Curling: enigmas lovingly dusted with snow

Alone within the precise, fixed frame of Curling’s opening shot, her face sprayed with freckles, her gaze almost blank yet somehow touching, Julyvonne (Philomène Bilodeau) is visiting the optometrist. There’s something wrong with her eyes, she’s told, or hasn’t she noticed? She hasn’t. Julyvonne’s 12 years old, home-schooled, and her interaction with the world beyond the rural Quebec bungalow she shares with her father, Jean-Francois (Emmanuel Bilodeau), has been minimal. But she leaves the optometrist’s with her first pair of glasses, and what follows, at least within her share of Curling, is a story about seeing things for the first time. Some of these things may not be real. Maybe.

Jean-Francois is a shy, fearful man with a weathered, angular face. He has two jobs: he works maintenance at a bowling alley and cleans rooms at a motel. Kennedy (Roc LaFortune, a real card), his superior at the bowling alley, calls Jean-Francois “Moustache,” perhaps because the broom-thicket of hair below Jean-Francois’ hooked nose seems to take up so much of his face, perhaps because Jean-Francois’ reserve is so unnerving that the boss, a fan of obscure euphemisms is any case, just needs something to endow his only employee with a little character. At one point in Curling, after making a chilling discovery one night on a desolate road, Jean-Francois does something in secret that would barely seem pardonable in a child, much less a 40ish single father. Yet I think we’re inclined to believe the best in him because he’s gentle, and because he so clearly loves Julyvonne, however misguidedly that love manifests.

Curling is the most recent film from the Quebecois writer-director Denis Côté, whose 2009 film Carcasses, which shifted from something like a documentary about a junk collector to the weirdest variation on the home invasion thriller I’ve ever come across, ranks as one of the freshest and most remarkable Canadian hybrids of the last decade. Though frequently visiting rather antiseptic interiors, Curling contains many beautiful images, of snow blowing across a barren highway, an inflatable Santa descending a ladder, of a tiger inexplicably lazing in the white countryside. Though its characters find themselves in morbid and bizarre situations, their responses are comprehendible: there’s a coherent psychology at work here, even while we’re immersed in strangeness.

I emphasize Curling’s relative accessibility partly just out of annoyance with some other reviews and features I’ve found (cough-cough, Globe and Mail, cough-cough) that paint the film as perversely opaque. To be sure, there are mysteries: that pool of blood on a motel room bed, the tiger (obviously), the frozen carcasses dusted with snow, who become something akin to Julyvonne’s imaginary friends. (Are they imaginary?) It’s true that Côté doesn’t like to explain things. For example: Why are they playing ten-pin with whose itty-bitty bowling balls? Why do Jean-Francois and Julyvonne listen to ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ on music nights? Perplexing! Yet somehow we make it through. In fact, Curling (sorry, Côté) is almost a heartwarming comedy. It’s about an overprotective father learning to let his daughter grow up. It’s about a middle-aged man learning to emerge from his shell. It’s about silly costumes, and, indeed, the odd allure of curling. And it does, in its way, urge us to reach out, even in the frozen darkness.

TIFF '10: Life after cinema

Over the course of the picture, Jorge Jellinek loses his job, gets a haircut, abandons his luggage, and impersonates a law professor—and that’s only in the movie’s second half. By the end a sort of transformation has taken place, a change has come over his face, and he seems lighter, like a new man, or at lest trying to be. It’s a wonderful performance, among the finest I’ve seen at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, one that's unassuming yet rippling with comic grace. Jellinek is just a pleasure to watch. He walks as though trying not to move his torso. Before the haircut he seems to be wearing a wig. Without his nerd-to-the-marrow glasses he could perhaps be Alfred Molina. His character has spent 25 years working at a Montevideo cinematheque, which is now dying. Cracked vinyl covers the seats, each of which Jellinek personally inspects. The key to the vault of reels is secreted away in the DVD case for Ikiru. A donation campaign is underway yet it’s hard to imagine anyone’s pocketbooks being pried open from hearing a flamboyantly dull radio lecture on the finer points of developing one’s knowledge of cinema history—I wish they’d pitch in for no other reason than the promise of a Manoel de Oliveira retrospective. Shot in black and white, in 1.33 aspect ratio, with all it’s credits at the top, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is nostalgically clothed and promises to be an homage to vanishing chambers of cherished cinematic discovery, something along the lines of Goodbye Dragon Inn. As far as that goes, it’s affectionate yet not all that sentimental. It’s actually about something else, and it’s very funny. At one point Jellinek is weeping on a bus when he spots someone looking at him, someone who looks suspiciously like a younger version of himself. That’s the turning point, I think. As Jellinek says in one of his recorded pleas for support, “You are both a witness and a participant…” That goes for life and the movies. I only hope that more people see this movie, in cinematheques, multiplexes, or otherwise. (Oddly enough I saw it at Jackman Hall, the theatre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, which the TIFF cinematheque called home until only a few weeks ago when they moved into their new digs.)

