Barbarian (2022)

[2022 review here]

Bulgaria / USA. 102 minutes

Director/writer: Zach Cregger

Photography: Zach Kuperstein

Music: Anna Drubich, Ronettes

Editor: Joe Murphy

Cast: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgard, Justin Long, Matthew Patrick Davis, Richard Brake, Jaymes Butler, Kate Nichols

(spoilers) Since at least 2013 and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Detroit’s amazing deterioration in areas such as Brightmoor has been there to be used as a powerful visual element for anyone willing to venture into them. Capitalism isn’t doing anything about it and whole blocks are going all the way back to nature, with barest hints of the decrepit decaying houses where people used to live. Barbarian makes good use of the wreckage. Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at night to her Airbnb destination in a pouring rainstorm and never gets a good look at the neighborhood until next morning, when it is almost as shocking for us as it is for her. The camera takes its time swiveling and panning and showing us everything it can see.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview with a documentary filmmaker but already she’s in over her head by the whims of fate. The house at 476 Barbary has been double-booked and the other renter is already in there with the key. It’s an Airbnb nightmare. A large convention in town makes available hotel rooms scarce. The guy already there, Keith (Bill Skarsgard), doesn’t seem threatening, but you never know. Director and writer Zach Cregger reportedly based a lot of Keith and other males in Barbarian on a book by security specialist Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear, which details warning signals of dangerous men. If alarm bells are going off for Tess—and they are—they are going off for us as well through all the uncomfortable conversations that lead to Tess agreeing to stay there overnight. We won’t learn it for a while, but Keith is the least of her worries.

“The Autopsy” (1980)

David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, was high on Michael Shea at the time the anthology was published in 1987. Shea’s Nifft the Lean won a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1983. Hartwell compares Shea to H.P. Lovecraft and that seems about right—Shea even wrote a couple of tales set in the Cthulhu universe (then again, in the 20th century who didn’t?). The connection is easy to see in this long, dense, vividly detailed story. Hartwell classifies it as science fiction and perhaps partly because of that I also thought of the movie Alien, which came out the year before this story. The aliens here are also small like they are in the 1982 picture Liquid Sky, which in turn may also have been influenced by this story. It’s not clear exactly what the aliens in “The Autopsy” are looking for but it doesn’t seem to be anything good. Brute survival is one part of it. The alien we encounter has been on Earth for a while, taking possession of bodies and sucking the blood and life out of them, as needed. It’s not a vampire story in any other way, but it does have a certain element of cruelty that is at once gothic, modern, and very unsettling. And there’s no Kevin McCarthy to stand around shouting, "Listen to me! You're next! They're already here!" I don’t want to get distracted by categorizing, but I do think it's completely fair to call this story horror (ditto Alien, ditto Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Our main guy, a 57-year-old doctor with stomach cancer, has been called to a small mining town to perform autopsies of victims in a mysterious and suspicious explosion at the mine. The corpses are stored in an abandoned ice factory on the edge of town. It’s the middle of the night. As with Lovecraft’s work, another fair point of comparison is that “The Autopsy” requires patience and a continuing willingness to give yourself over to it. The gore is rich and plentiful, all dolled up in arcane medical / biological terminology. You can’t say the title doesn’t warn you. In the Lovecraft vein, Shea even includes a reference to going mad from an experience, and it’s better than most such Lovecraft scenes (sans “tittering,” which I admit was one of Lovecraft’s better recurring word choices). Lovecraft’s characters driven to madness are often a little unintentionally comical. There is no hint of laughs in “The Autopsy.” It is relentlessly grim. It goes to mind-bending places that are similar to those in Aleister Crowley’s “The Testament of Magdalen Blair.” It’s a regular head fuck. Recommended.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Carole King’s Tapestry (2021)

Loren Glass is an English professor at the University of Iowa. Born approximately in the ‘60s he came to Carole King and Tapestry by way of hippie parents and stepparents. I think his appreciations are sincere but they felt a little too pious for my taste. He does a good job of locating King and the album within their contexts, rock ‘n’ roll close to the moment it became rock and of course the singer-songwriter tradition and feminism. Some things I hadn’t really known before: Carole King was born Carol Klein, and Tapestry is her third solo album, following her flight to the West Coast from New York in the ‘60s. I’ve never known those first two albums. Though Glass has ties to rock critics such as Ann Powers, for better or worse he has little of the spirit. Admittedly the spirit can often be loud-mouthed braying. But I felt Glass was circumspect and respectful to a fault. On the other hand it may be the best way to approach the album. It’s a favorite of mine (and a million others) for various personal reasons. I still consider “It’s Too Late” one of the greatest pop songs ever made. My biggest complaint about this 33-1/3 volume is that it overdoes the footnotes—nearly 200 of them, usually bare citations, and often not useful. This is not the first 33-1/3 I’ve seen with citations, but Glass may have set the record for sheer numbers. I’m just too easily distracted by them in this form, too inured to the chatty kind that has something to add. My favorite section was “Trilogy,” covering King’s first three solo albums, which she later called a trilogy. It’s a nice way of ambling into Tapestry itself and Glass provides a very neat analysis. He also—as one must—addresses her background as one of the great Brill Building songwriters of the early ‘60s. There’s a reason Glass is so solemn—King is genuinely a giant of the music industry, a rock ‘n’ roll and rock icon, and a singer-songwriter iconoclast out of Laurel Canyon. After more than 50 years she is still daunting to consider. I wish more of Glass’s passion came through and less of his inhibitions, but it’s still a useful primer on King and her greatest album. His best geeky rock critic point is about the “Album Era” of rock and the place of Tapestry in it. He dates this Album Era as from 1965 to 1975. I could quibble, but fair enough!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

