"Runaway" (2003)

Read story by Alice Munro online.

Like most of us, I have a certain susceptibility to stories involving helpless adorable animals, but I still think it's fair to call this story by Alice Munro devastating. It certainly cast a pall on me for several days. At the same time, I don't think it's fair to call it manipulative. Alice Munro is generally that good, and this story is specifically that good. Clark and Carla are a couple in their 30s, living in the countryside of central Canada. They have a stable for boarding horses and also give riding lessons. A few days before the time of the story a terrible storm has ripped through, damaging property and enabling horses and other livestock to escape. It's been a bad summer, with much rain, which has depressed their business. At the same time, Carla has been developing a relationship with their neighbor, Mrs. Jamieson, who has hired her for housekeeping help. These three characters—their histories and their relations—are complex but in ways that have developed naturally. Clark and Carla have been struggling for years financially, and have different ways of handling that stress. Mrs. Jamieson is older and self-sufficient. She recently lost her husband and Carla was there to help with the nursing. In the immediate aftermath of that death, Mrs. Jamieson has developed something of an overheated regard for Carla. She wants to have tea with her and make her life better. But they are widely separated by age and especially by class. Mrs. Jamieson's feelings are misplaced, likely a passing result of grief. Meanwhile, a small lie Carla told Clark about Mr. Jamieson before his death has snowballed into an awkward situation. I don't want to give away too much about the story because it's the discoveries as much as anything that do the work. Everything that happens is a perfectly natural reflection of the characters as presented. All three are complicated, feel real, and remain unpredictable to the end. I never doubted anything about this story even though it surprised me again and again. There may be human villains in it but we know them well enough to understand their good sides too, if not always their motivations exactly, which are more like everyday human mysteries. Think about it. Who do you know—who do you really understand—who doesn't find ways to surprise and even shock you? This is a great story, and it leaves a mark.

Runaway by Alice Munro

"The Misfits" (1957)

Story by Arthur Miller not available online.

In my rambling internet research on Arthur Miller's story, which in 1961 became a movie with Marilyn Monroe, I found it characterized as a novella (what I read was less than 20 printed pages), found unsubstantiated word of a 2002 novel version, and more often had to pick through information about the movie, for which Miller wrote the screenplay. I know the movie pretty well, and Miller's stage productions to some degree, but I was surprised by what I found in this short story. I'm sure this betrays my own stereotyping (is it the Clark Kent glasses Arthur Miller wore?) but it's way more outdoorsy and, um, masculinist than I expected. It focuses on a degraded mustanging operation of the three principals, all men (the most studly of them is named Gay, for what that's worth). Roslyn is a simmering presence who remains off stage. But she's on Gay's mind—Gay is her 46-year-old boyfriend who worries she might be sleeping with others, including his friends. In the movie Gay is played by Clark Gable and Roslyn by Marilyn Monroe—she is definitely on stage. (As a point of interest, The Misfits was to be the last film for both of them.) The short story details the round-up procedure used by the men, scaring wild horses with a plane diving at them and herding them to a rocky plateau where they can be picked off one by one with a pickup truck and a shrewd if cruel strategy. They get even fewer horses here than they did in the movie. It's pitiful. The horses are pathetically outmatched—and all they will bring from the rendering plant comes to about $100, divided between the three. They feel vaguely ashamed about what they're doing, but Gay keeps trying to cheer them with his motto, "Better than wages!" Yes, they all agree, it's better than wages, but they are still vaguely ashamed, even (or especially) Gay. What surprised me is how much, once into it, "The Misfits" has the structure and rhythms of a nature story. More specifically, it's on the order of a hunting story, but the hunt has been debased by the superiority of their technology and the weakness of the animals (there is a colt here that particularly breaks everyone's heart). This is much less like James Fenimore Cooper and Natty Bumppo and much more like Sarah Palin emptying automatic weapons into wolves from a helicopter. The only possible justification would be financial, and that is shown up for what it is in this story. Even in 1957, a hundred dollars split three ways was barely adequate for three days' work. In its sense of tragedy, "The Misfits" feels like something an East Coast playwright might come up with. But even that is a remarkably subtle element here. This is good stuff.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Super (2010)