Citizen on patrol: A conversation with Jonathan Lethem about work, groups, genre, the movies, and the enduring power of Dick

A subterranean monster-tiger wreaks destruction upon New York below a chocolate-scented cloud that emits ear-piercing drones heard only by select citizens. Somewhere within the city’s labyrinthine clusters of living space, mystically glowing vases attract stupendous bids on eBay. The socio-geographical canvas of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (Vintage, $17.95) is teeming with the fantastic and the hilariously banal. The novel chronicles the friendship of Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth, the former a grown-up child star now semi-famous for being the fiancé of Janice Trumbull, an astronaut trapped indefinitely in the International Space Station, the latter a dandyish, borderline recluse, and cult-legend arts critic with a fondness for burgers, weed, and Marlon Brando. The pleasures of Lethem’s latest are derived from its relentless invention, sense of place, masterful banter, micro-hierarchies, deliciously absurd dinners with pajama-clad millionaires, and luxurious descriptions of characters that are only intermittently realistic yet nearly always suffused with truth and insight. I spoke with Lethem last November in Toronto, lost my record of our conversation, then found it again, just in time for Chronic City’s trade paperback release.


JB: Several critics have noted the unusual blend of density of incident and paucity of classical narrative structure in Chronic City. Were you conscious of nurturing this sort of busy looseness?

Jonathan Lethem: That’s a great term for it. I think of this book as having an extremely somber, morbid background, almost like a giant Hieronymus Bosch mural of New York City in the 21st century, specifically of Manhattan between 9/11 and the financial collapse. In the foreground, it’s really an antic tangle of characters and their day-to-day hanging out. It’s behaviour. It’s not a plot in a classical sense. It’s almost more like a season of Seinfeld. One stupid day spent with this bunch of people after the next. Their self-absorption is thematically linked to the things that are wrong with the city I’m writing about.

JB: It has a fluidity that’s dictated by the ensemble. In a sense it reminds me of certain Robert Altman films.

JL: That’s good! I like that too. That makes sense.


JB: In your last book of stories, as well as in You Don’t Love Me Yet and Chronic City, I’ve been enjoying your sensitivity to social hierarchies and group dynamics, how different personalities negotiate their place in a rock band, a dinner party or some impromptu assembly of previously compartmentalized friends.

JL: I’m very interested in people forming groups, both useful and useless ones. I’m interested in the structures we arrange for ourselves, what we can take from them and how they can become hiding places or worlds unto themselves.

JB: It occurred to me that for all the more identifiably science-fiction genre work you’ve written, Chronic City seems the most directly indebted to Philip K. Dick. I was recently reading A Maze of Death and Ubik and it occurred to me that Dick’s work is also often deeply concerned with group dynamics.

JL: Absolutely. Chronic City definitely marks a return for me. Having re-read so many of Dick’s books to put together those Library of America volumes, I renewed what is a very permanent influence, a very permanent engagement for me. I got down to the root level with it again and thought, I can use this stuff, I can make more of this again. Because I’d become a very different writer from when I first set out and was very consciously influenced by Dick. I can transmute these materials in a new way because of things I’ve since learned to do and the way I’ve learned to write about New York City. So I was very aware of bringing him into this one.

JB: Has being a father changed your writing?

JL: Probably. It’s been very good on a mechanical level. It meant that I found an office outside of my house and work on a computer with no internet. So instead of indulging myself in sort of always writing and never writing, working throughout the day in this very princely way, now I go and I’m a worker. I get my job done for a few hours and then I go on to other responsibilities. I like the result of that. The deeper, thematic effects of fatherhood will likely emerge only very slowly. I’m not a journalist on ay level. I’m very slow to reflect parts of my life in my work. It took me 20 years to write about my childhood in Brooklyn.


JB: Do you always find a place for some version of yourself in your books?

JL: I feel I’m everywhere. Even before I was writing in any way autobiographically, I could see that I was turning aspects of myself into various characters. If they live at all it’s because I’ve smuggled something of myself into them. It sounds very solipsistic. The book itself is a virtual hall of mirrors. But it’s also my enthusiasms, my responses, my friends, characters from other people’s books, all of these things.

JB: I suppose writing about art is a way of giving your characters life. I’m thinking of Fortress of Solitude and the sheer number of artists or art enthusiasts in that book.

