Herrmann, Welles, War, Time, Art(ifice)

Bernard Herrmann, the greatest of all film composers, died on Christmas Eve, 1975, expelling his final breath, as legend has it, shortly after completing the score for Taxi Driver, his final masterpiece. Were Herrmann still with us we'd be celebrating his 100th birthday this June. The coming of the Herrmann centenary was the first prompt for the Art of Time Ensemble's production of The War of The Worlds, which opened at Harbourfront Centre's Enwave Theatre in Toronto on Thursday and closes this afternoon. I attended last night, along with a packed house that included Micheal Ondaatje and Atom Egoyan. Yet, since the original Mercury Theatre/CBS Radio broadcast did not actually feature much in the way of original music from Herrmann, Art of Time decided to preface their man event with a marvellous surprise: a suite of Herrmann's film music inventively pastiched and arranged by Dan Parr, accompanied by a wonderful montage of images from the films referenced. Thus, as the music undulates with doomed romanticism, shrieks and bellows, whirlpools and crashes, the paths of Marion Crane and Travis Bickle, Max Cady and Charles Foster Kane, cross in dream-space; Cary Grant's drunk driving leads to Robert Ryan's wintry footprints which lead to Jimmy Stewart's endless descent; plumes of NYC steam merge with the smoke of burning books; and Klaatu disintegrates rifles gripped by baffled US troops over and over in a lulling apocalyptic rhythm.

What followed intermission was a condensed recreation of Orson Welles' (in)famous 30 October, 1938 alien invasion radio drama. The stage became a studio, occupied by the Ensemble, conducted, as was the Herrmann suite, by Art of Time Artistic Director Andrew Burashko, a trio of actors, including Don McKellar in the Welles roles, and Foley maestro John Gzowski, all of them in period dress, shirt sleeves rolled up, Luckys dangling from their lips, huddling around elegant chrome microphone stands under a suspended glowing sign announcing that we are ON THE AIR. I loved it when all the musicians joined in the vocal hubub to scream together in deathly agony the alien slaughter of earthlings commences, some of them cracking up while doing so. The Brechtian dissonance between the visual and aural experience made for superb entertainment: laughs when eyes were open, chills when shut. Gzowski was inevitably the star of the show, darting silently in stocking feet between a dozen or more bizarre devices, including, of course, a Theremin. It took a moment to adapt to McKellar, given that some degree of imitation is inevitable and he simply doesn't possess Welles' full-bodied resonance, but his cadences were nearly impeccable, his readings compelling, and the prankster's focus he conveyed while instructing his collaborators his impatient gesture and eye contact added to the sense of Halloween mischief.

The most captivating passage of The War of the Worlds however arrived with the broadcast's final section (the one I completely forgot about), in which the mock-live reportage falls away and is replaced by what is virtually a monologue, backed by eerie underscoring, from a lone survivor of the Martian attacks describing in past-tense his journey through the ruins of New York and New Jersey. This part was read by Nicholas Campbell, whose hair has turned white sometime in the past few years, and who settled in under spotlight and delivered a performance of engrossing intimacy, at once playing it for the microphone and, more subtly, the watching audience.

Marcellus Emants' Posthumous Confession: Notes on life as a dirty brown spot

Arresting from its first stark sentence (“My wife is dead and buried”), nearly relentless in its catch-all combo of misanthropy and self-loathing, yet consistently compelling and perversely insightful, A Posthumous Confession (NYRB Classics, $16), Dutch author Marcellus Emants’ 1894 novel, newly back in print, translated and with an introduction by J.M. Coetzee, with a perfectly chosen detail from Edvard Munch’s Self-portrait in Hell as its cover art, is as elegantly wrought as it is deeply repulsive. So, in other words, a must-read.

By the time he finally sets down to write about his life—to confess, as it were—Willem Termeer (a name that fittingly prompts images of termites) is 35, friendless, and, having been recently widowed, “free again.” But free to do what? He says he’s killed his wife, Anna, though the circumstances are unclear. By his own claims Termeer, a man without profession, whose biography is encrusted with botched attempts at hedonism, is hopelessly apathetic. How did he manage to become a murderer? Until we reach the final pages, all we’re given to speculate upon are cryptic summaries: “one thing followed from another far too gradually.”

