Better Living Through Criticism (2016)

A.O. Scott presently labors at the New York Times as a film critic, where he has worked since 2000. I liked his attempt here to define and defend the role of critics, a vocation (or avocation) that has existed for centuries—millennia—but always under a vague cloud of illegitimacy and forever on the verge of ending abruptly. Nazi types are one problem ("When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver," "Journalism is the enemy of the people"). Capitalism more generally doesn't like the critical enterprise much either. Newspapers and magazines carried the burden for a century or two but they were always folding and now the whole industry looks sketchy. Lately it's been the internet and digital and social media as a more likely source, but the amateurism there also makes it a threat to professionalism. I do share Scott's mistrust of IMDb and Amazon reviewers, bloggers, and other amateurs more or less giving away their work, even though I am precisely part of the problem there. But what do you do? We need the eggs, as the old joke has it. ("My brother thinks he's a chicken." ... "Thinks he's a chicken! Why don't you take him to a doctor?" h/t Woody Allen.) At any rate, one of the hardest parts for everyone is defining critics and criticism, which Scott gives a go. You can argue he fails at defining it precisely, but he certainly draws a large circle around everything it might be. His sources are fun to follow as he reaches back for Aristophanes, Samuel Johnson, Susan Sontag, Yvor Winters, and any number of formidable figures of the past who have engaged his questions. He even includes Socrates-style dialogues with himself in short intervening chapters. He looks for the popular image of critics in intriguing places, such as the movies All About Eve and Ratatouille. He boldly claims criticism as a creative endeavor coequal with all other arts. He suggests that art itself is a kind of critique of life, with the artist in the reviewer's position. Artist and critic both use their respective materials toward the ends of judgment, or discernment, and sharing experience. In spite of his wit and light touch, Scott seemed a little gloomy to me about the prospects for the 21st century. He makes a strong argument that as long as there has been print there have been critics. In fact, in some ways it's depressing how much criticism there is and always has been. Today's bloggers are yesteryear's ink-stained wretches writing bad reviews of Moby-Dick. But that's not entirely fair. All critics miss obvious things. Just a few weeks ago I was remembering the animus Rolling Stone used to have for Led Zeppelin. And, in fact, one of Scott's best sections here is called "How to Be Wrong," addressing the inevitability and perhaps even the necessity for error, in assessing the ongoing competitions between innovation and convention, the latest shiny new thing versus musty old reliables. Scott observes the widespread exasperation with critics and criticism—the truth is most critics feel that way about them too. But he knows well the siren call of it, that urge to share a profound experience with others, which often is legitimated by encountering criticism for the first time. Scott does a nice job of outlining the situation, both from the outside and the inside, and he makes a good case for the various utilities of criticism too.

In case it's not at the library.

"Winter Dreams" (1922)

Read story by F. Scott Fitzgerald online.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published this story in 1922 and it's standard fare in many ways, more in the vein of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, though it is also considered a foundational story for The Great Gatsby. A young man from Minnesota—"Black Bear Lake," as opposed to the White Bear Lake which actually exists there—goes East for an Ivy League education, returns home, sets up in business, and eventually moves to New York City. Dexter Green is his name. Getting rich is his game. The woman he falls for, Judy Jones, is a kind of early pastiche of Daisy Buchanan and especially Jordan Baker, both in The Great Gatsby—beautiful, and careless. Dexter falls in love with her almost at first sight, when she is 11 and he is just a few years older. Not much happens beyond random lifelong encounters between them, though it is marked by Fitzgerald's gift for wonderfully extravagant language. Describing a summer evening scene by a lake, for example, he writes, "Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet." Lines like that are one of the main reasons it's so difficult to make a movie of his work. He casts spells that only words can. Meanwhile, Dexter is busy getting rich and Judy is busy breaking hearts. That's what we do in a Fitzgerald story. It's also apparent from this story and the way it moves, again, why Fitzgerald had such a hard time accepting the realities of America and the world in the Great Depression '30s. He preferred the middle-class greed fantasies of the '20s, the "roaring" '20s, which he had a hand in inventing and mythologizing. So the people in this story golf and belong to country clubs, spend summers at lakes sailing, and in general extol the virtues of wealth (I use the word "virtues" ironically). Fitzgerald's characters are more or less innocents, these men falling in love with jaunty chicks. But it's a very white world and I'm not talking about the snow. It's a world scrubbed free of common troubles of the masses, a world of rank privilege. The justification, which he doesn't really even bother with, is "the human condition," people forever unsatisfied and into mischief. I'm prone to forgive Fitzgerald some because he could be such a peculiarly good writer. Even the names he comes up with are just wonderful: Dexter Green, who loves money, and first earned it as a golf caddy at the country club. Judy Jones (much later, Judy Simms). T.A. Hendrick. Mr. Hart and Mr. Sandoval (golfers). Krimslich (Dexter's mother's maiden name). Irene Scheerer (Dexter's fiancée). As for the title, it seems beside the point, in many ways. But I suppose it's an allusion to the ideal Fitzgerald had of the experience of growing up in the Midwest, dreaming to get money, a specific experience shared by Dexter Green and Jay Gatsby. For fans only.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"The Darling" (1990)

Story by Scott Bradfield not available online.