JL: In that book especially art is a mediating way to dwell on the world. The graffiti artists, the musicians, the science-fiction convention, all of these are different ways that people try to thrive in a difficult universe through the avenue of culture. Even criticism, even Dylan Edbus’ writing about music, is an attempt to build some kind of meaningful place for himself.

JB: Chronic City starts in the offices of the Criterion Collection and features numerous digressions into film culture. You’re obviously a film nut. Have you never entertained the notion of writing for the screen, or even directing?

JL: When I was a kid I wanted to be a director very much, but to do that would be rival commitment to the one I’ve made to writing fiction. I don’t think screenwriting is where the action is. If I cared to make film I’d have to direct it. So I’ve just decided to just enjoy this adjacent relationship where I write books that are very responsive to film and in turn tend to attract filmmakers and get me into all sorts of interesting, sticky bystander situations. That’s just enough to give me the fun of dabbling in that world without the totally intimidating prospect of actually originating something myself. I watch filmmakers. My wife is a filmmaker. It’s not an art to be a dabbler or dilettante in. It’s enormous.

JB: Are there things you’d like to convey without words?

JL: I do think about that. I was a painter for a long time, and even in a very wordy book like Chronic City I’m interested in issues of inexpressibility, conundrums that defy language. But I’m pretty well situated where I am. I get to do a lot of what I want to do.


JB: To speak more generally of the culture-obsessive quality of your books, do you ever think about how this aspect of your work will speak to future generations? I’ve often recommended Fortress of Solitude, but I’ve recommended it most often to people who share some of my own interests in the art, films and music referred to in the text. Do you envision a day when new editions of Fortress of Solitude will require copious footnotes?

JL: God bless that possibility. That would be cool if it rated those footnotes. People always want me to be concerned about this issue, and I sometimes try to be, but when you read Dickens you’re in Dickens’ London, with every immensity of detail, the street names, the commercial jingles that were in the air, the snippets of folk culture dialect and jokes. When you encounter Saul Bellow you’re immersed in his mid-century Chicago, and for better or worse you just have to embrace it. And you do because it’s all emotionally charged for him. I just try to meet that standard. I try to make everything matter on the terms of the book. I try not to let anything be too indulgent and extraneous. If you’re going to write about culture you have to accept that you have one.

JB: Do you read as much as you used to?

JL: Never as much as I did. When I was a teenager and through my 20s I was an insanely voracious reader. I miss that, but I could never reproduce those conditions. Forget having a family, once I really got my habit of writing going, that occupies too much of the same mental space, and even physical space, the sitting still, using your eyes. So I couldn’t read the way I used to, but I try to read a lot.

JB: Do you still have relevatory experiences reading?

JL: Yes. Again, they couldn’t come as rapidly as when one week I was discovering Kafka and the next I was discovering Stanislaw Lem and the next Shirley Jackson. I was moving through worlds so rapidly. There are fewer earth-shattering experiences, but when it happens the earth still shatters. Reading Roberto Bolaño the last couple of years did that for me.

JB: Do you read while deep into work?

JL: Yeah, I always do. There’s nothing that I’m trying to protect from influence. It’s great if I get excited about something while working. It reminds me of what it’s for.

JB: I was recently speaking with Paul Auster and was struck by his claim to not read anything, at least not fiction, while he’s working.

JL: He gets more novels written than I do, so perhaps there’s something to be said for that. [Laughs]

The singularity of Colin Firth

I missed A Single Man during the Toronto Film Festival and missed it again when it first opened theatrically. I was wary of it, noting review headlines that often insinuated the too-easy yet suspiciously accurate-sounding attacks on fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford’s excessively fussed-over, largely superficial direction. What made me keep wanting to see it was, of course, Colin Firth. Is there another leading actor so consistently pleasurable and moving to watch who makes so many mediocre movies? Would A Single Man be the one to showcase his tremendous blend of talent and pure screen presence? It has, in any event, won him an Oscar nomination.


Having finally caught up with A Single Man—the depiction of a day in the life of Firth’s Anglo-American English professor George, mourning the loss of his lover, set in November of 1962, and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood—I was surprised to find the movie to be actually less glossy or formally rigorous or provocative that I’d intuited. Or hoped. It is an oddly cool movie for one so steeped in grief. There are loudly announced stylistic choices to be sure, but many of them fall short of their intended impact. Ford’s jump-cuts are annoying, and his jarring switching of angles within a scene is superfluous, often disguising stasis. His cutty yet ceremonialized flashbacks to moments shared by George and his conspicuously younger boyfriend convey little in the way of emotional weight. His combination of slow-motion and the shifting of the image from dull tones to saturated colour is employed frequently, which does help us to trace the many moment’s in George’s day when he briefly recognizes hints of beauty in an otherwise drab, Cold War era and now largely loveless world, but it also renders the technique a gimmick whose meaning is very limited. Besides, if George can so often be reminded of life’s value, even a purely aesthetic one, does his depression not begin to feel too close to mere self-pity?


