The Intruder (2004)

L'Intrus, France, 119 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Jean-Luc Nancy

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Stuart Staples

Editor: Nelly Quettier

Cast: Michel Subor, Gregoire Colin, Yekaterina Golubeva, Beatrice Dalle, Florence Loiret Caille, Alex Descas, Bambou, Lolita Chammah

Not surprisingly, perhaps, director and cowriter Claire Denis likely intends many different things by the title of this ponderous and obscure but enrapturingly beautiful picture. Based on an essay by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it’s the story of a one-time mercenary, Louis Trebor (Michel Subor), in search of literally a new heart and thereby somehow his long-estranged son. The heart is thus an intrusion into his body, he wants desperately to intrude on his son’s life, and the movie itself is an intrusion into the essay (which I don’t know). Early in the show, living in a cabin on an isolated mountain of the western Alps, Louis kills and disposes of the body of a random nighttime intruder into his cabin. So on so forth. The knife is an intrusion on that body. Scraping electric guitar music by Tindersticks principal Stuart Staples.

In fact, thinking of it some more, the title can be taken as an intrusion into cinema history. It’s stupefyingly generic. There are other movies or TV miniseries called The Intruder from 1933, 1953, 1962, 1975, 1979, 1981, 1999, 2005, 2010, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2024, and 2025. I don’t think I’ve seen any of them. The most famous might be the 1962, directed by Roger Corman and starring William Shatner, Frank Maxwell, and Beverly Lunsford. The 2019 horror show gets pride of place in the IMDb search returns. I’m not saying all these intrusions are conscious on Denis’s part, especially not the other pictures. But I bet a bunch of them are. It’s just the way she rolls.

“The Black, Dead Thing” (1933)

Frank Belknap Long’s original title for this story, as published in the edition of Weird Tales pictured above, is a nice artifact of the H.P. Lovecraft era in horror, heaving up with many a gasping shudder “The Black, Dead Thing”—you can positively feel the quivering in that comma. Long was among Lovecraft’s best-known correspondents. “Second Night Out,” the way I found this story in an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology and the way it mostly appears in reprints now, is quite a bit more reserved, focused on a key point in an oceangoing journey as I understand it: getting one’s “sea legs” after a day or two of nausea from the pitching rolls of the deep sea. I like the ambiguity, which is in the story but not the original title, that the incident at hand could as well be a delusion while sick. On the other hand, in many ways the story does seem to be focused on erasing any possibility of mistake. Long’s story reminded me of F. Marion Crawford’s classic 1885 “The Upper Berth,” with its creepy corporeal ghost onboard a ship at sea. This thing, like that thing, smells bad. Coming into contact with it, in the dark of course, it feels like a writhing eel. That’s colorful. Our guy’s vacation probably never had a chance and we’re told he spent a long time saving the money for it. I will mention that the black, dead thing is thankfully not racism (you have to worry about that in 1933) but rather something more on the cosmic order, ancient and eternal. Long attacks with blunt instruments, shocking us with darkness and sensory details, attempting somewhat successfully to numb us by evoking a massive featureless face of evil. Whoever changed the title might have done Long and all of us a favor, more lulling us into what becomes a brutal inexplicable life-or-death confrontation. And this, whatever it is, we learn, always seems to happen to someone on the second night out of this voyage. I wouldn’t call this story a classic—so far Long looks to me like one of the more minor figures in Lovecraft’s personal coterie—but I must say I appreciated getting to the eel thing on my own within the story, rather than shrieked at me from the title.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur
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Brian Eno With Kevin Shields, “The Weight of History” (2018)

[listen up! (9:12)]

Here’s one of those special Record Store Day products that’s definitely worth a listen. Full disclosure, I still have not made a Record Store Day purchase. This lengthy track was released as one side of a so-called double-A-sided 12-inch single. It comes of a collaboration between ambient meister Brian Eno and My Bloody Valentine principal Kevin Shields, an association that feels so natural it also feels overdue for 2018. The other side of the 12-inch, “Only Once Away My Son,” was recorded in 2017, but that’s not much better. As a dirge, “The Weight of History” feels haunted, with foghorn bottoms, unexpected crackling textures, winsome melody, and moaning. In many ways it seems most like just another artifact in Eno’s ambient gallery. But if there’s one thing Eno is good at (and actually there are many) it’s collaborating. Shields and MBV had a reputation for making the loudest music anyone had ever heard in concert, and the albums were decked out with dense layers of feedback and other churning, vibrating noise as setting for delicate melodies. Eno provides the gently lilting tape loops here while Shields works his gentled tremolo-based distortions. Google AI, which sounds like a fan, lets it rip (sourced to Wikipedia and GuitarGangsters.net): “Shields scales back the aggressive, wall-shaking volume of My Bloody Valentine in favor of micro-textured ambient architecture. He swaps explosive distortion for subtle, process-driven soundfields that lock into Brian Eno's generative and tape-loop aesthetics.... Instead of aggressive whammy-bar chord sweeps, Shields applies his signature pitch-bending tremolo control to sustain string whines and single-note drones, keeping the pitch gently drifting and ‘out of tune’ by micro-intervals.” All I can add is: Yup. No wonder people get hooked on using our future robot overlords to help write.

