To fuse and refuse: The Fly at 25

Seth Brundle, the tragic genius at the core of The Fly (1986), is motivated to crack the secrets of teleportation not only because such innovation will challenge established concepts of time and space, but also because he suffers from motion sickness—teleportation means never having to set foot in a propelled vehicle again. This bit of character eccentricity is one of the many ingenious details that have allowed The Fly to endure these last 25 years, not only as what may be the defining synthesis of every major theme in David Cronenberg’s filmography, but as the modern big-budget genre film that synthesized an intelligent query into the most vital and troubling issues faced by contemporary philosophers, scientists and policy-makers with an absolutely primal and inspired display of body horror theatrics. There is no other movie at once so smart and so disgusting. Indeed, The Fly features what remains the most astonishing vomit scene—wait, make that scenes—in cinema history. (A word of warning to the uninitiated: do not watch this movie while eating yogurt.)

Rooted in the 1957 short story by George Langelaan and, of course, the Vincent Price film of the same title (1958), The Fly is several things: a chamber love triangle between Brundle, a journalist (Geena Davis) trying to file and article for a magazine named Particle, and her editor (John Getz); a science fiction about a man who accidentally gets into a machine with an insect and pays the abysmal consequences; and a shock-meditation on aging, death, and what it means to be human. “Am I dying?” Brundle wonders after his successful self-teleportation with insect co-pilot begins to exact its gooey toll on his flesh. (“His” flesh? Or something else? Teleportation obliterates form in order to recreate it elsewhere.) This being a Cronenberg film, whatever existential terror or grief Brundle feels en route to becoming Brundle-fly is eclipsed by unquenchable fascination. Other versions of Langelaan’s ‘Fly’ had its protagonist lose his ability to speak relatively early in the story; Cronenberg insisted that his Brundle keep his tongue nimble as long as possible—he wanted Brundle to articulate what was happening to him until the very end, at which point a single, unbearably sad gesture is all that’s needed for the experiment to reach its dire conclusion.

Much credit has to be given to Goldblum, whose toothy, lanky charisma, dry humour and quiet showmanship rendered him one of Cronenberg’s perfect alter egos: a smart man of action; a geek with sex appeal; a guy who can endow the word "cheeseburger" with seductive magic. And Davis, Goldblum’s girlfriend at the time, is every bit his match, both intrigued and repulsed, in-love and loving and fiercely self-protective: her alarmed response to the possibility that she’s pregnant with Son of Brundle-fly is deeply affecting. Its fantastic narrative being awkwardly yet necessarily compressed, The Fly is not without its little flaws—a bit of boilerplate dialogue here, some garish lighting there; way too much showy pathos from Getz’s emasculated ex—but the immense power of its unnerving ideas, the complex dynamics of its tautly told story, and the nuanced performances of its two leads earn its status as some very peculiar sort of masterpiece.

The Original of Laura: pieces of a man

“Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of intercourse so seldom convey…”

—from The Original of Laura

Its weight in your hands approximates that of someone’s remains. It contains the unfinished work of a dying man mediating on physical things, so there’s plenty of sex and a sense of proximity to death all the more unnerving for its relentless playfulness. It’s one of these posthumously published puzzles pulled from the fire, but to my nose smells nothing like literary betrayal nor crass cash-in. Take a look at its thick, largely blank pages: no one could mistake this for anything other than what it is: an art object; an homage; a glorious sketch. It leaves us wanting more, as it should. This “novel in fragments” doesn’t even hold all the fragments necessary to make a whole book—not even a third, I’d guess. But what remains of its narrative ambitions is also something about fragments, about the body as Death’s construction site, or rather demolition zone, a place where fragments of a person can be stolen or actually willed away, piece by piece, in this case from the feet up. There’s another title, not on the jacket but inside: Dying is Fun. I’m not sure if I buy this assertion, but if anyone could transform such irony into articulated desire it would’ve been Vladimir Nabokov.

I stalled an awfully long time on reading The Original of Laura (Knopf, $42), feeling that perhaps I should wait until I’ve read everything else by Nabokov—still working on that one!—uncertain as to how this artifact should be approached. The book came out one year ago and I’m only now finally reporting on it, feeling silly for my trepidation. It’s actually a pretty fun, fascinating read, and the context provided by the packaging and introduction is all the context anyone needs. It can’t be stated too clearly that this represents the roughest of, well, not even something we can call a draft, from an author whose prose is famous for its shining eloquence. But, as with say, the Bootleg Series recordings of Bob Dylan, this roughness, this exposure of process, is partly what’s so interesting to examine.