Scott Bradfield's story is little more than 25 years old but already it feels a little dated, working from the fascination with serial killers then entering its glamour phase in popular culture. The operative comparison is probably Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho novel, which came the year after. It's likely enough neither writer was particularly aware of the other. That was the time when serial killer trading cards came along, recall. It was just in the air. On a more conscious level, Bradfield is looking to Chekhov, who also wrote a story called "The Darling," which is also about a woman whose husbands keep dying on her. In the Bradfield story, however, it's because she keeps killing them. Bradfield is often attempting to have things both ways. It's a comedy more than anything, indulging ridiculous plot developments, yet the star of the show, Dolores Starr by name, is also a victim of abuse and incest, and in fact her father is her first victim. All right, maybe, but when Dolores meets and falls in love with another serial killer (they pull guns on one another simultaneously and it's true love, at least for awhile) you know you're in absurdist territory. And the problem with absurdist territory is that it means anything can happen, and thus nothing has significance. It's all just too easy. Bradfield's language is urbane and vaguely mocking. It's fun to read because he flatters you that you're in on the joke. But it's not a very good joke. As literary exercise it's impressive enough. I didn't know the Chekhov reference, and that story might have the effect of deepening this one, adding resonance. Nabokov would appear to be another obvious source. In the first paragraph, the third-person narrator plays with Dolores's name the way Humbert Humbert plays with Lolita's in that novel, and Lolita's name is also Dolores. So we have a smart and witty writer having some fun, and in fact, Bradfield is among the first to get to this kind of thing. So props to him. He may even deserve more credit than I can say. At this juncture, however, what he deserves credit for is something we're all a little tired of (and have been since approximately Oliver Stone's 1994 movie Natural Born Killers). The story is hampered by other small problems—it's distracting that the rare serial killer who is a woman is the main character, making it even harder to believe, and then there's the enduring problem of one gender writing from the other's point of view. It doesn't tend to go well. Dolores gets away with everything until it is convenient to the story for her to be captured, imprisoned, and become a celebrity. Points for prescience in popular culture trends. Docked for not including zombies.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

True Romance (1993)

USA / France, 120 minutes
Director: Tony Scott
Writers: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary
Photography: Jeffrey L. Kimball
Music: Hans Zimmer
Editors: Michael Tronick, Christian Wagner
Cast: Patricia Arquette, Christian Slater, Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, James Gandolfini, Bronson Pinchot, Saul Rubinek, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt, Samuel L. Jackson, Conchata Ferrell, Michael Rapaport, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore

As a matter of pure coincidence, I happened to run across a listicle on the Internet this morning when I sat down to write, The 15 Best Movies About Lovers on the Run. It not only put True Romance at the tippy-toppest of the heap but also included most of the other titles I'd thought to jot down while looking at it again recently: Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde, Something Wild, Wild at Heart. The only one from my notes not on that writer's list was After Hours, which after all is not so much lovers on the run as man in over his head. A man in over his head is often a natural feature of lovers-on-the-run movies, including True Romance. A man in over his head, but in this case a man rising to the occasion, and in more than easy comical ways.

The listicle writer was also extremely positive about Quentin Tarantino's script, calling it "the purest, coolest, and most honest thing Tarantino has ever written." After Jackie Brown, which I think wins even just on those three specifics, I'm inclined to agree. True Romance is a beautiful underclass Elvis and Marilyn story about a girl from Tallahassee, Florida, and a comic book store clerk from Detroit whose faith in love carries the day. Already Tarantino's greatest strengths are on display, in the way the dialogue rolls, in the way the characters intermesh, and yes, in the way the violence explodes.