Termeer’s chronically mistrustful, solipsistic, a compulsive liar. His sense of inferiority, even to those whom he despises, is paralyzing. In one especially memorable anecdote, he meets a student who he instantly dislikes, only to realize that they’re exactly alike, and Termeer befriends the younger man so as to enjoy feeling superior on account of his elder status. In another episode he develops a middling interest in a Swedish pianist (Anna also would play the piano) that becomes a blazing desire only with the appearance of a rival. He gradually resolves that the only way for him to function socially is to perform: “if it was impossible for me to become a good man I would at least aspire to live like a good man.”

Emants worked predominantly as a playwright, and part of what makes A Posthumous Confession so readable is the momentum and intimacy of its monologue. Termeer’s vulnerability sometimes yields emotional colours he might not even be cognizant of. His descriptions of fumbling teenage courtship are surprisingly tender, even sweet. Perhaps this sweetness helped to facilitate the profound sourness to come: “my love disappeared like a raindrop in hot sand: all that was left was a dirty brown spot.” Elsewhere, his wild pessimism is conveyed with such throttle that it actually becomes really funny: “O death, death—how frightened I have always been of it! Yet I have so often asked myself, ‘Were you unhappy before you were born?’”

Coetzee notes that A Posthumous Confession is a singularly pure example of the confessional genre, and Emants indeed invests an unusual degree of attention to developing Termeer’s distinctive literary voice and approach to self-analysis. His reasons for wanting to write become incrementally lucid and may even represent the most altruistic impulse Termeer is capable of feeling. “Who knows how many there are who are just like me,” he wonders, “yet will realize it only when they have seen themselves mirrored in me.” Yet there is also a sly bit of preternatural postmodernism emerging here. Termeer goes to see a play entitled Artist by one Marcellus Emants. It “made a deep impression on me because of the many features of resemblance between the artist and myself.” He even goes on to critique Emants’ play.

A Posthumous Confession’s most obvious antecedents are Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground and certain tales of psychological frailty by Poe. The novel also bears a certain likeness to early work by Emants’ Norwegian contemporary Knut Hamsun. But where do we find this underground figure in more recent decades? Perhaps in the work of Thomas Bernhard. Or perhaps we need to go to the movies. “I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis Bickle confesses in Taxi Driver. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” If only becoming “a person” were that simple.

Closer and closer readings: Farber on Film

An essential volume on any film-lover's shelf, the new Farber on Film: the Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, $40 US/$50 CAN) was edited by Robert Polito, who authored a terrific Jim Thompson biography some years back called Savage Art. Farber died last year at the age of 91. He hadn’t written about film since the 70s, when he dedicated himself full-time to painting. Yet his perspective retains a colossal vitality. He wasn’t bent on prescience. On the contrary, he was rigorous about seeing movies as they played to their moment in time. (It’s why he was wrong about the protagonist’s motivation in Taxi Driver—Travis Bickle’s gnomic personal obsessions have aged better than Farber’s suggestion that he should have been driven by pure need for celebrity.) But Farber immersed himself in films with an observational prowess that the rest of us are still trying to catch up to.

Taxi Driver

As promised in the subtitle, this doorstop delivers the whole course of Farber’s critical career, nearly 800 pages worth. The book has an exhaustive index and lends itself to random browsing, but there’s something cathartic in reading from cover-to-cover, in watching Farber develop his sensibility through the 40s in regular columns for The New Republic or The Nation before seeing that sensibility come to full fruition in the expansive essays that populated his revered late collection Negative Space. As Polito notes in his superb introduction, “Farber is perhaps the only American critic of modernism to write as a modernist.” From the first sentence Farber is cantankerous and muscular and eager to push the language. From the first he’s broad in vision, weaving the state of wartime US politics and culture, the state of film industry and film art, into his arresting, provocative prose. From the first he thwarts the urge toward quick-fix criticism so that you can’t even tell if he likes something, and who cares when he’s drawing us always closer to really seeing and hearing what the movies are doing, what they can do, what they don’t do, what they should.