“Learning to use the vigor of the body for the purpose of its own deletion,” an wealthy, elderly, fat man considers science, writing, and his slow disappearance, as well as his longing for the young woman whose name rhymes with the one in the title. Flora recalls Margot from Laughter in the Dark and, quite obviously, the eponymous nymph of Lolita—she’s even molested as a child by an older man named Hubert H. Hubert. Her backstory is arguably the book’s most coherent section, and includes a suicide recorded on camera and a fatal stroke occurring in an elevator: “Going up, one would like to surmise.” The Original of Laura was the project undertaken by Nabokov during his final, sickly years in Montreux. It was clearly far from completion when he died in 1977, though his son Dmitri offers what seems to me a perfectly convincing case for its survival and publication in his painstakingly Nabakovian introduction, which possesses the faintest echo of Pale Fire, and in its concern with correcting legacy invokes The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

Designed by Chip Kidd, the cover emphasizes themes of disintegration and absence, with words fading to black before their termination. Nabokov’s text itself appears as facsimiles of the index cars upon which the author composed his works, the edges of which perforated, encouraging consumers to punch them out and perhaps rearrange them in some new order, though, jarring as many of the transitions may be, it’s hard to imagine an arrangement more satisfying than the one presented here. The Original of Laura is fractured and elliptical, a mere hint at something that might have been, peppered with sparks of the old brilliance in search of their final form, mischievously sculpted to make it almost seem intentional, and in precisely this way it’s kind of perfect.

2000s: our prolific poet of death and wonder

Unless you’re capping out at, I don’t know, say 200, there comes a point in assembling these best-of-the-decade lists when it feels like you’re just blithely eliminating one masterwork after another. You get giddy. You get guilt-wracked. Another publication I did one of these lists for also asked me for a list of the decade’s best filmmakers, which made the process somewhat easier. There are those prolific artists whose work is so solidly masterful, who provoke us, move us, and entertain us so consistently, it becomes tough to determine which of their movies deserves championing above the rest. In the end, rather than any one movie, it’s the body of work that seems important.

No single movie from Gus Van Sant made my best-of-the-decade list, but Van Sant himself sure as hell ranks high on my list of the decade’s best filmmakers. Have a look at this chronology: Gerry (2002) Elephant (03) Last Days (05) Paranoid Park (07) Milk (08). The first three supposedly constitute some sort of “Death” trilogy, the second and third of which dramatizing real-life events still fresh in our collective memory—the Columbine shootings and the suicide of Kurt Cobain, respectively. Yet the fourth also revolves around trauma and life lost, and also plays games with our sense of memory and chronology, with that tricky notion of time’s arrow flying in a single, steady direction. Even the fifth tells the story of the pioneering, openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk as though it were a heady escalation of events inevitably leading to a shocking and untimely demise. All of these films are death-haunted, yet all of them burst with life, colour and humour, with youth and friendship, with erotic discoveries and woozy mysteries, with the pleasures of losing oneself in the rumbling undulations of skateboarding toward the crest of a half-pipe, or the overwhelming rush of an alliance of previously neglected or oppressed mass having their voice heard loud and clear for the first time.

Van Sant’s rare among American filmmakers in that from fairly early on he’s managed to straddle the increasingly disparate trajectories of highly personal, challenging filmmaking and mainstream filmmaking—only Steven Soderbergh, who gave us movies ranging from Che (08) to Ocean’s Eleven (01) over the course of this last decade, and Richard Linklater, who slid seamlessly from Waking Life (01) to School of Rock (03) to Before Sunset (04), seem equally capable of playing both ends of the system with flair. What distinguishes Van Sant from even these esteemed peers is the dexterity with which he’s able to make these transitions and the extremes he embraces, from the incorporation of avant-garde formal play to the unapologetic populism of the triumphant biopic. His work defies our cynicism about Hollywood and the ever-looming death of the movies. May his next decade be even more dazzling.

New books by or about Bolaño: Tracing the poet's progress and the emergence of the novelist

The events of Monsieur Pain (New Directions, $28.50) orbit around the peculiar illness that would take the life of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. He died, rather mysteriously, in Paris in 1938. He had been in Spain, had worked for the Republican cause, and it’s suggested that his heartbreak over Spain exacerbated his demise. Yet in Roberto Bolaño’s novel, Vallejo, who appears only briefly, and only as a warm body, in a scene that finds him examined by a practitioner of “the occult sciences,” seems primarily to be dying from some spiritual condition that manifests itself in chronic hiccups. All around him Europe is becoming swept up in waves of fascism, seeming to hiccup itself, choked by spasms, unable to breathe calmly in an increasingly stifling air. And, who knows, perhaps the poet is hiccupping on the continent’s behalf, one final, wordless poetic act.

(Vallejo isn't the only character in a newly released novel to suffer perilously from a persistent case of hiccups. In Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City [Doubleday $34], his busy but loose, sprawling, often hilarious tale of friendship set in an alternate Manhattan, a man is afflicted with incessant hiccups caught from a beloved dog.)