USA, 96 minutes
Director/writer: James Gunn
Photography: Steve Gainer
Music: Tyler Bates
Editor: Cara Silverman
Cast: Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, Gregg Henry, Michael Rooker, Andre Royo, Nathan Fillion, Rob Zombie, James Gunn

If superhero movies have turned into something of a cliché—or perhaps more accurately into a thriving industry with a full spectrum of manifold overbred clichés—the psychologically realistic treatments of them are not far behind. Indeed, they probably belong on that spectrum of clichés themselves now. Alan Moore and Frank Miller impressed when they worked out the approach 30 years ago in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns (respectively). Batman is the natural here, as the basic idea is always that these figures don't have superpowers but they do have perverse personal motivations to "fight crime." They often work at night, and well outside the law. They aren't exactly role models with utility belt gimmicks the way they were in the '50s and '60s.

Super starts from this point, with another foot planted firmly in a certain quirky indie comedy ethos, signaled by casting Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, and Kevin Bacon in the principal roles, by the use of a kind of low-budget naturalism in the action scenes, and by Tyler Bates's wincingly twee score, which is at once cloyingly sweet and archly i - r - o - n - i - c (sample here, I dare you to listen to more than 20 seconds). Director and writer James Gunn has, of course, gone on to be captain of his own Marvel franchise, Guardians of the Galaxy, and it's not really hard to see how he got from here to there. Equally telling credits for Gunn include screenplays for the 2002 remake of Scooby-Doo and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. Yet somehow Super is greater than the sum of its puny parts, offering that rarest of things, a transcendent superhero movie.

"Murderers" (1971)

Read story by Leonard Michaels online.

Leonard Michaels is not a writer I know well. He's often compared with Philip Roth, who I know better. Michaels was born the same year as Roth and similarly interested in the experience of American Jews in 20th-century East Coast environs, notably New York. "Murderers" is a very short story, only about five printed pages, that has the feeling of an anecdote, or is built around an anecdote, and enlarged from there. Somehow it ended up in two of the anthologies I've been going through. In Brooklyn, a group of young adolescent boys has discovered that "the rabbi" and his wife often have afternoon sex with the windows open. The boys have naturally enough made a habit of spying on this activity, though it requires that they do so from a precarious perch on a water tank. The rabbi and his wife are mysterious, with unexplained details, perhaps the most notable of which is that the wife is bald-headed, and wears a variety of wigs. The unnamed first-person narrator is adult and sophisticated enough to describe what they spy on as, "In psychoanalysis, this is 'The Primal Scene.'" Yet nothing is made of the woman's baldness, which suggests a bizarre fetish, or more likely, the way we understand it now, cancer. Be that as it may, she and the rabbi are purely sexualized objects to the boys, and indeed, soon enough, one of them begins to masturbate, which doesn't seem to be taken as unusual by any of them. (I never had the circle-jerk experience and am always a little amazed when I hear accounts of them actually happening.) Then, however, there is a dreadful accident that leads to their discovery by the rabbi and eventually the life-changing punishment he inflicts on them. I say "life-changing" but it's little more traumatic than anything else about adolescence. It's a strange, violent, disconsolate story. There's an air of despondency and fatalism about it, like an English boarding school story. It is at pains to be comic—that's in the very conception of the accident at deepest levels—yet it's also not very funny at all. What's more, Michaels is clearly a witty and urbane writer. He's reminiscent of Roth stylistically as well as thematically. So it's a pretty neat trick he pulls in this short story, like a series of rabbit punches playing with your expectations. Spying on the sex of the long-married is ripe with comic potential. But wait, what? She's bald? The detail works like a bolt of anxiety, a tiny emotional shock to the system. Not to mention what happens to one of the boys—what happens to all of them, as a result. Overflowing with comic instincts, "Murderers" dares you to laugh.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

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

The Big Sick (2017)

