A writer’s bucket list

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

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

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

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

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

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

In praise of David Thomson

The publication of the fifth edition of David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, the best book ever written on the movies, is cause for celebration, and an excuse for me to talk about one of the weirdest books in all of literature. Thomson is a controversial figure, and for good reason: his film writing isn’t conventional criticism so much as a single huge work of fiction, with Thomson himself as both protagonist and nemesis. It isn’t a coincidence that one of Thomson’s earliest books was a biography of Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy: his entire career can be read as one long Shandean exercise, in which Thomson, as a fictional character in his own work, is cheerfully willing to come off as something of a creep, as long as it illuminates our reasons for going to the movies.

First, a word about the book’s shortcomings. As in previous editions, instead of revising the entries for living subjects in their entirety, Thomson simply adds another paragraph or two to the existing filmographies, so that the book seems to grow by accretion, like a coral reef. This leads to inconsistencies in tone within individual articles, and also to factual mistakes when the entry hasn’t been updated recently enough—like the article on George Lucas, for instance, in which the latter two Star Wars prequels still evidently lie in the future. And the book is full of the kind of errors that occur when one tries to keep up, in print, with the vagaries of movie production—as when it credits David O. Russell with the nonexistent Nailed and omits The Fighter. (Now that this information is readily available online, Thomson should really just delete all of the detailed filmographies in the next edition, which would cut the book’s size by a quarter or more.)

And then, of course, there are Thomson’s own opinions, which are contrarian in a way that can often seem perverse. He’s lukewarm on Kurosawa, very hard on Kubrick (The Shining is the only movie he admires), and thinks that Christopher Nolan’s work “has already become progressively less interesting.” He thinks that The Wrestler is “a wretched, interminable film,” but he loves Nine. He displays next to no interest in animation or international cinema. There’s something to be outraged about on nearly every page, which is probably why the Dictionary averages barely more than three stars from reviewers on Amazon. And if you’re the sort of person who thinks that a critic whose opinions differ from your own must be corrupt, crazy, or incompetent—as many of Roger Ebert’s correspondents apparently do—then you should stay far, far away from Thomson, who goes out of his way to infuriate even his most passionate defenders.

Yet Thomson’s perversity is part of his charm. Edmund Wilson once playfully speculated that George Saintsbury, the great English critic, invented his own Toryism “in the same way that a dramatist or novelist arranges contrasting elements,” and there are times when I suspect that Thomson is doing the same thing. And it’s impossible not to be challenged and stirred by his opinions. There is a way, after all, in which Kurosawa is a more limited director than Ozu—although I know which one I ultimately prefer. Kubrick’s alienation from humanity would have crippled any director who was not Kubrick. Until The Dark Knight and Inception, Nolan’s movies were, indeed, something of a retreat from the promise of Memento. And for each moment of temporary insanity on Thomson’s part, you get something equally transcendent. Here he is on Orson Welles, for example, in a paragraph that has forever changed how I watch Citizen Kane:

Kane is less about William Randolph Hearst—a humorless, anxious man—than a portrait and prediction of Welles himself…As if Welles knew that Kane would hang over his own future, regularly being used to denigrate his later works, the film is shot through with his vast, melancholy nostalgia for self-destructive talent…Kane is Welles, just as every apparent point of view in the film is warmed by Kane’s own memories, as if the entire film were his dream in the instant before death.

On Spielberg and Schindler’s List:

Schindler’s List is the most moving film I have ever seen. This does not mean it is faultless. To take just one point: the reddening of one little girl’s coat in a black-and-white film strikes me as a mistake, and a sign of how calculating a director Spielberg is. For the calculations reveal themselves in these few errors that escape. I don’t really believe in Spielberg as an artist…But Schindler’s List is like an earthquake in a culture of gardens. And it helps persuade this viewer that cinema—or American film—is not a place for artists. It is a world for producers, for showmen, and Schindlers.

And, wonderfully, on what is perhaps my own favorite bad movie of all time:

Yet in truth, I think Kevin [Spacey] himself is the biggest experiment, and to substantiate that one has only to call to the stand Beyond the Sea, written, produced and directed by Kev and with himself as Bobby Darin. The result is intoxicating, one of the really great dreadful films ever made, worthy of an annual Beyond the Sea award (why not give it on Oscar night?), as well as clinching evidence that this man is mad. Anything could happen.

The result, as I note above, is a massive Proustian novel in which nearly every major figure in the history of film plays a role. (Thomson has already written a novel, Suspects, that does this more explicitly, and his book-length study of Nicole Kidman is manifestly a novel in disguise.) Reading the Dictionary, which is as addictive as Wikipedia or TV Tropes, is like diving headfirst into a vast ocean, and trying to see how deep you can go before coming up for air. Although if it really is a novel, it’s less like Proust than like Pale Fire, in which Thomson plays the role of Kinbote, and every article seems to hint darkly at some monstrous underlying truth. (In that light, even the book’s mistakes seem to carry a larger meaning. What does it mean, for instance, that Thomson’s brilliant article on Heath Ledger, in which he muses on “the brief purchasing power” of fame, was “inadvertently dropped” from the fifth edition?)

And what monstrous truth does the Dictionary conceal? It’s the same truth, which applies as much to Thomson himself as it does to you and me, as the one that he spells out, unforgettably, at the end of Rosebud, his study of Orson Welles:

So film perhaps had made a wasted life?
One has to do something.