Monsieur Pain is the earliest novel we now have from Bolaño, whose body of work has been getting rapidly translated into English by a couple of different US houses in the wake of the tremendous critical acclaim that met The Savage Detectives and 2666, both of which were published in the last few years. In the book’s preface, Bolaño explains that the novel was written back in 1981 or 82, long before he appears to have made any significant commitment to being an author of fiction rather than a poet, which he always maintained was his real vocation. Yet Monsieur Pain feels somewhat less overly poetic in its prose or structure than the later work. Some of the characteristics that we associate with Bolaño—the enigmatic sinister, the collision of politics and ineffable psychological need—are present, and an epilogue of biographical sketches is something of a prelude to the structural device found in Nazi Literature in the Americas. But, even though Monsieur Pain is translated by Chris Andrews, who has deftly translated the bulk of the Bolaño available, we don’t yet hear the Bolaño voice. That will come in good time—in fact it’s positively vibrant in The Skating Rink (New Directions, $28.50), the early mystery novel released in English last summer—and it’s perfectly interesting to see the author develop his approach in this slim work dense with curiosities.

While it hardly follows a generic narrative thread, Monsieur Pain is imbued with much playful tropes lifted from thrillers, considerable intrigue, and bizarre detours. There is the hero’s unrequited love for a young widow. There are foreigners following our hero through the streets. Bribes are taken. There are inexplicable orders that must be adhered to. There is also a surprise meeting in a café with a pair of twins who design miniature scenes of deadly catastrophes to be displayed in aquariums (which subtly anticipates the deep sea imagery of 2666). There is a screening of a perplexing, semi-documentary movie with the sly title of Actualité. This Paris is a confluence of shadows, and Bolaño’s writing feels rather close to an open homage to Kafka. The hero is repressed and finally ineffectual, lovesick, lonely, dream-rattled, and consumed with guilt. Perhaps he’s losing his mind. Perhaps he’s being mesmerized. He wants to save the life of César Vallejo, but there are forces that will not let this transpire.

At one point a character speaks of the notion that “every death has a ritual function; death, indeed, was the only genuine rite left in the world.” For Bolaño himself, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, death seems to have functioned as a shroud of mystique that would posthumously envelope his writing, much in the same way that Bolaño’s imprisonment in Chile after the coup, which has over the years been exaggerated by certain commentators, had enveloped his writing with a certain heroism while he was still alive. So it’s that much more interesting to hear from Bolaño during the final part of his life in this excellent little collection entitled Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (Melville House, $18.95).

It opens with an essay by Marcela Valdes that pays tribute not only to Bolaño but also to the Mexican investigative journalist Sergio González Rodriguez, Bolaño’s friend and the author of Huesos en el Desierto, an exposé on the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez. González Rodriguez's research was essential to developing the portrait of Bolaño’s Santa Teresa, his fictionalized Juarez, and the dark centre of 2666. Bolaño, who greatly admired American crime writers such as James Ellroy, once said he wanted to be a homicide detective, and his correspondence with González Rodriguez was perhaps the closest he came to vicariously fulfilling this urge. (A list of other things Bolaño might have liked to do with his life can be found later in the book: “Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick, and there’s no other choice but to write.”)

In the four interviews that follow, we’re able to read Bolaño’s sense of the shape of 20th century Spanish-language literature, with numerous illuminating comments on the authors who he felt remain important, and the book features a number of informative, concise, and nicely laid out side-notes that give the reader easy access to basic information on every figure mentioned. Bolaño, whose tongue is frequently in cheek but who is equally capable of sudden, surprising flights of sincerity, discusses the problems with reading prose from the perspective of a poet, the differences between Mexico, Chile and Spain, his tendencies toward radicalism and the solitude it brings with it, the literary marketing value of political imprisonment, and types of literary silence. Looming over this last topic is the sad fact that Bolaño’s silence was the kind imposed by death that comes far too young, and at the peak of a brilliant career.

Return of the robotical son: Astro Boy

Based on Tezuka Osamu’s beloved manga and anime franchise, Astro Boy is set partly in the clean and luxurious floating Metro City, and partly in the vast trash heap that constitutes the planet below, a dystopian vision in which the segregation of the wealthy elite from the underprivileged majority has been pushed to extremes—as have issues of waste disposal. Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage) experiments with “pure positive” and “pure negative” energies, which gets war-giddy President Stone (Donald Sutherland) jazzed on inventing excuses for some ultra-high tech ass-kicking to help boost his chances at re-election.

During one such experiment, single parent Tenma’s precocious only-son Toby (Freddie Highmore) is killed. Tenma plummets into grief and determines to bring Toby back to life by fusing some of the kid’s DNA into the body of a powerful robot look-alike, complete with all of Toby’s memories. But Tenma quickly becomes horrified by his creation, this cheerful little golem with his dead son’s smile and voice and demands for love. The robot Toby, our Astro Boy, is finally stranded on Earth, where other robots are onto his artificial nature while humans assume he’s one of them. He hooks up with a band of orphans led by one Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), a futuristic Fagan who hosts monster robot rallies. So Astro Boy has to keep a low profile, pose as a normal boy, conceal from the world his jet-propelled feet, superhuman strength, and machine guns ready to pop out of his synthetic flesh. Something that proves difficult once he knows that President Stone is on his tail and calling for his super-charged heart.