School Days (1976)

Rock critic Robert Christgau puts Stanley Clarke in the Meltdown list of his 1970s Consumer Guide (with England Dan and John Ford Coley, Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, Klaatu, Chuck Mangione, Jean-Luc Ponty, and many others you wouldn’t want to meet in a music discussion group). I can see the point, listening to School Days again lately, but the album has certain sentimental attachments for me and vivid mood memories of the mid-‘70s. It was given to me as a gift by a friend who also happened in his own right to be a highly active bass player, playing in a free jazz ensemble and jamming around. Clarke was a kind of peer, or maybe role model just five years ahead of him, a founding member of Return to Forever and long-time sideman to Chick Corea. School Days is Clarke’s fourth solo album and it raised his commercial profile to new heights, reaching #34 on the Billboard 200 album chart (#2 on Jazz Albums). At one time—say, shortly after the gift exchange—high points like the riff on the title song starting around 1:41 sounded positively heroic to me. I played it loud and I played it often. But after that first one (of six tracks total) the songs drift toward the inane, with various exercises attempting to evoke moods and such: “Quiet Afternoon,” “Desert Song,” “Hot Fun,” so on so forth. There’s a strong sense of dynamics here and an ability to take it down low. The horns are a nice touch, the vocals not so much. There’s too much focus on the bass, but, well. And I loved the overall antiseptic cleanliness of the sound, perhaps the primary appeal to me of fusion. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness. It was never so much the playing fast that did it for me as it was the doing so cleanly. These were virtues for me in 1976. See Al DiMeola (also on the Meltdown list) or Chick Corea, to come full circle and return to forever. Yet inevitably, in my experience, the antiseptic leads too surely to the sterile. Next stop punk-rock.

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Ultimo tango a Parigi, Italy / France, 129 minutes

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Writers: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, Agnes Varda, Jean-Louis Trintignant

Photography: Vittorio Storaro

Music: Gato Barbieri

Editors: Franco Arcalli, Roberto Perpignani

Cast: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Massimo Girotti, Veronica Lazar, Maria Michi, Gitt Magrini

I’ve been around the block so many different ways with this controversial picture I’m not even sure where to start. Like many, I must have been drawn to it in the first place by Pauline Kael’s ecstatic review of it in the early ‘70s, saying it “may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made.” I went to see it, of course, but in a skeptical mood, as a high school senior, and came away thinking the only thing great about it was Gato Barbieri’s soundtrack. It sounded even better to me on the OST album which I played a lot for years. For that matter it still sounds great, creaking in the background of the picture and, even more so, still, letting the soundtrack album play. I’m listening to it now. So good.

Then I came back to Last Tango in Paris in the ‘80s. I don’t know why—probably it was playing in a repertory theater and I didn’t have anything better to do. I had low expectations so naturally, perhaps, this time I was more impressed, especially with Marlon Brando as the low-life loser and US expatriate Paul. Perhaps the tortured romance in it resonated with the tortured romantic in me. Then I saw it a third time and thought it was too long and way too often too boring. I’ve seen it several times altogether now and never had exactly the same reaction. My look the other day came years after learning Maria Schneider, who plays the sexy ingenue Jeanne, registered complaints of mistreatment and manipulation on the set during the shoot, particularly in regard to the so-called butter scene, which is in line with the picture’s general exaltation of sex as end in itself, sex as sublimated violence, primal I suppose but pretentious even more, halfway trying to dignify rape as some kind of male mysticism. It was always an ugly, ignorant, foolish scene—start with the assumption that butter is an adequate lubricant. Learning of Schneider’s revelations tainted the whole movie for me, the main reason I turned away from it all this time.