The Big Sick is an old-fashioned romantic comedy—boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back—fitted out in a modern-day context of immigrants and post-9/11 American bigotry. So the boy, Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani), is basically a second-generation Pakistani raised in Chicago who wants to be a stand-up comic, but his family is traditional to the point where his parents assert the right to choose his wife for him. The girl, Emily (Zoe Kazan), is a white graduate student studying psychology, born and raised somewhere in the post-'60s New South. This is apparently based on a true story as the closing credits feature photos of the "real" Emily, cowriter of the screenplay with Nanjiani and also now his wife. Awww. The movie is also a Judd Apatow production and bears some of his signatures (chiefly the inept modern males, and much less so the gross-out stuff). Kumail and Emily meet in a club where he performs and they hit it off right away. It's manic quirky cute chemistry they have—he wants to show her movies like the original Night of the Living Dead and The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and they always end up making out almost as soon as the movie starts. But troubles arise when they start talking about meeting each other's family. Kumail has never mentioned Emily to his family and is concealing that from her. When she finds out, we enter the boy-loses-girl phase of the movie. They break up and stop seeing each other. Not long after, Kumail gets a frantic call from a friend of Emily's that Emily is sick in a hospital emergency room. It turns out she's so sick with an infection that she must be put in a coma to properly treat her. Next up are Emily's parents, Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano), who steal the show the rest of the way. It's true I seem to be a natural fan of Holly Hunter, enjoying practically everything I've seen her in, but Romano is more of a recently acquired taste. I never saw the sitcom, but I liked him in Vinyl and he's really great here too. The parents have misgivings about Kumail because of what they know of the break-up, but, you know, this movie is headed for boy gets girl back, and the getting there is what's great about this one. Perfectly enjoyable and probably belongs on any shelf dedicated to the romantic comedy.

Ancient Evenings (1983)

In the world of international heterosexual stereotyping, where the British have fixations on schoolmarms and the French want to put everything in their mouths, I always thought Greeks were into anal and Egyptians necrophilia. Come to find, in this doorstop of a novel, there was a good deal of nuance to all that, at least if we can trust Norman Mailer's version, and I'm sure we can't. Wikipedia is good on this one: Ancient Evenings, it says, "deals with the lives of two protagonists, one young, one old, in a very alien Ancient Egypt marked by journeys by the dead, reincarnation, and violent and hyper-sexual gods and mortals in a complex combination of historical fiction, allegory, poetic flight, confession, and spiritual meditation." Ayup, that about covers it. It's hard to separate the concept from the history, so to be safe I assumed it was all concept. There are pharaohs and other historical figures but also gods and magic and such. It's very dim at the start but there is a payoff in the first half with a great battle story that is vintage Mailer storytelling, the Battle of Kadesh, an actual historical event that happened in 1274 BCE. At points like this the novel feels reasonably accurate, but that could be because I saw the same Ancient Egypt movies on TV that Mailer saw in theaters. Starting in Advertisements for Myself, nearly 25 years earlier, Mailer often mentioned in passing that he was at work on a great big novel set in Ancient Egypt. This is obviously that book, though he dates the writing as 1972 to 1982, which suggests a long gestation. He had found the key to writing very long in his previous book, The Executioner's Song, and in many ways Ancient Evenings feels like hard-won wisdom applied to a project too long stewed over. (It also feels like a book contract he was able to secure in return for the success of The Executioner's Song.) At least he got it out of his system because he then became very good indeed at very long narratives, both fiction and nonfiction. Ancient Evenings is an interesting curiosity but way too long and weird to read casually. The sex is embarrassing for what it reveals of Mailer's own preoccupations, but I guess by that token you can also say it's very brave. You could probably take it apart in a good all-night book reading group session and really have some high old drunken times. Or you can file it under I read it so you don't have to.

In case it's not at the library.