I’m not sufficiently versed in existing Astro lore to be certain how much of Flushed Away director David Bowers’ feature version extrapolates, bastardizes or re-invigorates the source material, but there’s no denying how engaged I was in Astro Boy’s recasting of Pinocchio, not to mention Oliver Twist, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, and Freaks, its merging of familiar myths with modern concerns of class, isolationism, technological ownership, the environment, and the residual effects of rampant consumerism. Of course the implications are all pretty explicit, which seems perfectly legitimate given that this movie, with its moral parables, its colorful, fluid imagery and its exciting, explosive set pieces, is clearly geared toward a family audience.

Despite some notable histrionics from Cage, the vocal performances go a long way toward making Astro Boy feel buoyant amidst several detours into tragedy and eerie questions about what it means to be human. Sutherland actually underplays President Stone’s obvious roots in Bush Jr., Kristen Bell gives surprising texture to Cora, Astro Boy’s teenage love interest—speaking of eerie questions—and Samuel L. Jackson has a lot of fun within the very limited range of vocal possibilities of Zog, the giant robot pal revived by Astro Boy. Fantastic and somewhat simplistic as Astro Boy is, there’s a pleasing degree of investment here in what the consequences of our continued exploration of virtual culture and the uses and abuses of artificial intelligence. Sure beats the hell out of Surrogates, in any case.

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

From the beginning he scrupulously surveyed a landscape the rest of us strive to keep at bay. He spent a pivotal portion of his youth in a Japanese internment camp, where violence, death and collapse were regularly on display. He lost the love of his life and mother of his young children while still in his early 30s. Yet despair and hopelessness seemed other to him. In his stories and novels he rendered with great precision and unfettered imagination what other writers merely drape in bathos. In his second novel The Drowned World (1962), he described a London visible only by the tips of its tallest buildings, the remainder completely submerged following a global catastrophe spurred by melting icecaps. “Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids.” Later in the novel we’re given a tour of an underwater planetarium, which is to say we’re given the stars far below the surface of the sea. Such gifts are common in the work of J.G. Ballard.

When characterizing Ballard’s tales, whether fantastically dystopian or chillingly realist, one’s repeatedly tempted by the term “alienating,” yet what makes the work so arresting and provocative is the fact that his protagonists aren’t really alienated at all. They witness horrors that, rather than simply deadening affect, awake a new level of fascination with phenomena far grander in scale than individual lives or even civilizations. Like the experimental plants and animals bred in the laboratory of Ballard’s ‘The Voices of Time’ (60), his characters break away from conventional responses to their environment by utilizing some dormant impulse locked inside all of us, perhaps in our very genes. To read his books is to stimulate, as Martin Amis described it, “a disused part of the reader’s brain.” Transcending genre, form and, most gleefully, taste, Ballard remains singular. He died last Sunday morning in London, following a long struggle with cancer. He was 78.

James Graham Ballard was born to British parents in Shanghai in 1930. They lived luxuriously in an enclave upon whose fringes existed a world both “extravagant and cruel,” boasting a wild assortment of exotic crime. “Anything was possible, and everything could be bought and sold,” Ballard wrote. “In many ways, it seems like a stage set, but at the time it was real, and I think a large part of fiction has been an attempt to evoke it by means other than memory.” In a transformation that would echo again and again in images of abandoned buildings, empty pools and grounded aircraft, their protected world would be left a spectral cavity once the Ballards were placed in internment in 1943. Ballard received lessons in poverty, charity, starvation, solidarity and pettiness. He ate maggots for protein. And he was always curious, amazed and basically cheerful. “Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life.”

In 1946 Ballard returned to England, bombed-out and miserable, a victorious nation that behaved as though defeated, a place where “hope itself was rationed.” Ballard went to medical school, where he became transfixed by the cadavers he was assigned to dissect, seeing in their faces a palimpsest of experience. He then went to Moose Jaw with the RAF, and it was on the Canadian prairie that he discovered science fiction, the genre that would ignite his mind. He married Mary Matthews in 1955 and settled in Shepperton to have three kids and start in earnest his prolific writing career. Mary would die suddenly of pneumonia in 1963, leaving Ballard to do all the domestic and money-earning duties while still engaging in a dynamic social life in swinging London. His memoir Miracles of Life (08) is dedicated to and named after his beloved children, who he remained close to all his life. Yet happy families, or even unhappy families, were never to be a significant subject of his work.