Red Rooms (2023)

Here’s a French-Canadian movie with ambitions of addressing unhealthy public infatuations and obsessions with true-crime stuff, up to and including podcasters and so-called web sleuths and the many tricks of their trade. The statuesque, coldly numb Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy) has a day job as a model, with a terrific apartment in downtown Montreal. At home she is surrounded by high-end voice-activated computer equipment that enables her to pursue her various interests, which include checking her email, playing online poker for money, and looking for things on the “dark web” at large. She is presently attending the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who is charged with the murders, torture, and dismemberment of three teenage girls in separate incidents. He shot video of his depredations, two of which have been recovered and will be played at trial, although they don’t necessarily positively identify Chevalier, who wears a mask in the videos. Red Rooms intends to shock us with its revelations—“red rooms” are alleged sites on the dark web where people are tortured and killed, a kind of cross-pollination of OnlyFans and snuff films, suitable for Videodrome programming. But, while we hear the screaming and power tool noises in the brief clips we’re exposed to from the videos at the trial, we are never shown them. I’m not saying I’m disappointed (really, I’d rather not see these things) but it felt to me like a determinedly flinty movie going uncharacteristically soft. It might be an effort to get a more audience-friendly rating, but it has not been submitted anywhere for rating. Certainly, anyway, we can imagine what’s going on from the descriptions we’re given and what we hear, but it does seem notably coy. Kelly-Anne picks up a Chevalier groupie along the way, Clementine (Laurie Babin), and gives her a place to stay while the trial is going on. Clementine obviously represents a well-known type of troubled true-crime aficionado, but this all feels unlikely. Groupies like Clementine do exist, but I had trouble making out the motivations here. The icy Kelly-Anne seems to be a bit of a psychopath herself, is maybe the point, as she has illicitly acquired copies of the two known videos and we see how she acquires the third when she learns it is available. Another day, at the trial, Kelly-Anne shows up dressed explicitly as one of the victims, including metallic orthodontics on her teeth. She is forcibly ejected from the trial. I was not clear at all on why she did that. I liked a lot of things about Red Rooms but I’m not sure director and writer Pascal Plante ever brings it all the way home. Something at its center feels a little hollow, phony and pretentious.

“Ghosts” (1986)

The New York Trilogy
“Ghosts” is the second piece in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, a meditation on or perhaps a novel about detective fiction and New York City. It’s the shortest in the so-called trilogy, too short to call a novel itself, at 60 pages even shorter than Animal Farm or Heart of Darkness. But it is dense, compulsively readable, and eventually almost haunting. It starts with some obscure riffing: “First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown.” Let me explain. All the characters in this story are named for colors. The action (such as it is) takes place on Orange St. I don’t think Auster was making fun of Travis McGee novels, but it’s possible. Anyway, the opening has it right. The main character is a detective named Blue. A man named White (who may be disguised, wearing pancake makeup) hires him to follow a man named Black. In fact, White has already rented an apartment across the street from Black, where Blue can keep an eye on him directly. But mostly all Black does it sit at a table and write or, less frequently, read Walden. Black leaves his place once in a while for groceries or on other errands. The vigil is much like the one that ends the first entry in the trilogy, “City of Glass,” although this one is more comfortable. It lasts more than a year, and along the way Blue abandons a girlfriend without meaning to. It’s nearly as confusing as one of the unusual episodes with Black, where Blue witnesses what appears to be a breakup scene. But we get no further information about that. Or about why Blue abandons his girlfriend, for that matter. The tail job is very boring for Blue, but somehow fascinating for us as readers, much like “City of Glass.” I kept waiting for Auster’s deadpan style to slip into open mockery, but the color scheme of the character names is about as close as he gets to treating it like a joke. He does get at a certain emptiness, not just in detective fiction but extensible to all life, which is a pretty neat trick for something that has many earmarks of arch po-mo business. But there’s also an unmistakable sincerity to what Auster is doing here that carries it off well (unless he has actually fooled me). Also, perhaps most importantly, Auster is a good writer, slightly obsessed but lucid, and a pleasure to read.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
Story not available online.

Wanda (1970)

USA, 102 minutes

Director/writer: Barbara Loden

Photography/editor: Nicholas T. Proferes

Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Jerome Thier

Although director and writer Barbara Loden made two more short films in 1975, The Frontier Experience (25 minutes) and The Boy Who Liked Deer (18 minutes), Wanda was her only feature. She died in 1980 at the age of 48 having spent most of her career as a model or stage and occasional film actress. The filmmaker Elia Kazan was a kind of mentoring figure for her. She appeared in his Splendor in the Grass in 1961, won a Tony Award in 1964 for After the Fall (directed by Kazan), and married Kazan in 1967. Her bleak vision and semi-improvisational film style have earned her comparisons to John Cassavettes. Wanda got some attention at the time it was released, including an International Critics Award from the Venice Film Festival, but for the most part it has lingered in obscurity until more recently, when a resurgence of interest in women’s pictures gave it renewed life. Perhaps the most famous beneficiary of this trend was Chantal Akerman’s long domestic meditation, Jeanne Dielman, which won the most recent Sight & Sound poll and shot up from #85 to #12 in one year on the critical roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Since 2006 Wanda, similarly, has risen from as low as #864 in that survey to its present position at #151.