Double Indemnity

The title Negative Space is apt: Farber can be pretty damned negative at times—at first blush you might wonder if he actually likes movies—while his roaming senses, trained by painting and photography, not to mention sports, always peruse the whole of the filmic space, digging into corners, probing the cavities, sometimes at the expense of certain elements we often cling to as being essential, like theme. While getting high on his championing of underdog works like Moontide or The Set-Up or anything produced by Val Lewton, my head spun and my jaw dropped when Farber, at times given to contrarianism, laid into Double Indemnity, The Magnificent Ambersons, Laura, My Darling Clementine, The Third Man, Sunset Blvd with such merciless, surgical precision. But Farber's readings feel more alive, more actively wrestling with these films and what they represent—where they fall in the culture—than the vast bulk of comfortably reverential, historically assured writing they’ve generated from hundreds of other writers—myself included. True, Farber’s take on Rashomon feels excessively sharpened by preconceived suspicions about Kurosawa’s flashy technique while basically ignoring the dark tide of uncertainty that undercuts its every scene, just as his dismissal of Billy Wilder’s cynical adoration of tough-talking lowlifes seems the product of Farber’s general repugnance toward Wilder’s employment of gloss. But unlike every other critic who’s ever used that laziest of pejoratives, “arty,” Farber invested the first half of his career in defining precisely what sort of threat studio era “artiness” posed.

High Sierra

While working through Farber’s ongoing reports from the American cinema of the 40s and 50s there were times I wondered if his division of films into the economical/unassuming/action-driven and the pretentious/Oscar-baiting/self-consciously flashy wasn’t too reductive, not to mention highly oriented toward, and more forgiving of, what can’t help but feel like an almost exclusively masculine sensibility. Yet the narrative inherent in Farber on Film, the long and dogged establishing of a perspective, builds in increments, shaping itself through reflection, reassessment, comparison and cultural change, until we arrive at the first definitive statement of Farber’s thesis-in-progress, the 1962 essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.’ “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” White Elephant Art, by contrast, is plagued by “a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film.” Farber zeroes in on something that can manifest as many things for different viewers: spontaneity, abandon, risk, freshness, process-over-product, attentiveness to the full measure of what film can access, openness to accident. It also favours acting that seizes our fascination by being nothing more than, as he writes in ‘The Decline of the Actor,’ “simply curiosity flexing itself,” that prizes the fleeting exhilaration of something as ephemeral as Bogart glancing up at a street sign when he didn’t have to; the way Ida Lupino "works closely and guardedly to the camera, retracting into herself, steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching"; by the presence of Liv Ullman, "one of those rare passive Elegants in acting who can leave the screen to another actor and still score." The Elephant vs. Termite perspective found Farber embracing B-movies, where filmmakers were better able to wriggle free of the front office and quietly produce subversive wonders in the margins of often seemingly negligible material. It found Farber embracing sly supporting performances that could almost function as critiques of the pompous leads surrounding them. From ‘Pish-Tush’: “Movies that have become classics… are never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in the back of the static mannered acting of some great star.” But while Farber’s dichotomy remained in place, what compelled Farber changed radically as the 1960s changed assumptions about what might constitute artiness, termites and elephants. His gradual admiration and rich appreciations for Godard pays off all the more for the insights of his early skepticism. Defenses of Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks became defenses of artists as potentially "arty" as Chantal Ackerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog. He's actually quite friendly to Easy Rider, and to Terrence Malick. And far from cultivating a strictly male perspective, Farber gradually began to co-author essays with his wife Patricia Patterson. Among some of the best late essays are exhaustive assessments of Herzog, Luis Buñuel and Nicolas Roeg.

Farber, with typewriter and white-out

What’s great about Farber on Film is that it emphasizes how good criticism takes nothing for granted. Writing an essay called ‘The Subverters’ in 1966, when film studies departments and popular critics were busy trying to build a canon, “to bring some order and shape to film history,” Farber declared such efforts “doomed to failure because of the subversive nature of the medium: the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of a film.” This persistent unruliness of movies is among the things that make it so seductive to some and infuriating to others. The medium is all about motion, and it refuses to sit still and politely concede to definitive, settled judgments. So Farber moved along with it. His opinions were strong and ruthless—and always open to adjustment. He’s one of the only critics whose reviews the reviewed filmmakers—that all filmmakers—can actually learn from, to say nothing of audiences. I know I’m a better, more fulfilled, more stimulated film watcher for reading him. I only hope it can make me a better film critic, too.

Heart-shaped box step: James Gray talks about Two Lovers, the dictates of desire, and the uncertain whereabouts of Joaquin Phoenix

As Leonard sinks to the bottom he looks up toward the shrinking sun shattering in the frigid water, and just when he seems resigned to his death a woman crosses his field of vision, apologizing for having to leave. So what shakes Leonard out of his suicidal calm it seems is not even the promise of the woman’s return, but rather the mere chance to caress the melancholy memory of her leaving him one more time. This is how Two Lovers begins. This phantom woman from Leonard’s past will not reappear, but two others will take her place in his unfading desire to be swept away by some overpowering feminine force.