The Secret Glory (1922)

Here’s another novel by Arthur Machen casually hailed here and there as a masterpiece. He spent several years on it at the turn of the 20th century, but it was not published until 1922. In a preface, Machen notes an encounter with an old teacher and mentor. “I am just finishing a book,” Machen says, “a book that everybody will hate.” It’s a fair assessment. I had a good deal of trouble getting through it, though it’s not without its merits. I loved his sardonic take on public school sports and the cruelties of adolescents in bunches. The main character, Ambrose Meyrick, is obviously autobiographical, a dreamer and intellect with no aptitude for physical play. He’s at the school because his uncle is a master, who unfortunately abuses him. An early (and lengthy) caning of Ambrose is notably vivid and sadistic. Ambrose is a reject but he’s on to bigger things in the scheme of life and death, namely, as near as I can tell, the Holy Grail itself. Machen’s speculation on how it got to Wales has something to do with Romans and/or the Roman Catholic Church. As an interesting side note, Protestants are much reviled here. The story makes a kind of sense but only the maddest kind. Ambrose never finishes school and eventually escapes the small Welsh town and his uncle. His father, now dead, was a certified mystic so Ambrose comes by it honestly. His uncle, a cleric as well as instructor, is all materialist with earthly ambitions. Machen is acid on him. Eventually scenes out of Rabelais intrude the narrative. Ambrose is a fan and speaks to his girlfriend about Panurge, Pantagruel, and such. Mostly bewildering for me, but it does make me want to read Rabelais. There is a grail here. It seems likely to be the Holy Grail, from the way it’s described and by its hypnotizing colors. Ambrose is bohemian in lifestyle, traveling to London with his girlfriend and living with her there (and reading Rabelais). I don’t, contra Machen, hate The Secret Glory, but it was a slog for me. It seemed like a lot of work for very little. It also seemed to promise more, perhaps, with a slower, more thoughtful reread, but I’m not sure I will ever get to that.

In case the library is closed due to AI assault, which is not happening.

True Colours (1980)

Split Enz started as an art-rock unit in the ‘70s, based in New Zealand and under heavy influence of Roxy Music. As the Finn brothers, Tim and Neil, came to the fore of the outfit via band changes and fortunes they morphed toward pop music. True Colours is a certain ideal of the late-‘70s new wave version of pop, a complete package, all decked out in primary colors. Your choice for the cover scheme: yellow and blue, red and green, purple and yellow, or blue and orange. More combos were added later and the vinyl itself was laser-etched with the triangles, squares, and rectangles featured on the cover. It was a complete package because, in terms of the music, there’s not one clinker on this album. Most were written by Tim Finn. Two—“Double Happy” written by Eddie Rayner and the LP closer “The Choral Sea” written by the band—are instrumentals, which suggests to me a band so enraptured in love with what they can create they simply shed them like sparks. They are high points. Compare “Space Invader” on The Pretenders. On the rest of the set, the simple verse-chorus-bridge attacks with guitar breaks and vocal harmonies are classic pop music to my brain. A few weeks ago I was complaining about the Whitney Houston / American Idol warbling that now occupies swaths of the pop music landscape (e.g., Kesha), but this Split Enz album is more like it for me. Beatlesque at its most abstract, never specifically evoking them. The songs range from the high-spirited romp of “Shark Attack” to the near-operatics of “I Hope I Never,” so sweetly sad. “Poor Boy” is stately, almost majestic, with a hypnotic tinkling hook. “How Can I Resist Her” sports a great, zooming, synthy instrumental break. Part of the secret brew to new wave and True Colours is an openness to synthesizers and keyboards for textures and light futuristic touches. It was a good direction for pop music and endured for much of the ‘80s (Whitney Houston was released in 1985 and the rest is history there). I’m not sure why, but, as much as I loved this album in its time and still (and earlier efforts such as Dizrythmia too), I never followed closely the further adventures of the Finn brothers, including Crowded House, which I don’t know well though generally like what I’ve heard. None of it has ever sounded as good to me as True Colours. It is a quintessential new wave landmark, with Drums and Wires, Fear of Music, The Pretenders, and 154. One of the best.

