ever made—works on two levels, as both a story of life and a story of film. As the latter, it’s simply the most inventive movie ever made in Technicolor, second only to Citizen Kane in its abundance of tricks and flourishes. These range from small cinematic jokes (like its use of the scrolling title Forty-five minutes later, subsequently borrowed by Scorsese in The Aviator, to indicate the passage of time within a single shot) to effects of unforgettable emotional power (like the empty spotlight on the stage in the final scene). It’s the definitive work by a pair of filmmakers who had spent the previous decade on an unparalleled streak, making more great films in ten years than five ordinary directors could produce in an entire career. And The Red Shoes was the movie they had been building toward all along, because along with everything else, it’s the best film ever made about the artistic process itself.

And even here, it works on multiple levels. As a depiction of life at a ballet company, it may not be as realistic as it seems—Moira Shearer, among others, has dismissed it as pure fantasy—but it feels real, and it remains the most romantic depiction of creative collaboration yet captured on film. (It inspired countless careers in dance, and certainly inspired me to care deeply about ballet, an art form toward which I’d been completely indifferent before seeing this movie.) And as an allegory, it’s unsurpassed: Lermontov’s cruelty toward Vicky is really a dramatization of the dialogue between art and practicality that takes place inside every artist’s head. This may be why The Red Shoes is so important to me now: from the moment I first saw it, it’s been one of my ten favorite films, but over the years, and especially after I decided to become a writer, my love for it has increased beyond what I feel toward almost any other work of art. Yet Vicky’s final words still haunt me, as does Lermontov’s offhand remark, which stands as a permanent warning, and enticement, to artists of all kinds: “The red shoes are never tired.”

The unfair universe, or the limits of character

Most of us, from the moment we start writing seriously, are told that all good writing comes from character. Whether we’re writing a literary novel or a hard-boiled mystery, it seems obvious that the protagonist should drive the story through his own objectives and behavior, that he should succeed or fail based on the choices he makes, and that the resolution of the plot should come about as a direct consequence of his own actions. This is good, sound advice. I’ve given it here before. And yet as we continue to write and experience other works of art, it becomes increasingly clear that character isn’t the whole answer. Because when we consider the absolute heights of literature, from Oedipus Rex to King Lear, or even the best of genre fiction, like the novels of James M. Cain, it’s hard to shake the feeling that what we’re being shown is somehow more than character, while also derived from it, and closer to a true representation of how the world really works.

Years ago, after seeing Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, I reflected that one reason I admire but don’t love Leigh’s movies is that they’re character-driven in the purest way: the stories are derived from a long process of improvisation with a team of actors, and as a result, there’s nearly nothing in his films that doesn’t emerge from character. This is obviously admirable—and Leigh is one of the most consistently engaging directors around—but it also means that his movies are curiously limited. Events in real life, after all, doesn’t always come directly from character: we’re often asked to deal with things that are out of our control, or the control of those around us. Life can be uncanny, shocking, or arbitrary—but often in ways that seem strangely appropriate. And that’s why works of fiction that resolve their themes on an allegorical level, rather than a purely rational one, tend to shake us far more deeply than works that scrupulously follow through on the implications of character alone.

As a result, many of my favorite works of art, ranging from Vertigo and The Red Shoes to The Magus and Disgrace, are almost cosmically unfair. What happens to the the characters in these stories, while superficially the consequence of their own actions, is also the result of a playful, dangerous, or unfathomable universe, which takes their actions and magnifies them to the scale of tragedy. And sometimes genre fiction—horror, in particular—understands this better than anything else. I respond to the terribly unfair fates of characters in Stephen King, for instance, because they justify my suspicion that in real life, what happens to us is not always the result of our own character, but of some higher capriciousness or malevolence. And this sort of narrative perversion is inherently factored out of works of pure character, like Leigh’s films, while remaining accessible to artists like Brian De Palma, the master of the unfair conclusion.

In all honesty, though, I’m not sure what my advice is here. Character is still hugely important. And the strategy of cosmic unfairness, if pursued too closely, can only result in a victim story. (One unfair act of fate is generally enough.) As a general rule, the protagonist’s actions and objectives are what drive the plot moment by moment—this is one of the first things that any good novelist needs to internalize. But it’s more a question of craft than of philosophy. And once this rule has been fully absorbed, the novelist can move past it, or undermine it, just as life itself often undermines our best intentions. Best of all, as in Vertigo, an artist can begin with pure character, then fulfill it with a twist of fate that seems inevitable, but in ways that can’t be rationally explained. But such stories are only possible when the writer already knows the importance of character itself—and when to move beyond it.

Great Directors: Powell and Pressburger

Essential films: The Red Shoes, A Canterbury Tale, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I’m Going!

Over the course of a single decade, from 1940 to 1949, the writing, producing, and directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger produced ten masterpieces, beginning with Contraband and ending with The Small Back Room. This amazing run, conducted in the face of World War II and the difficult years that followed, is unparalleled in the history of movies, and deserves a great book on the subject. (Powell’s own autobiography, A Life in Movies, goes only part of the way toward filling that need.) Even more impressive is the dazzling range of stories on display. Some are naturalistic, while others are outrageously weird; there’s comedy, suspense, history, war, romance, melodrama, even excursions into science fiction and fantasy. One of their greatest films, A Canterbury Tale, doesn’t seem to be about anything at all, until we realize that it’s actually about everything in life that matters.

And yet every one of these movies is recognizably the work of the Archers. A film by Powell and Pressburger doesn’t look or feel like anything else: it’s the result of a very British mixture of humor, common sense, visual and narrative ingenuity, superstition, and a genuine curiosity about how the world works. If The Red Shoes had nothing to offer but dancing, music, and art direction, it would still be a classic, even an object of religious devotion. The fact that it also has a richly detailed story, fine performances, gorgeous locations, and cinematic inventiveness to rival Citizen Kane—and in color!—makes it seem almost inhumanly generous. Add this to the fact that it’s the best movie ever made on the creative process, and you have the work of art, after a lifetime of moviegoing, that has inspired and consoled me more than any other film.

Tomorrow: the dangerous example of Stanley Kubrick.