As depicted by Joaquin Phoenix, Leonard is at once among the most pathetic and dynamic protagonists in recent movies. He’s introduced to the lovely, kind and comforting Sandra, exquisitely and movingly played by Vinessa Shaw, by his parents. She’ll be good for him, as well as good for business, given her family’s interests in investing in Leonard’s parents’ Brighton Beach dry cleaning. She’s a too-perfect match for this depressed but sheepishly charming guy from good immigrant Jewish stock. She even works for Pfizer, the company that produces Leonard's medication. 

By accident, though it somehow feels closer to his own volition, Leonard meets Michelle, an unstable, vivacious new neighbour played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Michelle, who dates her older, married, wealthy boss, who likes designer drugs, who is not Jewish, is clearly not good for Leonard the way Sandra is. She comes to embody everything Leonard longs for, as opposed to what he can have.

The third woman in Leonard’s life is Ruth, Leonard’s mother, played by the inimitable Isabella Rossellini not as the stereotypical nasally Jewish momma, but as a concerned and outwardly conservative woman who deep inside just wants to do right by the unruly dictates of her son’s heart. Two Lovers is not so much a love triangle as an uneasy quadrant around which Leonard must box step until he builds up the courage or foolishness to break off in a single, focused direction.

As wildly distinct as the very intimate Two Lovers is from We Own the Night (2007), the large-scale crime drama director and co-scenarist James Gray made immediately before this, it’s startling how closely their thematic trajectories match up. It’s something we spoke about quite a bit when I interviewed Gray. With four films now under his belt—the others are Little Odessa (94) and The Yards (00)—Gray has developed a very particular body of work, one that combines familiar, audience friendly genres and talented stars with a flair for intricate visual poetics, but that’s arguably had a hard time finding the larger audience it deserves. Still, as Gray explains it, he’s been lucky to make these films at all, and to make him his way.


JB: Two Lovers seems in one sense a cautionary tale against family as a force that’s antithetical to self-realization. It contradicts so many movies set in ethnic communities that strive to show family as something comforting, fortifying, and at worst frustratingly quirky.

James Gray: Absolutely. And addressing something of both these things you describe is part of what makes movies about family so intriguing. Family can be a locus of great emotional support, and also a terrible place where your dreams are killed. In Two Lovers the family stifles Leonard, but it also saves his life.

JB: Obviously it would be deluded to blame Leonard’s problems on anything other than his own weaknesses and precarious desires, but I couldn’t help but consider how much he’s a product of this very specific environment the film carefully evokes.


JG: It was especially important to me that Leonard’s parents were very clearly not Americans, that he felt outside the mainstream from the very beginning. And that the family home itself is claustrophobic. It’s shot that way. We didn’t construct a set, so you couldn’t just move walls around. Essentially the camera was always in a place where a person could be.

JB: So when we watch Leonard in his parents’ home, even when alone with a woman, there’s always this ghost of a familial presence. Yet it’s interesting that you mention the claustrophobic scenes, because I want to ask you about another scene that feels exactly the opposite, this moment where Leonard confesses his love to Michelle on the roof. It’s a turning point that manifests very emotionally, very physically. One of the things that made it so memorable for me is the fact that it’s delivered in this slow, unbroken, gliding, nearly hypnotic overhead shot.

JG: Yeah, the camera starts about eight feet in the air while they’re in that brick gazebo and winds up becoming a two-shot in profile of the actors. The shot is about five minutes long. What happens here, what I intended, was that at about this point in the film things start to become dreamlike, more cosmic and mythic. I was trying to find a way to mirror how delusional Leonard was becoming.


JB: A number of critics describe your films as old-fashioned, but this is a highly unconventional way to cover a love scene.

JG: The old-fashioned thing comes from a lack of vocabulary, I think, from people who view things like storytelling and sincerity as old-fashioned. Some people are just anxious to categorize. Old-fashioned to me doesn’t mean anything.

JB: Your camera, if I recall correctly, takes a similar perspective in one of the most memorable and visceral scenes in The Yards. I’m thinking of that terrifically dirty fight between Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg.

JG: That was for a different reason, but you’re very right. I wanted that fight to show how these people were struggling against an oppressive environment that was much bigger than them. But then I suppose the same thing is true of the scene we're discussing in Two Lovers. You can see the whole neighbourhood in the distance, a whole other world that’s quite indifferent to Leonard or Michelle’s predicaments. I never shot any other coverage for that scene because anything else would have seemed bogus. Plus I had him turning away from camera for a great deal of that confession. The idea was that he would turn away from camera so the audience would understand how embarrassed he was without him having to say it, or play it even.

