When That Rough God Goes Riding: Greil Marcus on the many mysteries, missteps, and pants of Van Morrison

Perhaps the greatest records—the ones that, to borrow Greil Marcus’ standard, we carry to our graves—are those that seize us upon our first encounter, yield their real treasures only gradually, and somehow retain their mysteries even after we’ve internalized their every strum, tickle, and intake of breath. Marcus claims to have listened to Van Morrison’s 1968 creative breakthrough Astral Weeks more than any other record, every time worrying he’s exhausted it, every time discovering anew that it still hasn’t given itself up. He submits several reasons why this might be in When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (Public Affairs, $29), though none convince me so much as the one he’s not quite certain of, thus forming it as a question: “Is it because it has no ending?”

Morrison gets down with Janet Planet

First time I heard Astral Weeks I must have fallen into a trance. I was sure the record consisted of three, maybe four songs. I was later shocked to discover the eight listed on the back cover. It feels like traveling, this record, like following a path in the dark that leads to changes in topography you hadn’t anticipated yet in retrospect seem the natural result of all that came before. Marcus gets at something similar when discussing the yarragh, which William Butler Yeats once described as a sort of Celtic lament, which for our purposes we might loosely align to the Spanish concept of duende—in his 1999 essay ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song,’ Nick Cave memorably declared that duende “pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and, though he tries to, he cannot escape it.” Marcus locates the yarragh in Morrison as “the voice that strikes a note so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back.”

When That Rough God Goes Riding, which is more a collection of short essays than a sustained consideration of Morrison’s work, is at its best in rapturously articulate passages such as these, as well as in smaller, sometimes quirkier digressions. Marcus considers Morrison’s performance of ‘Caravan’ in The Last Waltz, wearing that amusingly snug outfit and kicking his right leg in the air like a Rockette, and later pays loving homage to Morrison’s donning of hot pants in ‘Moonshine Whiskey.’ Marcus is wonderfully sensitive to the nuances of Richard Davis’ bass work on Astral Weeks. Marcus tells a vivid personal story about a schoolmate’s bohemian mom whose image he recalls while listening to ‘Madame George.’ He’s very good with the strange, hushed aural space Morrison inhabits with ‘Linden Arlen Stole the Highlights’: “the louder you try to make it, the more it recedes, until it reaches as far as it will go toward silence, making you lean into it.”

Morrison getting his kicks in The Last Waltz

Marcus can be less persuasive when making cross-media comparisons, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ to Raymond Chandler’s Little Sister, a somewhat intriguing case, or ‘Friday’s Child’ to a scene in Anton Corbijn’s Control, which could have just as easily been a million other things. He seems determined to spend an awful lot of ink describing the movie Breakfast on Pluto before analyzing its use of Morrison’s music. I appreciated Marcus’ audacity to write off 16 entire years of Morrison’s work—“The tedium was almost heroic in its refusal to quit,” he quips—yet if you’re familiar with the work in question, as well as with other less reputable records that Marcus champions, you can’t help but yearn for closer readings of Morrison’s whole 45-year oeuvre, rather than the scattering of musings collected here. But I suppose the scattered, associational nature of When That Rough God Goes Riding could be seen as Marcus’ own riff on the yarragh. I closed the book without any doubts as to the sincerity of Marcus’ stray assertions about this artist he so clearly reveres, even those that admit their own inconclusiveness. It takes a certain critical flair to end an essay with the confession that “what I value most is how inexplicable any great work really is.”

Good cop, bad cop, batshit cop: The Other Guys

Two adrenaline junky celebrity cops dive 20 stories to their senseless deaths for no apparent reason other than the crazed bliss of suicidal recklessness. A punch-up breaks out at a funeral and everyone whispers while beating each other so as not to disturb the grieving guests. A guy gets loaded and eats a priest’s arm. A chopper’s taken out by an onslaught of golf balls. An NYPD captain moonlights at a bed and bath store to put his bisexual son through DJ school. Steve Coogan bribes investigators with tickets to Jersey Boys. These are some of the movie’s highlights, though they could just as easily be enjoyed as stand-alone slapstick shorts. Their being part of a feature film constitutes nothing beyond a convenient framing device.

It must be some kind of genuine praise when I confess that I dunno what to make of cop buddy gutbuster The Other Guys. When we talk about the necessity of approaching movies on their own terms rather than as variations on familiar templates, we typically do so with regards to relatively obscure or “difficult” movies in danger of vanishing into the art house fog, but this same re-negotiating of expectations can be applied to comedies. The Other Guys is a miserable failure at lots of things we typically consider essential. The narrative, for one, which seems to want to be some sort of satire at times, isn’t merely stupid, it’s also inconsistent, incoherent, and flamboyantly lumpy. But throughout film history we can find numerous comedies that work, sometimes beautifully, as nothing more than tautological accumulations of gag-assaults, knowingly absurd situations that are funniest when we realize they’re going absolutely nowhere—the Marx Brothers were at their best when using this tack. Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell get into a childish yet tense verbal sparring match based entirely around how animal versions of themselves could consume each other in a nonsensical food chain. The conversation is so silly, but they just keep at it until it seems utterly exhausted, and keep at it further still, until it’s not just funny all over again but actually funnier than it was to begin with. Like Van Morrison repeating a single lyric into blissful abstraction, these guys beat funny ideas to death so as to raise them from the dead.

The Other Guys was co-scripted and directed by Adam McKay, who helmed the earlier Will Ferrell loser comedies Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers. The approach here is similar if perhaps more insane. This is busy, spastic, anxiogenic comedy, so the narrative isn’t really supposed to hold together. Wahlberg, as a humiliated high-strung peacock champing at the bit for some super-cop glory, and Ferrell, as the partner content to stay at his desk and quietly build cases against developers for neglecting to apply for scaffolding permits, do brilliantly funny things with the uneven material by making it all so deadly serious. Though its less recognized than Ferrell’s, Wahlberg has always had a very special gift for comedy—just go back to certain bits of Boogie Nights, the singing especially, or even the way he simply parks a bike in I Heart Huckabees—because he heroically hurls himself headlong into playing stakes rather than jokes. I was in tears at times. But for every well-drawn character there's one that just gets more half-assed with every new appearance—such as Eva Mendes as Ferrell's sketch of a spouse. For every inspired scene there’s another that falls drearily flat. Holding it all together is little more than our patient waiting for the next, hopefully better scene. Still, I’ll take this over a tediously over-manicured, story-edited-into-a-coma comedy any day of the week.