Apocalyptic scenarios fuelled many of the early novels, yet the more Ballard interacted with the familiar contemporary world, the more truly unnerving his fiction became. The Kennedy assassination, his wife’s death, Vietnam, his memories of wartime Shanghai, and his interest in new feats of consumerism, fetish-making and media sensationalism merged to create the image/event/prose graft of The Atrocity Exhibition (66), aligning Ballard far more with Jean-Luc Godard or Andy Warhol at the peak of their powers than with the likes of Isaac Asimov. One of Ballard’s most infamous novels, Crash (73) encompasses the radical approach to speculation Ballard had taken, subverting our response to trauma into an obsession with configurations of modern embodiments of affluence and glamour. His characters survive car crashes only to then crave and even design more of them, erotically, wholly, seeking some psychotic communion. When David Cronenberg adapted the novel into an equally controversial film of the same name (96), it made for one of the most fruitful collaborations between two uncannily like-minded artists of the late 20th century.

Empire of the Sun (84) ushered him into the literary mainstream. A fictionalized retelling of his Shanghai experiences, it melded Ballard’s crisp, coolly poetic language with nostalgia and tenderness. From here, the bulk of remaining body of work would stick largely to the format most clearly outlined in High Rise (75), tales of cloistered, antiseptic colonies—gated communities in Running Wild (88) and Cocaine Nights (96), an elite business park in Super-Cannes (00), a giant exurban shopping mall in Kingdom Come (06)—where the deadening effects of modern life invites transgression, the promise of control invites tacit agreements to lose control, and a state of anarchy is longed for by exactly those who sought to maintain order. I reviewed most of these when they came out, and it never ceased to amaze me how these explicit variations on a theme in each case the same story could yield fresh insights.

I never met J.G. Ballard but I’ll miss him nonetheless. His voice so rarely gave comfort, but there is a sort of vertiginous exhilaration to be found in his probing of our collective psyche and precarious ambitions. His body of work is too alive with possibility to be considered fatalist. His fecund mind sought to unearth the secret contract between surrealism and social commentary. And he did his part in ensuring that the British novel would not succumb to quaintness. Like the protagonist in ‘The Garden of Time’ (61), he has felt the final crystal of life dissolve in his hands, but he’s left us a vast field of jewels to pick through and marvel at in his absence.

There's plenty more on Ballard to be found at The Daily. 

The Mark on the page: Naked Lunch 50 years on

In the 50 years since its publication Naked Lunch has surely repelled more potential readers than it’s attracted, yet anyone compelled to work through William S. Burroughs’ seminal work knows how eerily fresh it remains, despite the novel’s refrain of putrefaction. Perhaps it endures because of its still arresting insights into the nature of addiction, a public health issue that does not seem to go away, that Burroughs renders in such a multitude of forms it becomes a multi-purpose metaphor of almost singular resonance. Perhaps it’s because the puzzle pattern of the text never yields to full cohesion, remaining tantalizingly just beyond our grasp. After all, Bill Lee, Burroughs’ alter ego and the closest Naked Lunch has to a protagonist, seems always to be departing, always refusing to sit for his appointed interrogations. Perhaps it’s the flamboyant grotesquerie and gallows humour, since besides Swift I’m not sure of any writer who’s mixed this particular cocktail so deftly. Though he’s testified to the contrary, Burroughs was indeed an entertainer.

I used the expression “to work through,” but when I picked up Naked Lunch as a teenager it didn’t seem like work at all. Tom Clancy, John Grisham, celebrity memoirs—now those would have felt like work. By contrast, the series of “routines” that comprised Naked Lunch were so casually inflammatory and recklessly stitched together it seemed positively inviting, something to be picked up, devoured and put aside when you’ve had your fill. Returning to the book for the first time in many years however, I no longer buy the ostensible randomness of its structure at all.

Naked Lunch is a lot of things, among them memoir, satire, science-fiction, vaudeville, metaphysical travelogue, hard-boiled junky pulp, grand guignol, pharmacological dissertation, avant-garde prose poem, hardcore pornography, and, as the author attests in the final passage, “a blueprint, a How-To book,” presumably on how to generate more like material, which Burroughs energetically followed. But while we can argue over how it might be finessed in some parts— personally, I think the abrupt interruption of the ‘Hauser and O’Brien’ sequence so late in the game by the belated “preface” kind of drops the ball—Naked Lunch is not random. Burroughs was a frequently masterful storyteller, if a rigorously fragmentary one. His first editors were Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, friends as well as fellow writers who knew Burroughs probably better than anyone and would have had a keen sense of how best to—literally—collect these pages from the floor and arrange them. For so much of Naked Lunch the accumulation of story fragments follows a propulsive internal logic and thematic causality, developing associations, characters, theses and sense of place, undulating and building like some demented mock-opera.