JB: Hm. What you’re saying reminds me of the famous shot in Taxi Driver where the camera turns away from Travis as he speaks with Betsy on the phone...

JG: And it dollies down that empty hall. Fantastic.


JB: It’s a testament to the complexity of Two Lovers that Sandra, while representing the safer romantic choice for Leonard, is so utterly appealing, beautiful, unpretentious, sexy and emotionally frank, while Michelle is hardly a mere vixen. The performances really defy the archetypes.

JG: I tried to steer clear of the romantic comedy version of this story. I wanted it to be that Leonard was blind, that what made Sandra unappealing was how much the family liked her, to express how elements of our desire for someone is entirely external to who the person really is or what they look like. Sandra could be the most beautiful person on earth and Leonard wouldn’t have seen it. Some feel she’s too good looking to be Leonard’s second fiddle, but that’s such a dunderheaded way of thinking about characterization. I mean, how many times in life do we find ourselves thinking, “What does she see in him?” Or, “She’s so lovely, what is his problem?”

JB: Something that defines Leonard is his inner conflict between the reassurances of traditions and the allure of recklessly breaking away from everything and venturing into new terrain. I wonder if you don’t feel something similar at times in the way you’ve developed your films, which echo previous periods of film history and yet seem poised on the vanguard of the current scene.

JG: I used to think a lot more about where I sit in the world, who likes me and who doesn’t. But one of the advantages of getting older and more decrepit is that at a certain point you don’t give a shit anymore and you do the work that feels close to you. To me, the litmus test for a work of art—and in my case I’m using the term loosely—is whether it can move you without offending you. That’s it. We’re living in a cultural scene that largely quite bereft of soul. It can be quite depressing. But I’ve been very lucky. I get to make the films I want to make. I have been denounced by some but very respected by others. You really can’t ask for more than that.

JB: Do you teach as a sideline?

JG: I taught at USC about seven years ago, but I don’t think they liked me very much. They never asked me back, anyway. I probably was not very good. You know, students would make movies and the lights would come up and I’d say, “That movie was really bad—let’s talk about why,” which is not what you’re supposed to do, I guess. You’re supposed to tell everyone that everything they do is fantastic. [Laughs]


JB: You’ve worked with Joaquin Phoenix now on three pictures, and his performances in them have been among the finest of his career. How have his contributions changed or intensified the stories you’ve been trying to tell, or perhaps the way you’ve told them?

JG: He has sharpened my sense of what constitutes my biggest interest in movies, which is the ability to depict the external and the internal conflict in hand. He’s quite brilliant in that way, very experimental, very inventive. He’s raised the bar. I’ve learned a lot from him.

JB: I wonder if when you first worked with him these were things you might have only been able to see in the cutting room, things that it took longer to learn how to detect while actually on set. After all this time, are you now better able to read each other in the moment?

JG: I don’t think we read each other at all anymore. We finish each other’s sentences. It’s become almost boring. I don’t talk to him. He doesn’t talk to me. I do another take and he says, “Yeah, I know.” Honestly, I remember being very aware of what he was doing the first time we worked together, very aware of what kind of actor he was.


JB: I guess there’s still some ambiguity regarding whether or not Phoenix will ever go back to acting, but I wonder if you have any more projects you’re hoping to tempt him with.

JG: Sure. But I’m just trying to figure out where he’s at. The bigger question is what he wants to do. I don’t know what he’s up to. I really don’t. But if he decides to act, believe me, I’ll find work for him.

Monster's mall: Observe and Report

The first fat white man is glimpsed scampering across the vastness of the mall parking lot. He wears only a trench coat. We don’t see his face. He flashes his flabby nakedness to all available female victims. “Hey bitch!” “I’m gonna fuck you!” “See my dick!” His attacks are essentially verbal hit-and-runs, though the sight of his flapping ding-dong probably causes the more lasting trauma. The second fat white man is the mall’s self-designated head of security. Ronnie (Seth Rogen), delusional, bullying, gun-obsessed, bipolar, socially disabled, overly fond of jogging pants, and possessing violent impulses about ready to blow, is a potentially far greater threat to the general public, yet he is, in his small way, their protector. He’s the protagonist of Jody Hill’s Observe and Report.