The Martian (2015)

Ridley Scott's latest foray into science fiction could well be his third-best, after Alien and Blade Runner lo these many years. It's not as ambitious or interesting as Prometheus, but it's also not a mess. The model here is not actually science fiction, but more like rescue-at-sea action thriller, in the manner of The Perfect Storm or, especially, Apollo 13. Because it reminded me so much of Apollo 13, in fact, and because it's done so skillfully, I often felt like I was looking at something closer to a documentary. I had to keep reminding myself we haven't seen manned missions to Mars yet, let alone anything like the things happening here. But everything seemed extremely probable, which I count as a plus. The Martian is more science than fiction, with Matt Damon burnishing his uber-geek persona as the ultimate badass Bill Nye the Science Guy. Here he is seen using science to treat his wounds, to make water, to grow potatoes, to repurpose the high-tech gear, to do everything that has to be done for which he can think of a scientific solution. The science is thrilling—really. This picture is full of object lessons for the aspiring rationalist. Matt Damon is Mark Watney the Astronaut Guy, who is accidentally left behind on Mars during a storm. As his plight becomes a cause celebre back on Earth the movie swells to big emotional media-driven places, with everybody pitching in to help bring him home and people gathering in city squares to fervently watch developments together on giant TV screens. It's a unifying day for humanity, and for science, which is always nice to hear about. And it's as lucid as can be, as one after another scientific problem is addressed and solved for. Perhaps because I recently read a book about the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon, The Martian seemed reasonably realistic to me about the way unanticipated problems crop up and are overcome, albeit under a lot of stress. Maybe that's what I liked about it. So hip hip hooray for science, hip hip hooray for technology, and hip hip hooray for this very nicely done movie. The script arguably has problems telegraphing its surprises by being at such pains to hide them, and there are other minor problems. It's all just a little smug. But it's fast for its longish running time of 141 minutes and there are generous portions of hail fellow well met joie de vivre. It works fine and it's a lot of fun.

Alien (1979)

USA / UK, 117 minutes
Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Photography: Derek Vanlint
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editors: David Crowther, Terry Rawlings, Peter Weatherley
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Jones

Every time I come back to Alien I am somehow surprised all over again by how good it is—setting aside the first time I saw it and the trauma it caused me, and could well cause you too if you happen to have never seen it. It's a very scary movie, first and foremost, grimly determined to be exactly that. But once past that, with all the shocks and surprises it delivers about the reproductive and survival processes of the terrifying alien monster—"alien" in every sense of the word—the sheer elegance of how this picture is put together shines: savvy in conception, heavy on production design, with a uniformly excellent cast, a tight focus on a single predicament across confined spaces, and with utterly no mercy. It's equal parts great science fiction and great horror, and it is full of twists and turns, some of which I'm going to talk about, so spoiler alert.

It starts with the gleaming spaceships of 2001 and Star Wars and adds rust and office politics. The spaceship in Alien is more on the order of a river barge, with battered and well-used industrial workstations. It's just a corporate freighter mostly empty of life except for the crew of seven, two of whom, blue-collar working stiffs, bicker with the others about their compensation and other grievances. The humdrum ongoing mission (toting materials from one place to another around the known universe) is interrupted when the crew is wakened from deep traveling sleep for a visit to a planet from which a distress signal has been detected. Everyone inside and outside of the movie has a bad feeling about responding to it, the usual starting point for a horror movie. You know how it goes: Don't spend the night in that house. Don't spread out in the woods to look for your missing friend. And whatever you do, don't answer that distress signal.

Tender Is the Night (1934)

Tender Is the Night seems to come up a lot as the novel to read next by F. Scott Fitzgerald if you like The Great Gatsby. People genuinely seem to go for it. The 1998 Modern Library list of greatest 20th-century novels, for example—which has Gatsby at #2 (behind the inevitable Ulysses)—puts Tender Is the Night at no less than #28. It's ahead of, among others, All the King's Men, The Call of the Wild, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Maltese Falcon, Pale Fire, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sister Carrie, and many others that seem plainly much better to me. I will echo the sentiment that if you like Gatsby you might as well try Tender, but in my experience it's a sad pile of fragments by comparison. This may be partly a reflection of how much I like The Great Gatsby—a favorite of mine for its brilliant structuring, its perfect vantage from which to observe the '20s high life on Long Island, the way it subtly expands to encompass something as universal and persistent as the American Dream itself, and of course for the beauty of the language. The language in Tender Is the Night is about as beautiful as ever, I can confirm that. That was Fitzgerald's enduring gift, and it's there at least in flashes in practically everything he did. I can also throw in the personal caveat that the whole Zelda / Paris-in-the-'20s thing (see the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris for a primer on the basic cliches) has never much impressed me. I recall a time when it seemed like everyone I knew was reading Nancy Milford's Zelda biography and mooning over the romance. Maybe I missed an opportunity. Maybe reading it would help me understand Tender Is the Night better. But I do think fiction has to stand on its own, without the necessity of "understanding" factual underpinnings. And honestly, the ignorance on display in Tender Is the Night about mental illness should be enough to put anyone off nowadays. It's certainly something anyone reading it should bear in mind. Fitzgerald's fictionalized retelling of his and Zelda's trials and tribulations, while affecting in moments, feels constantly labored and overworked to me. A miasma of all too understandable depression hangs over it—understandable, but not a winning formula. It's often unpleasant too; there is something between the principals but it doesn't feel like love. It's not much surprise to learn the novel can also be taken as one more artifact from perhaps the most painful case of writer's block in literary history. Approach with caution.