Wanda is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden and home of the US version of The Office. It is punishingly low-budget, opening on a desolate scene of a giant coal mining operation and a house that is absurdly there. The house belongs to Wanda’s sister and brother-in-law. She is crashing there but not particularly welcome. She has a date that day in divorce court, where she appears late and wearing rollers in her hair. Her husband, her two kids, and her husband’s new girlfriend are stuck waiting for her. “She doesn’t care about anything,” the husband tells the judge while they are waiting. “She’s a lousy wife. She’s always bumming around, drinking.” This remark, coming so early in the picture, set up an expectation for me that turns out not to be true at all.

“The Doll” (1980)

This story by Joyce Carol Oates shows how sharp she can be at creating memorable effects even as she works with staples of horror. Here a professional woman, age 44, president of a private college, is visiting a city she has never been to before, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She sees what she is certain must have been the model for a dollhouse she had as a girl, a present for her 4th birthday. It was a big dollhouse—36 inches high—and detailed by a craftsman, some distant relative. She has fond memories of the dollhouse and seeing a mansion that looks just like it unsettles her. She stops the car, leaves the key in the ignition and her purse on the front seat, and stands before the house in reverie, trying to decide whether to ring the doorbell and introduce herself. She thinks she must be connected to this family somehow. But she decides to continue on to the conference she is in town for. But later that night she can’t sleep. She’s no stranger to insomnia and decides to pay that call at the mansion after all. This idea alone makes me nervous. It’s after 10 but before 11. She thinks it might not be too late if there are lights on downstairs. What follows is the centerpiece of the story, which seems most likely to be a dream (if you’re looking for the rational explanation here). It moves like a dream, feels like a dream—never easy to do, but Oates pulls it off. She has also calibrated her college president’s point in life, just beyond child-bearing age and never with time for a man. “I am not opposed to marriage for myself, she once said, with unintentional naivete, but it would take so much time to become acquainted, to go out with him, and talk.” The dream explores, at almost shockingly primal levels, how she views herself—as a doll. A simulacrum of a real woman, just as the simulacrum she meets in the mansion is that of a real man (in appearance it looks suspiciously like one of her childhood dolls). Oates’s descriptive language blurs the line and then she lets sharp edges flash out unexpectedly. It’s partly a playtime fantasy with dolls, but the bottom can fall out and leave the abyss on plain view. But the next day she’s up and back at the conference again.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
Story not available online.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

I read John Fowles’s third novel (after The Collector and The Magus) in the ‘70s. I might have seen the Oscar-bait movie that came of it too, with Meryl Streep. The only thing I remembered when I was coming back to The French Lieutenant’s Woman recently is that it’s more genteel than the first two, but comes with its own bag of literary stuntwork. Fowles attempts a 19th-century Victorian gothic romance, set in 1867. He gets the stuffy language down reasonably well and manages to keep it readable too (though not as well as Susanna Clarke would do some decades later). The narrative voice—seemingly standard third-person omniscient—often slips the reins, letting us know he is writing a century later, implicitly and even explicitly comparing the eras. A revelation to one character, for example, is likened to a nuclear strike on a city. Eventually, John Fowles himself climbs down off his narrative perch and injects himself into the story, telltale beard and all. It’s done gracefully enough but you have to wonder to what purpose, beyond showing off. The novel is surprisingly effective and absorbing. Both times I read it I didn’t want to put it down. The story is about a governess, Sarah Woodruff, in a seaside port who appears to have been deranged by a failed illicit love affair with, yes, a French lieutenant. He appears to have abandoned her. You have to use the word “appears” a lot with this one because many things are not as they seem. Fowles never entirely escapes his idea that life is better now (that is, in 1967), which is not entirely convincing even though I’m inclined to it myself. A gentleman shows up, with likely a rank to inherit and engaged already, and falls in love with Woodruff. She is fiercely independent, perversely protecting what we now (post-1967) would call her personal agency. The story takes a lot of twists and turns. Fowles has created a complex and interesting character in Woodruff and a good supporting cast with the rest. The ending is a model of ambiguity and a little frustrating for the cold calculations of it. I’m not wild about the trickery—I like my omniscient narrators anonymous and out of the fray. After that it's closer to a romance that’s too close to cheesy. But it’s never cheesy, only close, and it’s always compulsively readable. But here my adventures with Fowles ended. I think I attempted but never finished Daniel Martin and that was it. But now I’ve read both The Magus and this one a couple times each. Has to mean something.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.