The two fat white men are marked from the outset as opponents. In a sense they’re mirror images of one another, and as is usually the case in tales of döppelgangers, there’s only room for one. In this case, it’s the younger, weirdly charming one. He might make racially driven threats, get trigger happy with his Taser and beat the living shit out of adolescent skaters now and then, but he never goes around showing his johnson to the world, and that apparently makes all the difference.

With Ronnie’s fixation on an unattainable blonde (Anna Faris, quite brilliant in a frustraingly underdeveloped part), his messiah complex, and his voice-over—“The world doesn’t need another scared man…”—speaking to us over images of him working out, the model for this anti-hero is quite clearly Travis Bickle, and the notion of setting a blackly comic Taxi Driver in the sunny suburbs is an inspired one. The cast seems to be beautifully aligned in their ability to fuse the necessary bleakness and mania, and Hill’s immediately apparent knack for cutting out of a scene right on the crest of a comic-shock wave invites us to settle in for something special. But Observe and Report is sadly neither here nor there. Its dementia is all surface. It’s a tease of a movie that finally doesn’t even try to follow through on its promise to probe psychosis for comic payoffs.

Part of the problem is that the world of Observe and Report is one without consequence. Sometimes, for the sake of a solid but purely short-term gag, it allows to us to recognize Ronnie as a total nutcase living in a world of puerile fantasy. At other times, especially the ending, the movie surrenders itself to Ronnie’s fantasy and rewards his insanity, though strictly in the modest ways of the mainstream lovable loser comedy, which is precisely where Feris' character, who should have been as unpredictable as Rogen's, glaringly shows itself to be a missed opportunity. Going in either direction might have resulted in something compelling, disturbing or more consistently hilarious, but Hill tries to have it both ways, going for the schadenfreude and the sentimentality at once, and winds up making something essentially incoherent.

The world upside-down: Zizek's Violence

Through countless cinematic detours in his enormous body of critical theory he has become one of the sharpest, most engaged writers on movies we have, so maybe it’s no accident that the theoretical tool he employs with relentless perfectionism is the very same tool most often used by the crack screenwriter: the good old-fashioned reversal. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes both dynamically and profusely, and he’s never met an assumption he didn’t feel the urge to overturn, a paradox he didn’t desire to give a thorough workout. He isn’t a shrewd contrarian so much as an intellectual showman—and I say this with the deepest admiration. The “Elvis of critical theory” tag he’s been given is not unearned.

Far too playful with Marx to convincingly be labeled a staunch Marxist, Zizek’s philosophy remains grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis—and this should itself impart upon his audience an emphasis on process rather than tidy results. With Zizek we are always on the couch, always left dazzled and maybe perplexed when our session has expired. To turn to his work for hard conclusions will inevitably frustrate, but more importantly will blind you to what he really places on the table, which is a feast of thoughtful, sometimes audacious stimulation, blending flavours well known, even vulgar in their appeal, with others that are exotic and in other settings would be intimidating. At the end, knowing hunger will return, you find yourself at the very least fortified, pleasured, and well fed.

That’s certainly the case with Violence (Picador, $15.50). In his contribution to the ‘Big Ideas/Small Books’ series, Zizek breaks his subject into three categories: subjective violence, such as crime and terror, the most visible form and one whose fascination we’re urged to resist; objective violence, which is symbolic and based in language; and systemic violence, the form addressed most enthusiastically, which lies in social structures and is the least visible and most dangerous. Zizek’s dissection of systemic violence starts coolly, drawing attention to such familiar phenomena as pleas for charitable donations that thrive on “fake urgency,” before building up to the hypocrisies of billionaires who claim to “give back,” in effect contributing funds to agencies attempting to alleviate a humanitarian crisis that in part was exacerbated by these same billionaires. Not to mention the hypocrisies of we who are outraged by the torture of individuals while virtually ignoring the overwhelming humanitarian crises of entire nations, ie: the Congo.

But things get more interesting once the groundwork’s disposed of—or, in some cases, trampled over in the heat of Zizek's spastic mental prowess. In examining terror, Zizek usefully distinguishes between “authentic fundamentalists,” like the Amish or Tibetan Buddhists, who convey “an absence of resentment and envy” and a “deep indifference toward the non-believers’ way of life,” with “so-called Christian and Muslim fundamentalists” who “in fighting the sinful Other” are merely fighting their own temptation. He later makes an intriguing parallel distinction between ideological governments who ostensibly offer sweeping freedoms while tacitly condemning the use of these freedoms and oppressive governments who tacitly encourage the bending of rules, leading to one of the most memorably succinct twists of common assumption in Violence: “totalitarian regimes are by definition regimes of mercy: they tolerate violations of the law, since, in the way they frame social life, violating the law, bribing, and cheating are conditions of survival.”