“I can feel the heat closing in…” It begins as New York crime fiction, allowing us our genre bearings, however briefly, immediately introducing the motifs of escape and paranoia. Bill Lee is on the run, and once he gets going the fleeing from one place to another never lets up. He soon encounters Doctor Benway, the quintessential Burroughs creation, a fountain of sinister wisdom and wisecracks, a villain of vampiric brilliance who represents the most innocuous and dangerous forms of societal control. He’s also good for ribald irreverence toward the human body, bragging about how he once performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can. The US will bleed into Latin America, into North Africa, into the fecund and deadly “Interzone,” into the blue movie Edenic deathless adolescent orgy of bizarre intercourse and orgasmic hangings that doubles as a protest against capital punishment. We’re regaled about the man who taught his asshole to talk until the asshole took over, a hysterically funny spin on parasitism, on the habit taking control of its master. It also exemplifies the anal fixation and Naked Lunch’s deep unease with homosexuality, this novel that careens with countless scenes of oddly touching, formative homoerotic bonding between boys and exceedingly graphic and often brutally violent gay sex.

The episodes of Naked Lunch bloom and recede like persistent hallucinations. But hallucinations are not mere fancy; they reconstruct and renovate experience. “Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.” Burroughs deliberately blurs the perspectives of half-sleep and wakefulness, trusting that there’s something of value to be found along the frontiers. And at its most lyrical, Burroughs’ prose displays an intoxication with language itself that inevitably aligns it to Joyce, sex and all. The compression of images couples with the ache of flooding memories. Following an act of torrid sexual climax, Burroughs writes, “A train roars through him whistle blowing… boat whistle, foghorn, sky rockets burst over oily lagoons… penny arcades open into a maze of dirty pictures…” And a paragraph later: “Time jumps like a broken typewriter, the boys are old men…” Over the course of this one page we see ecstasy produce an effect most commonly attributed to death: cryptically, William Burroughs’ life is flashing before our eyes.

If you know anything about Burroughs, who died in 1997 at the age of 83, you know that his writing, ideas and biography are inextricably merged. And you probably know that in Mexico City in 1951 he accidentally shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer while performing a drunken game of William Tell. He would eventually write about this event as forever haunting him yet ironically functioning as the catalyst for his writing career, but in Naked Lunch the only ghost of a memory of Vollmer appears and quickly disappears at the close of one of one of the more lucid autobiographical episodes. In Cuernavaca or Taxco—he can’t remember which—Lee and “Jane” smoke weed with some pimp and Lee flees in a fit of paranoia, finally catching a bus on his own back to Mexico City. “A year later in Tangier,” he then writes, “I heard she was dead.” David Cronenberg was right to make his film of Naked Lunch an overt hybrid of the novel and Burroughs’ life, with Vollmer’s death at the forefront. Burroughs’ novel has been rightfully heralded for speaking dark truths about social evils and human frailty, but in making blatant the loop that keeps Bill Lee circling back to confront the horrific event that formed the poisoned nucleus of Burroughs’ work, Cronenberg’s Lunch was the more Naked by far.

"Please. Help. Jean-Claude Van Damme is robbing a post office!"

What is surely the world’s first major meta-martial arts movie opens with a bravura tracking shot that forces Jean-Claude Van Damme, portrayed by Jean-Claude Van Damme, to kick, punch and jab his way through dozens of anonymous opponents to the sounds of some vintage Curtis Mayfield soul. The sequence just goes on and on, rather hilariously, until Van Damme begins to run out of steam, he misses a mark, and the whole thing literally collapses. “I’m 47!” he protests with affecting vulnerability to the frustrated crew. “Just because he brought John Woo to Hollywood doesn’t mean he can rub my dick with sandpaper,” the rather unforgiving punk of a director mumbles to his AD. A sort of companion piece to The Wrestler, but way goofier, JCVD gives us a fading action star waxing reflective on his own anxieties over struggling to keep up with the action.

Reeling from divorce and child custody suits, amassing vast debt, tiring, both physically and spiritually, of headlining an endless string of actioners that are virtual remakes of the same thing over and over, the muscle from Brussels returns home to lick his wounds and settle some business. But life will soon imitate art, and weirdly. It starts, aptly enough, in a sleepy video club that will soon be crammed with cops, some of whom wear only their underpants. They’re responding to one of the most memorable radioed-in cries for help in recent memory: “Please. Hurry. Jean-Claude Van Damme is robbing a post office!”

It appears Van Damme’s gone postal, though the truth is more complicated, involving hostages, many layers of theatre, meditations on the social duties of celebrities, a really bad and quite annoying bad guy with John Cazale’s haircut from Dog Day Afternoon, and a humiliating courtroom scene where a prosecuting attorney slaps down DVDs and rattles off the countless ways Van Damme has meted out death upon fictive victims for the last two decades. As helmed by Mabrouk El Mechri, JCVD is pitched somewhere between Jean-Luc Godard, Charlie Kaufman, a midnight movie and a cartoon. He bathes the whole thing in this bizarre, ugly, sort of bronzing ethereal haze that’s perhaps meant to resemble what the world looks like after 18 consecutive hours in a tanning bed. Like the enjoyably throwback score, the Dutch angles, or the long takes which frequently fix solely on Van Damme’s face even during a conversation, it’s one of many choices that render JCVD stylishly stoned and indiscriminate. But it’s never less than watchable and utterly diverting.