“Like Mother Used to Make” (1949)

I’m starting to see where Shirley Jackson may have been done some disservice by editors and/or publishers. The Library of America edition edited by Joyce Carol Oates restores the full title to Jackson’s Lottery collection originally published in 1949: The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris. It was simply The Lottery and Other Stories in most editions. The idea of James Harris, a literary figure who traces back at least to an English 17th-century murder ballad, may not have been fully developed across all of Jackson’s stories in the collection, but James Harris (or variations of the name) shows up frequently as a sinister demonic figure, notably in “The Daemon Lover” and “Like Mother Used to Make.” “Like Mother” is one of his best appearances. He seems to have unusual powers, or at least a preternatural, seductive confidence. David and Marcia are neighbors in an apartment building and have some kind of ill-defined relationship. Marcia would likely call it a friendship, no more. David has traits that suggest he could be gay. He’s fussy and fastidious and thinks a lot about things like decor and silverware patterns. Marcia is more of an ungainly mess, always late to everything. On this occasion, David is making her dinner at his place and we get well inside his head as he works on it. He doesn’t seem terribly attracted to Marcia. In many ways she annoys him. But they are friends and get along with mild friction. Just as they finish eating Marcia hears someone at her door across the way. It’s “Mr. Harris,” who says, “I just thought I’d stop by.” He completely takes over the social situation and seems to have designs on Marcia. Somehow, before long, David is excusing himself from his own place, leaving it and going over to Marcia’s. He can hear that Marcia and Mr. Harris have turned on his radio. “Wearily,” he begins to clean Marcia’s place. It’s a remarkable situation and unsettling to witness as a reader. Even if David is gay it’s still humiliating, forced (somehow) to leave his own place to them. Jackson may have intended, somewhat homophobically, to deepen David’s humiliation by making him gay and explicitly less manly and thus prone to the will of Harris, as opposed to gay and why would he care. Although, well, it’s 1949 and likely at best he is closeted—and he abandons his own place to them, that’s the fine point, bowing to Harris. Presumably Harris could have David too if he wanted.

Shirley Jackson, Novels and Stories
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Charles Bradley, “Can’t Fight the Feeling” (2018)

[listen up!]

Charles Bradley was born in 1948 but found few outlets for his musical ambitions until this century. Per Wikipedia, his first single came in 2002. Abandoned by his mother, he spent much of his early life homeless on the streets and roaming the country at large until finally working as a restaurant chef gave him an income he could rely on. The long delay in recognition was partly a matter of his stage fright and also perhaps due to his calling card as a James Brown impersonator. He learned his chops there—how could it not have served his career well?—but may have limited his bookings. I don’t hear Brown as much in this early single from his last album, Black Velvet, as I do the Stax-like approach of an act like Sam & Dave or Eddie Floyd, defined in many ways by its horn charts. Others have compared him to Otis Redding. But JB is plainly in the mix as well. Bradley’s rough guttural style of singing and his throat-clotted screams say it all. There’s no question he belongs in the halls of soul music. He died too soon, even at 68, with too little public appreciation. He was a natural, and no doubt the close study of classic 1960s soul served him well even if it did take most of his life to start to get the attention he deserved. In 2018 I did not know his story, already dead by then from stomach cancer, with less than 20 years in any kind of spotlight. I just liked the raw feel and horns of “Can’t Fight the Feeling” and the faith Bradley obviously had in soul music and all the ways it can galvanize, soothe, and reach ecstatic heights.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025)

For such a frothy light time travel comedy with a notable Ghostbusters vibe, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie comes with a long, winding pedigree. First, in the late 2000s, it was an internet-based series, Nirvana the Band the Show (the extra “n” in Nirvanna the Band would come later). Ten years on it was two seasons in TV-land proper, with Nirvanna the Band the Show. Now add the Movie, which is where I come in, the only one I know. But apparently the idea is basically the same in all: Nirvanna the Band principals Matt Johnson (vocalist, and director and cowriter of this picture) and Jay McCarrol (pianist and cowriter) are perpetually trying to get a booking at the Rivoli nightclub in their hometown of Toronto, cooking up various outrageous publicity stunts. Nirvanna the Band consists of McCarrol playing piano while Johnson improvises spoken-word rants and chants. The featured stunt here involves leaping off the top of the CN Tower and parachuting into the Skydome stadium. If you’re like me this amazing footage is looked at through your fingers. The human fear of heights is universal, and severely challenged here. These guys get away with everything, parking their RV any old place in Toronto and getting dangerous tools up onto the tower with them. Anyway, the weather’s bad, the Skydome roof is closing even as they jump, and they can’t make it through in time, landing instead on the roof of the stadium. That’s pretty much the way everything goes here. Johnson and McCarrol have lots of simple comic ideas that work—camera crew in tow for everything, for example, and making up shit we have no choice but to go along with, like the time travel aspect, which is all there to be discovered and unpacked, if you can. If it’s even possible. Johnson and McCarrol are likable blokes. Johnson likes to do his thinking with a whiteboard. His pants are ridiculously ripped. McCarrol obviously has most of the musical talent. The picture rushes about headlong and gets by on its own affability as much as anything. All bad language is bleeped out. I can’t speak to anyone who has been with them since about 2007, but I’m curious now about a reverse-engineering perspective and maybe looking into the earlier incarnations. I hesitate to guarantee a good time here, because this is a very odd one, but I can say for sure at least that I had a good time.