Among the most substantial stances taken in Violence concerns Israel and Palestine, two nations who, Zizek argues, should recognize how a diasporic existence is essential to their identity rather than fruitlessly claim rights to a holy land. Intriguingly, he calls for the renunciation of political control of Jerusalem, making it a neutral zone, an “extra-state place of religious worship” that would ultimately have a liberating effect for both parties. And I mean it as no slight to the gravity of this proposal when I compliment Zizek on his ability to move fluidly in just a page or two from this to a parallel proposal that US Congress officially change the name of French fries to Muhammad fries.

It is among Zizek’s strengths that irreverence and the utmost seriousness are never rendered mutually exclusive, just as culture high and low are employed with equal relish. There are citations from Walter Benjamin, George Orwell and Elton John. There are analogies that unexpectedly unite the themes of M. Night Shyamalan's widely panned The Village with Alfonso Caurón's Children of Men. And let me stress this: the guy gets mileage from movies like no social commentator I’ve ever heard of. He discusses the unspoken sub-cultural order explored in A Few Good Men as a pretty brilliant lead-in to his insights into hazing rituals, the homophobic dualities of military life, and the abuses of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib: “in being submitted to humiliating tortures, Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.” And he offers a striking reading of Taxi Driver that illuminates the essentially inwardly directed violence of Travis Bickle.

Alas, after a couple of hundred pages of stimulating riffing, Violence does finally have to draw to an end. Of sorts. Things get muddy. Zizek has us reject “false anti-violence” and endorses “emancipatory violence.” He writes how “to chastise violence outright… is a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.” Okay. But equally mystifying is his appropriation of the central conceit of José Saramago’s visionary novel Seeing, in which a government in thrown into panic over an epidemic of blank votes submitted in a federal election. Zizek clearly sees Saramago as a Marx brother, and his admiring assessment of Seeing leads to Violence’s final, enigmatic statement: “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.” I’m mystified because casting a blank ballot is actually far from “doing nothing.” I’m mystified by Zizek’s peculiar and rather hazy conditional sanctioning of violence—we really need to get clearer on this “emancipatory violence” thing, no? But I’m also mystified by how such a bracingly curt, even puzzling finale can still leave me kinda satisfied, re-engaged in certain political arguments, and mentally invigorated in general. Perhaps it’s better for us to look at any single book by Zizek as just another edition in an ongoing grappling with irreducible ideas, and enjoy the ride.

Fact is, he was talkin' to all of us

The yellow cab emerges silent, hulking, opaque and phantom-like out of the plumes of steam that waft up from the gutters, the gauzy, rain-slick streets bleed super-saturated reds and blues, the brass and snare drum conjure up oppressive waves of portent, and finally the darkness parts its curtain for God’s lonely man to make his entrance. He comes from nowhere, peers the world through slatted fingers, and can’t make convincing small talk to save his life. By his own claims he’s a Vietnam vet, an ex-marine, with no friends or family with whom he can connect or accept consolation from. A genuine outsider with only the most marginal sort of charisma imaginable, he seems somehow the unlikeliest of characters to mount the stage of movie history, but more than 30 years after making his first appearance there’s no denying that he’s earned his place there.

I think I’ve probably seen Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) as many times as I’ve seen any movie, yet every time I revisit it I’m always caught off guard at just how abstract, even hallucinatory, those opening moments are that I’ve described above. I’m equally caught off guard by how goddamned young, even asexual, Jodie Foster is as the child hooker Iris, or just how deeply immersed Robert De Niro seems in the role of the titular cabbie Travis Bickle, how convincingly he nurtures Travis’ loneliness, alienated logic, and the notion that his movement toward vigilantism is inevitable and somehow even heroic, cleansing, this 20th century underground man determined to wash the scum off the mean streets.

“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis writes in his diary. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” As delivered by De Niro, the comical, crude poetry with which he expresses his delusions of conformity is marvelous, and just one of several elements that make Paul Schrader’s churned-from-the-gut screenplay one of the most perfectly realized of the New Hollywood era. And you can actually access the script as you make your way through the movie on Sony’s recent Taxi Driver two-disc set, stopping at any point to see how it matches with the final result. Its just one of a plethora of special features designed to entice fans who obsess over the film to a level that competes with Travis’ obsessing over his misguided vocation.