What grounds all this at all is obviously Van Damme himself, who seems to be genuinely laying his heart bare, slumped in chairs complaining about shit scripts, signing autographs and posing for pics, doing a few high kicks, and flipping out when he can’t make a simply bank transaction. The movie’s key scene has Van Damme drift out of the action altogether for a few minutes, floating up to the ceiling like the hero of Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist, delivering this rambling, semi-coherent, Brando-esque monologue about fame, drugs, women and whatever else haunts the tired mind of a Belgian kickboxing movie star. In some parallel universe it just won him the Oscar.

By the time I get to Phoenix: Psycho, in all its trauma and fascination, returns on DVD

It is for me one of those genuinely inexhaustible movies, and, though its violence pierces me only more deeply as time goes by, I find myself returning to it more than any other. Psycho, newly released on a special edition two-disc set from Universal, with a beautiful new transfer and unusually good supplements, has that crystalline character of something that yields new or richer readings or sensations with every handling. It forbids and seduces at once. As the brutal set pieces in the shower or on the staircase or in the basement grow more familiar, the relatively mundane moments—Marion’s hurried negotiations with the used car dealer; Sam and Lila’s negotiations in the nocturnal gloom of his hardware store, brimming with sharp objects—grow in fascination. It’s one of the few Alfred Hitchcock films not about glamorous people, yet its morbid allure is colossal.

The story? Two no longer young lovers meet for another tawdry rendezvous and feel a decisive moment looming over their stalled relationship. He’s been married, is struggling financially, and proud, painting for her a sad picture of the two of them living meagerly as monthly alimony payments are sent off in the mail. She’s a secretary, is starting to feel life close in, is ready to dive into domestic hardship with him, and offers to lick the stamps. Back at work a client of her boss leaves a huge amount of cash which she’s meant to deposit but instead pockets. She packs a suitcase and makes a break for the nearby town where her boyfriend lives, that always hesitating hunk unaware he’s in love with a felon. She drives through a rainy night, tires out just as a motel with vacancies shows up on the side of a lonely road. She checks in, meets the lonely, sensitive, clearly unworldly and maybe unstable but still innocent-seeming proprietor. He’s the wispy, soft-spoken twin of her boyfriend, and serves her sandwiches and a huge jug of milk while his batty old mother mutters curses in the house overlooking the motel. She starts to wonder if she hasn’t gone a little crazy. Everyone goes a little crazy sometimes... Given its stature, I’m going to keeping writing here on as though you’ve seen Psycho. If you haven’t, well, my friend, you’re in for something special.

The horizontal lines that push steadily across the screen during Saul Bass’ famed opening credit sequence, accompanied by our first taste of Bernard Herrmann’s masterfully portentous, nerve-fraying score, strike me now as a graphic preview to Norman Bates’ hand slapped over his mouth after “discovering” the bloodbath. Better yet, these lines resemble the viewer’s hand closed over eyes that can’t help but continue to watch. Psycho is nothing if not an ocular web. The peephole Norman watches his naked prey through; the montage that sinks us into that bloody drain hole and then circles out from Marion’s dead eye in the film’s chilling mid-point; the gaping hollow pits that stare back at Lila from the shriveled head of Mother: the mere act of looking never feels so passive after Psycho but rather something all too easily corruptible.

It was Lila’s third-act sequence of looking at things that caught my attention most intensely during my most recent viewing. She enters Mother’s room, sees the antiquated mirrors and dresses, the strange decorative objects and, most bizarrely, the deep impression of Mother’s presumably rarely moved body on the bed. She enters Norman’s room, sees the dolls and examines that untitled book we’re never allowed to glimpse. And Hitchcock keeps cutting between these objects and Lila’s pointed gaze—not unlike his cutting between Marion’s eye contact with her rather confusedly troubled looking (tipsy?) boss as he crosses the street in front of her car—reminding us over and over how very purposeful and consequential this activity of looking is. Reminding us, too, of the unnerving, seeming randomness of things, the constant details, like Marion’s uneaten lunch or the exacting date and time given at the top of that first scene of Marion’s hotel room tryst with Sam. If an individual’s death has seldom been so horrifyingly palpable as that of Marion’s in Psycho, surely this is partly due to the randomness Hitchcock so lovingly emphasizes in every conceivable way, right down to the casting of a star in what in other hands would seem the disposable role.