Super (2016)

It's been all product from the Pet Shop Boys for some time now, delivered with a certain regularity and antecedents that are familiar and obvious, not to say comforting (though they are). The dance grooves, the disco conflagrations, are lush and steady if not quite fresh. The songwriting draws on old wells. "Twenty-something," for example, spends its minutes remembering earlier lives as "Young Offender" and other Dorian Grays between I don't have the energy to recollect. The best song here is "The Pop Kids," a nostalgia exercise but with a buzzing edge. It went to #1 on the US Dance Club chart, which is good enough for me and my Bobby McGee. The song hits certain exuberant high notes of pop fealty just vague enough to project anything onto: "They called us the pop kids / 'Cos we loved the pop hits ... Telling everyone we knew / That rock was overrated ... We stayed out 'til late / Five nights a week / And felt so chic." Well, who can't relate to that? And yet, in spite of my better instincts, I dwelt more repetitiously and obsessively on the insane bouncy-ball dynamic of "Groovy," which term they drolly use as a noun ("you're such a ..."). This wasn't exactly the usual infatuation for a beloved new tune on my part but rather something nagging me about it. It worries me and makes me nervous, like when you regret you wanted to watch the horror movie now starting. First a grand joke, and then you end up wondering if you are the butt. The dumbing down feels ferocious and caustic, like some kind of putdown I can't begin to understand. Why? At this point, to be clear, with Behavior and Very and Actually and "Left to My Own Devices" locked in the catalog for decades, the work of the Pet Shop boys is arguably done and they are welcome to feast on the scraps of recalled leftovers and I'm happy to join them. "Groovy" has certain affinities with other B-sides that've come along ("The Sound of the Atom Splitting," say)—and, oh but of course, with "Young Offender" and "Twenty-something" thematically. It also features live audience sound effects, so maybe "Groovy" is their final word on "rock was overrated." Except, I can guarantee you, based on all the reworking of their songs for quite some time now, I'm sure it won't actually be their final word. If pressed, I'm still calling that good news.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

USA, 92 minutes
Director: Robert Wise
Writers: Edmund H. North, Harry Bates
Photography: Leo Tover
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: William Reynolds
Cast: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray, Frances Bavier, Lock Martin

In the old movie business parlance (pre-'60s), a B movie was a low-budget shorter feature, often in a genre style, intended for the back half of double features. The A movie was the main attraction. It was full of stars and class and intended to win awards or make big box office or both. I would have guessed that The Day the Earth Stood Still, a science fiction picture with a theremin soundtrack I have been watching all my life, was a B movie, but no. It had a budget. The special effects are restrained, even primitive, but they are effective. The director is Robert Wise, a student of Orson Welles, whose career spanned The Magnificent Ambersons and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music between. Patricia Neal, an intriguing versatile cross between a character player and a leading lady, had a career starting to bust out all over. And the score is by Bernard Herrmann, a rising A player, who was among the first to use the theremin for the movies, followed shortly by thousands of B movie science fiction for the rest of the decade. In fact, the spooky electronic instrument was almost exclusively associated with science fiction movies until Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys tore it away for their own purposes. Pere Ubu returned the favor decades later but that's all another subject for another day. With everything else, The Day the Earth Stood Still is basically patient zero for science fiction theremin movies.

Reportedly Wise was interested in this project because he was a believer in UFOs. Indeed, the picture rings with its message, an uplifting one even, a fervent belief in a kind of idealized United Nations vision and proto hippie yearning for peaceful coexistence. These are the things I like about the movie myself—with my appreciation for Star Trek, it's possible that I just like a good stirring liberal skit. But actually there's a good deal of art and old-fashioned craft to this movie. At the same time, it reminds me a little of a friend I spoke to once who was "against" UFOs. It wasn't that he didn't believe they existed, but rather that he didn't believe aliens from other planets deserved the degradation of associating with humanity.

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853)

Read story by Herman Melville online.