There have been a number of excellent multi-disc packages of Scorsese films in recent years, with the two-disc release of Raging Bull being a major standout. I’m not sure why it took so long to finally get Taxi Driver the same deluxe treatment, but its proven to be worth the wait. There’s good making-of type stuff and testimonies from everybody from Scorsese himself to his one-time student Oliver Stone to numerous New York City cabbies who remember just how mean the city streets were back when the film first came out.

There’s also a pretty smart little featurette that’s got plenty of interesting quotes from the always articulate Schrader, though the highlight of the whole package for me is Schrader’s full length audio commentary, where he discusses where he was at in his life while writing the film (i.e.: in miserable shape), how he’d connected with Scorsese, how they adjusted the project to best accommodate the cast and shooting conditions, how much of the film was scripted and how much improvised, and how little anyone expected the film to become the enormous success it did. Schrader talks matter-of-factly about the underlying themes of racism in the film, explaining why he though it essential that Travis attack blacks in particular, and why the racism in the film eventually became one of the factors that led to Harvey Keitel being cast as the jive-talking pimp Sport, a role originally meant for a black actor.

Taxi Driver is a film that speaks to the ages yet could probably only have come out of the particular conditions of its time. Its fixations are those of young, angry men, and Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro were just young enough to still really feel it. Its singular position both in its response to and shaping of film history is on exhibit all over the place, with Scorsese’s wildly adventurous playing with form indebted to his voracious consuming of the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among many others. And it’s a film that’s finally a product of the heady 70s, that time when young directors with a newly-gleaned sense of film history's continuity could take control of their work, a time when mainstream audiences occasionally flocked to see films for reasons other than fleeting thrills (though Taxi Driver arguably has those, too), and the battle between art and commerce in movies found some near-perfect harmony for a few golden years. Taxi Driver is the grotesque child of that era, and one that deserves to be visited again and again.

The Brave One: This time, it's personal, or maybe it's generic, or maybe neither

When The Brave One cropped up last fall I was knee deep in TIFF and barely noticed it. It was only later that I began to notice how wildly conflicted the critical response was and my curiosity grew. The film’s genealogy as a vigilante thriller is of course impressive, with executive producer and star Jodie Foster in a sense assuming the Travis Bickle role from Taxi Driver, the film in which she played the pubescent prostitute who becomes Bickle’s personal salvation project.

The Brave One cements its kinship with Taxi Driver in its use of voice-over, the evocative New York location work, the convenience store-killing initiation scene, and, at points, even its score, which features surges of nearly atonal brass and strings. As well, there’s the protagonist’s unusual sensitivity to the ever-shifting city via the dictates of their occupation: from the cockpit of his cab, Bickle primarily saw and smelled New York, where Foster’s Erica, a public radio broadcaster who makes field recordings and comments on New York’s evolution on her show, primarily listens to it

Filmic heritage aside, what’s most interesting here is basically the cultivation of Erica’s sense of internal transfiguration. Having survived the brutal assault that killed her fiancé, her isolation and despair compounded by the apparent absence of any other friends or relatives in her life, she feels that she’s literally become someone else, someone now capable of cold retribution. This discovery of one’s basic, killer instincts was effectively mined most recently in A History of Violence, but the connection between trauma and response is more immediate in The Brave One, with Erica going from victim to vigilante in a matter of weeks. Her transformation is quickened by her sudden proximity to random acts of violence, and, while it feels like something of a baldly magical conceit, I liked this element too, the idea that once violence touches you, you suddenly start to see it everywhere.

So far so intriguing, but where everything completely falls apart is in the final act, which climaxes in one of most astoundingly stupid, most grossly misguided finales in recent memory. How could the presumably reasonably intelligent people working on The Brave One possibly agree to such a pathetic resolution? I was hoping that the making-of featurette on Warner’s new DVD might enlighten us.

Basically, the film’s producers explain how Roderick and Bruce Taylor’s screenplay was initially a straight-ahead genre piece, but when Neil Jordan signed on as director they knew it could be so much more and another writer, Cynthia Mort, was brought it to ostensibly smarten it up. Jordan himself says he actually wanted to make a genre film, something in keeping with the work of say, Sam Fuller or Don Siegel. Indeed, these testimonies finally begin to add up: in the end, The Brave One is caught between being exploitation and something more reflective, and suffers profoundly from this indecision.