Crime and Punishment (1866)

The first of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s majors was a reread for me. I have always liked it, but perhaps never more. It is intense, sprawling, never less than fascinating, and compulsively readable—you just have to get used to the names. Our main guy, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, is one of literature’s great antiheroes. He’s not particularly likable but it’s also hard not to pull for him. As with the unnamed narrator in Notes From Underground he is at war with the terms of existence. There is some sense that his double-homicide axe murders—the first 100 to 150 pages of the novel are harrowing and mesmerizing—is some kind of philosophical test of a “superman” idea. Certainly the 23-year-old Raskolnikov has published an essay to that effect, which brings the attention of the police. There’s an even greater sense he has no idea why he killed. If it was part of a robbery he botched it entirely. If it’s to rid the world of a shrewish pawnbroker, all right, maybe, but he also kills the pawnbroker’s kindly sister Lizaveta. You need the stupid “superman” idea to justify that at all, and basically you can’t, and basically Raskolnikov knows that. But Dostoevsky is not done with just these murders. He goes spinning off handfuls of threads with a web of characters associated with Raskolnikov—his mother and sister, his sister’s suitors, a good and loyal friend, destitute families, and a police investigator who is reported to be the model for TV’s Columbo. Crime and Punishment was serialized and involved agonies of rewriting for Dostoevsky. What he produced may feel impromptu and full of digressions but in fact it is well organized for what it is doing. It works first as a thriller and then, as long as it has your attention, it has another million things to tell you and they are all interesting. You are there for them. I don’t know how to describe reading this amazing novel any other way. It has always held my attention even though I don’t always remember specific details. How could I forget it was a double-homicide axe murder?! Yet what I always remember, even when it’s not as fresh, is that it is a wonderful experience to read it. Any translation, but this time I was happy to go with Constance Garnett again, one of the great translators of Dostoevsky (and Chekhov too).

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

Brazil (1985)

UK / USA, 132 minutes

Director: Terry Gilliam

Writers: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown, Charles Alverson

Photography: Roger Pratt

Music: Michael Kamen

Editor: Julian Doyle

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Katherine Helmond, Kim Greist, Ian Holm, Robert De Niro, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Bob Hoskins, Derrick O’Connor, Peter Vaughan, Kathryn Pogson, Jim Broadbent, Sheila Reid

I like the array of genre labels at IMDb for director and cowriter Terry Gilliam’s dystopic SF comedy. Besides the predictable—"dark comedy,” “dystopian sci-fi,” etc.—there is the perfectly apt “steampunk.” That gets to the heart of both what’s good and not so good about Brazil. It is dystopia practically by the numbers and wants it all ways it can get it: nightmares of calcified bureaucracy, ongoing random terrorist bombings, brutal police state, rampant incompetence, nothing mechanical really works, humanity is benumbed and disappearing into plastic surgery for the rich and misery for the rest. The future is crowded, overheated, and overstuffed. The technology is semi-powerful PC computers in Victorian garb. Office workers look at Marx Brothers movies on them when the boss isn’t looking. Yes, steam is visible.

Jonathan Pryce is Sam Lowry, a low-ranking bureaucrat happy to hunker down in his specific situation. He wants no further responsibilities. But his mother (Katherine Helmond) is rich, can’t stand the stigma of his lack of ambition, and keeps pulling strings to get him promoted. He has so far resisted them successfully. At night he has dreams of a woman and then he thinks he sees her in real life. He uses the surveillance power of the state via his job to track her down. She’s Jill Layton (Kim Greist), a truck driver who may or may not have terrorist ties. It doesn’t matter for Sam, who has loved her from afar and now wants to love her up close. What could possibly go wrong?