Firth, unsurprisingly, looks very compelling. In fact, as unlikely as this might seem, with his lovely haircut, large framed glasses, and elegant suits, he closely resembles Marcello Mastroianni from roughly the same period in which A Single Man is set. (Julianne Moore, who plays George’s one close friend, by contrast seems modeled after Dusty Springfield.) Firth has absorbed his costume fully, letting it alter his posture and expressions. Ford’s careful attention to George’s personal appearance and accoutrements is commendable. It only seems problematic when it begins to seem like a replacement for characterization.


“I am exactly what I appear to be. If only you look closely.” This is George’s most memorable line, and says an awful lot about Firth too, whose best moments may be the ones where George, as a way of making peace with the world before leaving it—he’s planning to kill himself before the day is through—makes a point of saying something nice to women. In one such beautifully played moment, while complimenting a secretary’s hair, he almost looks like he’s in a trance. Firth has always had great success with a less-is-more approach to his craft. His eyes especially are exceptionally expressive, and his awareness of this allows him to make bold choices with regards to how much he lets his visage colour a moment. But A Single Man simply lacks colour, even during those moments when the whole world seems to blush for George, and Firth’s careful modulation and discretion, while still the best approach given the circumstances, can’t flush out what simply isn’t there to be had. George has some sort of revelation before the movie is through, though it barely registers on screen.


I’m thrilled that Firth is getting more attention as an actor, though I hope audiences less familiar with his work don’t get the false impression that A Single Man is its apotheosis. How much more alive, dynamic, charming, and emotionally vivid Firth has been in movies more obviously awkward or even tacky than this one. In some cases, more risky too. I'm thinking of one of Bridget Jones' Diary, and one of the all-time great comic punch-ups. I’m thinking of recent movies like Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me, where Firth played a single dad who was wildly neurotic, tactless, exhausted, and totally irresistible, or When Did You Last See Your Father?, where he played a middle-aged man seething with childish anger toward his dying pup. Hell, even in fairly awful or silly movies like the new Dorian Gray or The Last Legion or Where the Truth Lies or Easy Virtue… I could go on. The point is he’s a wonderful actor, and should he win an Oscar for A Single Man (which isn’t very likely, I suppose) then so be it. Just don’t let the movie’s undigested gloom let you think this guy can’t do so much more.

Reflections in a hollow eye: Four by Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was prolific enough that though he’s the most famous director in history the breadth of his filmography remains unseen to all but the most ardent admirers. One of the pleasures of Hitchcock comes from tracing the obsessions, variations and attempts at reinvention found throughout the corpus. In the latest of their economically priced packages, Turner Classic Movies has smartly curated a quartet of films under the no-nonsense title of TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hitchcock Thrillers. Only one of these rests firmly in the essential canon, but the others are consistently fascinating, complex, often deliciously queer, and above all revealing glimpses into the filmmaker’s psyche. Two of these find Hitchcock deliberately working against established strengths, embracing unfamiliar styles while simultaneously imbuing the films with an unusual abundance of personal content. Not to mention casting actors in roles that ignite a compelling frisson between their star images and private lives.

Joan Fontaine meets Cary Grant on a train. He gropes her in the darkness of a tunnel, inserting himself in her cabin once she fits the bill for his bump to first-class. This is a kind of romance, but Suspicion (1941) is choked with psychological trauma. Grant’s an opportunist, a no-good bon vivant, his ruthlessness disguised by boyish charm, his words of love accompanied by no strenuous efforts at sincerity. Like Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (50) Fontaine spends the film’s duration wondering what violence her beloved is capable of, but in Suspicion the ambiguity never ends—even the final scene feels less like resolution than yet another of Grant’s quick-saves. Though the story was cobbled on compromise—the source novel ends very differently—the result is something marvelous, a pitch-black metaphor for everlasting romantic love. It is everlasting because it can never grow stale from comfort.