And what a strange and utterly perfect star performance it is. Janet Leigh is so damn good in Psycho because she’s as supple and cagey as her final adversary. Whether looking luscious in her bra with her boyfriend or in the office where she works, Marion is never quite penetrable. Indeed, it’s her eyes that remain remote. Other than hints of panic—with the car dealer or the cop—her eyes don’t betray her. Until she meets Norman, and only then do they begin to truly soften. Norman, his insecurities so eloquently, so tenderly embodied by Anthony Perkins, talks to Marion about “private traps” and here we have, in all its bravura irony, the most poignant moment of connection between two people in the whole movie. Marion is still guarded, yet she’s engaged to the point where this strange young man will actually cause her to turn around and go back to Phoenix, to return the money and accept punishment. But just as her private trap becomes illuminated for her, she has of course walked right into a different sort of trap beyond her ability to avoid, and moves straight into one of the most enduring evocations of sheer trauma in cinema history.

Death on the installment plan: Julian Barnes tries to overcome his thanatophobia, fails, writes book instead—and it’s pretty good!

Now the leaves shrivel, brown and fall from the trees to be obliviously trampled into wintry pulp; now the air turns crisp and thin, the days shorten and the nights forbiddingly chill—what better time is there to think about death! I’ve been reading the Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Random House, $32.95), English novelist Julian Barnes’ latest work of non-fiction. I’ve been reading it mostly outdoors, perhaps because my denial of summer’s end is nearly as resilient as our collective denial of that bigger, more ominous End. My reading of this divertingly morbid little volume has passed largely over pints of rich, opaque, iron-fortified beer on a tavern’s dusky patio until my fingers ached, a sensation that starts to blur its origins—is it just the coldness or the weakening effects of time on my digits?—once you reach a certain age, and that age likely depends on whenever it was you experienced le réveil mortel, a handy term dreamed up by Charles du Bos which Barnes suggests is best translated as “the wake-up call to mortality.”

I don’t know if this sounds like somebody’s idea of bragging, but I actually can’t even remember my own réveil. It seems like it was always there, already hatched and doing its work on my well-fed anxieties before I even knew what anxiety was. There are those, I’m told—and not only those who ascribe to religious beliefs—who aren’t plagued by fear of death. For them, Nothing to Be Frightened Of should hold some anthropological curiosity, a primer on what the fuss is all about. For the rest of us, Barnes’ pithy, anecdotal and arguably kind of amiably aimless thanatophobist’s memoir is all too familiar in its chronicles of late night sweats, those special sorts of panic attacks reserved for involuntary nocturnal “pit-gazing.” Barnes, now 62, is a non-believer, so his pit, for the record, is truly fucking fathomless, and the title of his book needs to be read with the emphasis on that first word: it is precisely nothing that’s so frightening.

Barnes goes through any number of age-old forms of philosophically intoned consolation, from the religious to the genetic, and finds more than adequate grounds for dismissing every one as insufficient. But consolation, that is, grown-up consolation as opposed to the rubber nipple type, doesn’t seem to be what this book is all about—unless we consider the value of the simple consolation of recognition, the reminder that we’re all in the same boat… even if it’s eventually going to smash into an iceberg.

“It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish,” observed Jules Renard and quoted by the Francophile Barnes, and for me this rings true. Literature, perhaps above all texts that survive their authors, holds a singular link to mortality, and books, hand-held, intimate by nature, closely invoke our private dialogue with time. Barnes, while claiming that if given a strict number of days left would probably chose the emotional mainline of music over books—also pretty sensible if you ask me—thus makes the refrain of Nothing to Be Frightened Of references to the books and authors he knows best, which seem mostly to be late 19th century and early 20th century Euros, like Flaubert, Zola or Turgenev, who, as cited by Barnes, once claimed that Russians have a unique talent for swatting away thoughts of death, making them disappear into the “Slavic mist.” “Nowadays,” Barnes later points out, “both the gesture and the mist are available pharmaceutically.” I guess this would be an example of another form of consolation here: humour, which is something Barnes appears to be in no danger of losing.

Barnes’ book is hardly all-encompassing, its consideration of “how we die” being largely confined to how middle-class westerners with reasonable access to health care die. No matter how universal a chord he strikes in his candid exploration of his own thanatophobia and that of people he’s been close to, Barnes never even begins to account for the varieties of thanatophobia that distinguish us culturally. But in a sense, the specificity of Barnes’ book, the personal aspect of it, is its real strength. As much as anything else, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is about Barnes coming to terms with death through the prism of his own family, through recalling the deaths of his parents and grandparents—each of whom are fun characters to spend time with and vividly drawn by the author—or consulting his renown philosopher brother; through trying hard to remember things about the past and about people, all the while acknowledging that memory and the imagination are nearly interchangeable. Barnes seems perfectly comfortable with the vagaries of memory, since as a novelist he’s vocationally inclined to believe some deeper truth may be gleaned from the (re)construction, however founded on the unintended fictions of our murky consciousness. And in these truths are perhaps a third and last form of consolation: our number may be up sometime, but before then, at least there might be one more sublime spark of understanding. All for naught perhaps, but a spark all the same.