In case it's not at the library.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993)

I'm really not sure which I like more in Scott McCloud's odd little kickoff to his eventual odd little trilogy (and counting?) of comics meditations: the ideas he lays out so clearly, or what a pleasure the thing is to read. His art style is clean, cartoony, and brims with the energy of his own ideas. Page by page, it's just so much fun to read. And all these years later it's apparent that some of his ideas are slowly but surely becoming the common currency. Example: "what happens between the panels," a concept I last heard directly referenced in the 2010 movie Super (which was pretty good!). Or, "This is not a pipe," which I know started nearly a century ago with Rene Magritte, but still, McCloud really applies the fine point to it. As with most formal arguments for the legitimacy of anything—in this case "comics," a word McCloud explicitly claims for his cause here, with a definition that excludes both Warner Brothers and "New Yorker" cartoons but includes Superman, Little Nemo, and some cave paintings—there's frequently a whiff of the self-consciously defensive about it. For the most part, McCloud skirts around any air of the fanboy, by keeping superheroes in good perspective and by maintaining the generally impressive appearance of someone who really seems to know what he's talking about. So superheroes are here, but so is Tintin, and so are Japanese manga and R. Crumb and all kinds of things. I think I find McCloud most interesting on Japanese comics, because he so obviously knows and appreciates them so much. One problem—and it's all mine, none of it McCloud's—is that as much as I love this I'm not any more inspired than I was before to go plunge into what's out there. Maybe even less so, because I think I know what awaits me. My own taste in comics, I have learned, is not nearly as catholic as McCloud's, nor as passionate. No point, for example, going out and buying a stack of manga. I did that last time (Mai, the Psychic Girl). And found it dull, found myself laboring to read it. In the world of graphic novels that's what I fear more than anything, because there are so many of them now. Yes, I still find things to love. It's just that the ratio of what there is to what's worth it is not so good and seems to be dropping. Again, this is my problem, not McCloud's. McCloud has given us an amazing book here. As far as I'm concerned, he is even better than Will Eisner at this kind of cracker-barrel comic book philosophizing, simply because he tells the stories better. It may be heresy to say this is a greater piece of work than Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art, but there I just said it. I think McCloud truly pried open the jaws of the medium's possibilities here. This one is also better than his own follow-ups too, but there's plenty of room for greatness in this series, as we will see.

In case it's not at the library.

Blade Runner (1982)

USA/Hong Kong, 117 minutes
Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples, Philip K. Dick
Photography: Jordan Cronenweth
Music: Vangelis
Editors: Marsha Nakashima, Terry Rawlings
Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl Hannah, Joanna Cassidy, William Sanderson, Brion James, Joe Turkel, Hy Pike

Did anyone have any sense how well regarded Blade Runner would ultimately become when it was first released? No one I knew. A few decades on, only Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull rank higher among movies made since 1979 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? Currently at #38, Blade Runner is the highest-ranked and most recent picture on the list until Fanny and Alexander, at #75, also from 1982, and only Kubrick's 2001 is ahead of it in the science fiction genre. The reputation this picture has won for itself in such a relatively brief time still surprises me a little. I mean, I liked it when it was new—but I also liked Diva (currently unranked) when it was new, around the same time, and I remember liking it more.

I'm not questioning how good Blade Runner is—in fact, I would have to say when I made a recent project of looking at it in all its permutations that it has worn remarkably well, and is indeed only better, a truly great picture. I'm not sure Ridley Scott ever made anything else within shouting distance of it, as much as I may like some of it or not, nor do I think his fiddling with three edits did much for it beyond removing the obnoxious voiceover accompanying the first version (and there's a case to be made for the utility of that element as certain plot points are blurred without it). But I'm also not prepared to argue that this is one of those happy-accident collaborations where everything falls right, such as Casablanca or The Third Man. It's definitely flawed. Maybe I just need to call it an early salvo in the reputation of Philip K. Dick, whose legacy still appears to be on the rise, and leave it at that.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