I had forgotten that Herman Melville gave his classic short story the subtitle "A Story of Wall-Street." At first this confused me, thinking of the modern version with skyscrapers and superfast computers. But I think a fair translation of the subtitle is actually more like "A Story of Temping." That's the dynamic it has always had for me (at least, after I'd spent some time temping and then circled back to the story) and ultimately it makes sense of what's often taken as a mystifying or even whimsical and certainly odd little tale. A scrivener in the 19th century was a low-level clerk doing the work of a photocopy machine much more slowly. A photocopy machine might be the best way to think of Bartleby, whose famous calling card is "I would prefer not to." The phrase smacks of countless fits of pique I've seen in office temp workers, including myself a few times, not to mention photocopy machines. You are often right up-close and personal with the absurd in such positions. This is also a situation comedy episode of deference and circumspection beyond reason. Melville's story describes the point at which Bartleby may be said to have snapped, though it is a gentle and barely audible sound, and then the aftermath. The narrator is a principal at the law firm where Bartleby was employed. One day he imperiously calls Bartleby into his office to assist him with proofreading a document (accomplished by one person reading the original aloud while the other scans along on the copy). The abrupt interruption is just one of those indignities of the office day—in 1853 when Melville wrote this story as much as in the 1990s when I toiled as a scrivener (then called "word processor"), and no doubt today as well. No doubt. It's the way office life and work goes. People melt down and blow up and leave behind shrapnel in the form of anecdotes told over and over. In this story it is Bartleby's dogged refusal to work again, with his simple affirmation, "I would prefer not to." This is not an isolated case. I knew a temp who was habitually late to his job—the front-line receptionist for a work group, who spent his long days answering calls and taking messages. One day the entire group was scheduled for a daylong morale-building field trip event. But they couldn't leave the building until Michael (the Bartleby in this story) arrived to "hold the fort down" all day by himself. The group manager was a tiny woman in her '50s who dressed very smartly and liked things to run efficiently. She was furious he was late and dressed him down in front of everyone. He waited for her to leave an opening, probably a question of some kind, to which he replied in a stage voice projected to the rear of the group, "Oh shut up you old cunt, I'm here now." Needless to say he was fired on the spot. Perhaps he works now in the same dead letter office where Bartleby finally arrived. Ah Michael! Ah humanity!

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville (Library of America)

Detroit (2017)

It's hard to deny the sheer force of the latest movie from director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, a scathing horrorshow treatment of one incident in one "long hot summer" in one American city in the '60s. It's 1967 and it's Detroit, but it's also 2017 and Black Lives Matter. The movie is historical but the prism is today. Bigelow and Boal, who previously collaborated on The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, focus here on a long and harrowing scene of police brutality and fatal misdeeds during a field investigation inside a residence motel. Meanwhile, outside, there's a riot goin' on, literally. The scene in the motel sustains a remarkable amount of intensity and it goes on for a long time. The movie left me well wrung out. The true facts of the case on which it's based are somewhat murky. The officers were acquitted at trial, but that was a matter of legal technicalities, wrongfully taken confessions or some such. No one doubts their guilt for at least three murders. But not all the details of that night are understood or agreed on, so Bigelow and Boal have made choices to address gaps and conflicts in the story. The results may be controversial but we know police behave this way. The details serve a greater truth. So I was basically OK with these scenes, above and beyond the discomfort of witnessing them. But along about 40 minutes into the mayhem I started to notice that the movie seemed to be making another point: torture does not work. Of course, that reminded me of their last picture, Zero Dark Thirty, which was controversial not only because it showed torture working, but did so within the frame that it was part of a greater truth—awful things happen in the fog of war, and how can anyone be held morally accountable if the results are what we want? (This is also known as "history is written by the victors.") (except in the case of the Confederate South, see also Charlottesville) On the torture issue, Detroit goes the other direction, not that I want to imply it's some kind of shell game. If I went into the movie less inclined to give Bigelow and Boal the benefit of the doubt, the effect of Detroit, as I said, is hard to deny. It's vivid, intense, and searing, which are also generally the hallmarks of Bigelow's pictures, certainly since she came into her own with The Hurt Locker. But Detroit is also heavy-handed and clankingly obvious—you can argue that's because it has to be, because it reflects a reality too long unacknowledged, even now. Fair warning. It is a blunt force object and it's coming at your face. Yet as I mull over the experience of this movie, I keep remembering things like how the bad cops are implicitly portrayed as isolated bad apples. People higher up the chain are onto them but haven't been able to get them yet. My impression of reality is more that a lot of those people up the chain are just bad apples that got promoted. Once again, see also Charlottesville.