I don't think it's possible to overstate the value and pleasure of this slender novel. Set quite deliberately in 1922, written mostly in 1923, and published in 1925, it was as contemporary to its times, the so-called "Roaring '20s," as it could be. It so completely occupied them, in fact, that it came to practically overwhelm them. It packs in everything: the psychic fallout from World War I, the shallow mania for wealth, the widespread ongoing exodus from country to city, Prohibition and the gangsters it spawned, the rise of the automobile, and all of the hysteria and desperation and foolishness and exhilaration. The main points may now be found in an image on a U.S. postage stamp from 1998, but the emotional realities are detailed expertly in this novel. As a work of literature, it is at once so subtle and so complex that it has proved almost entirely resistant to conversion to film—Baz Luhrmann is reportedly the latest to give it the old college try, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan along for the ride. Good luck with that. They are the right names, I will say, or right enough, and if the picture is almost certainly doomed to failure I'm looking forward at least to a resurgence of interest in the book that it may engender, as I recall the failed attempt in 1974 of Jack Clayton and Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston accomplishing too. That's when the book first came to my attention anyway, and how I came to encounter this strange story of a man so quotidian, so mundane, and yet so extraordinarily obsessed with an incident in his past that he enters into the times with the sole intent of amassing a fortune he can use to enable him to attempt to recapture it. And the times happened to be right for him to do exactly that. Fitzgerald was a writer who plied his trade almost entirely by instinct, using the expedient tool of English language dedicated to varieties of fantastic and ineffable throughlines. His work is unified in the way it is all mad with romance, drunk on it, rich with extravagant notions and presumptuous images. It could be awful, lugubrious and indulgent and tin-eared and grossly misunderstanding of the terms of life for many. But when he caught the thrum of something vital, and nowhere did he do that better than he does here, he was capable of an almost monstrous beauty. In its language, its structure, its deceptively modest goals and its approach to the problems of the novel, it is almost perfect, with an uncanny ability to transform a lovely story, almost as if by accident—except that, by everything we know about the ambitions of Fitzgerald, it was anything but an accident—into one of the most profound observations of America that exists yet even today.

In case it's not at the library.

Thelma & Louise (1991)

USA/France, 130 minutes
Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Callie Khouri
Photography: Adrian Biddle
Editor: Thom Noble
Cast: Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Tobolowsky, Brad Pitt, Timothy Carhart, Lucinda Jenney

Here's one that actually seemed to me even better than I recalled, a fine epic road movie based out of Arkansas that switches up on gender and illuminates a world—admittedly, with overly broad strokes and taking aim at every easy target it can think of—that half of us don't understand nearly well enough. Thelma, played by Geena Davis, is a young housewife with a ridiculous petty tyrant lout for a husband, a carpet salesman and a perfect fool and a philanderer too (!) who dictates everything she can and cannot do. Louise, played by Susan Sarandon, is a flinty waitress in a foo foo uniform who chain smokes, swears a lot, and has a red-hot temper. They treat themselves to a rare weekend getaway to the mountains, Thelma climbing out on a limb and doing so without her husband's permission. When they stop on the way for drinks and dinner at a loud roadhouse the troubles begin: Thelma connects with yet another lout, Harlan (played with bottomless creepy menace by Timothy Carhart), lets him get her drunk even as they kick up their heels on the dance floor, and before long he has taken her out to his car in the parking lot where he begins to assault her. Enter Louise, who has a gun and uses it to liberate Thelma from the situation. But Harlan, in his fuming impotence, makes one foul-mouthed remark too many, and Louise loses it and shoots him dead. The girls hightail it out of there, turning fugitive and heading for Mexico by way of Oklahoma City. From that point the road movie is on, with cars zooming down highways, swooping tracking shots from helicopters, eerily beautiful shots of the Arizona desert at night, and police lights flashing in sweltering heat. With little to tie them to the murder they have time to act on their plan to make it to Mexico, but fate is not about to smile on them kindly in this movie. Down the road, most of the ways that a man can do a woman wrong make their appearances. It gets hard to watch at many points, such as when Thelma keeps letting herself be drawn to a shifty hitchhiker, J.D. (played by Brad Pitt, smug as usual), but that's just the narrative tension working—like "I Love Lucy," mixing up dread and horror until we are as unwilling to look as we are unwilling to look away. A good many set pieces are scattered along the way—for all his many various and legion faults, Ridley Scott does know how to put together a movie. My favorite was a hold-up scene captured in the grainy black & white of an in-store camera video, seen from the comical point of view of the authorities in pursuit of them in the company of Thelma's husband. The ending is suitably desperate and not, I think, all that cheap or easy (though you could probably argue it the other way too), harking in an almost unbearable way to a scene that ended better in another buddy movie of outlaws on the lam, this one more the traditional purview of males, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.