Another train, another chance meeting. What strikes me most when I revisit Strangers on a Train, many years after my first awed teenage viewings, is just how utterly homoerotic—perhaps homophobic—the picture truly is. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, this story of men who meet by accident and agree, however tacitly, to swap murders, is most rewarding when read as one of male-to-male seduction, a sort of gay Fatal Attraction (87), where Robert Taylor’s mama’s boy pseudo-aesthete genuinely does seem to act on the hero’s behalf, strangling the hero’s conniving wife, her glasses tumbling into the grass, bearing witness to their owner’s death as he silently lays her down and puts her to sleep. That hunky Farley Granger seems not entirely convincing as the tennis-playing hero trying to marry a senator’s daughter serves the film splendidly. Hitchcock, who’d already deftly exploited Granger’s homosexuality in Rope (48), clearly doesn’t believe his hero’s innocence and neither do we, tainting the ostensible resolution with palpable unease, greatly improving what might have felt like a triumph of closeted blandness over perverse insight.

I hadn’t seen I Confess (53) and always assumed it was a flawed curiosity. I didn’t expect it to be so boldly laced with uncertainty and so gorgeously photographed. Nor was I prepared for Montgomery Clift as the Québécois priest accused of murder. Clift’s performance is itself the most elegantly ambiguity-laden thing in the film, tormented, and conspicuously cagey. I Confess is a film of architecture and faces, mainly, of looming steeples and nerve-wracked gazes. The establishing shots seize the Quebec City exteriors in high contrast, tilted images that upset purely on a design level. Again, Hitchcock’s hero has privileged knowledge of a murder, the killer, somewhat nonsensically, taking him into his confidence, playing out some experiment in loyalty between male outsiders. The killer’s hilariously endowed not only with Hitchcock’s fear of authority but also given a wife with the same name as Hitchcock’s: Alma (Spanish for soul). Again, Hitchcock uses his star’s sexual ambivalence brilliantly. Did the beautiful, troubled Clift abandon romance and enter the priesthood because he’s secretly gay? By the end, Clift’s married ex-girlfriend spills her guts, Alma spills her guts, the killer spills his guts. Everything we need to know about the murder’s been explained. But we never learn what’s really up with Monty. The film’s hero is by far its greatest mystery.

An even more serious, less glamorous film, The Wrong Man (56) finds Hitchcock suspended somewhere between the poles of noir and neorealism. There’s an oft-told anecdote about how Hitchcock’s father had his five-year-old son imprisoned on a lark, and Hitchcock saw his anxieties about police reflected in the strange but true story of Manny Balestrero, a Queens bassist fingered for robberies he didn’t commit. In the wake of McCarthyism Hitchcock conjured his most Kafkaesque vision of America, where the assignation of guilt has the potential to impose guilt upon you. This nightmare scenario unfolds through a hybrid of dream-like artifice—a long, weird dissolve suggests that Manny’s prayers to Jesus are instantly answered by his double, walking a lonely street somewhere—and in some of the most realistic settings in Hitchcock. The subway rumbles past the windows of apartments and offices, through the shops where the cops escort Balestrero and, in a bizarrely malevolent procedure, force him to revisit the scenes of his ostensible crimes. Henry Fonda is perfectly cast as Manny, the jazz musician who neither drinks not does drugs and is always on time. He was the everyman who could be any man. It’s a shame he’d never work with Hitchcock again.

Sleep, shadows, secret lives: Murakami, Hoffmann, Stevenson

Sleeping Beauty Edward Burne-Jones 1870

The days close early, and soon they’ll change the time on us and darkness will fall before we even leave work. October brings with it a surplus of night, but not, for some of us, any extra sleep. Me, I wake up in the wee hours, and most often pass the time reading. Come autumn I get hooked on spooky stories, and I got to thinking on stories about sleep itself. A favourite from Haruki Murakami—you can find it in The Elephant Vanishes—is actually called ‘Sleep.’ A seemingly normal middleclass woman stops sleeping. She reads Anna Karinina. The problem is that she never catches up—I’m told by experts that no one ever actually “catches up” on sleep, but it’s a handy expression—and she kinda likes it, the freedom, the hours no longer spent idly—think of all the gigantic Russian novels to read. She feels energized, renewed, as though undergoing some transformation. But into what?

E.T.A. Hoffmann

I don’t know if E.T.A. Hoffmann had trouble sleeping, though it’s easy to imagine how the writing of ‘The Sandman,’ first published in 1818 in a collection entitled, aptly enough, The Night Pieces, might have troubled his rest of the author. “Something terrible has entered my life,” writes Nathaniel to his dear friend Lothario—the first part of the story is delivered through a series of letters. He recounts a childhood marked by his mother’s nightly demands that he be off to bed lest the sandman come and find him, and indeed, he hears him mounting the stairs as he lay awake in the dark. This sandman is eventually discovered to be a lawyer—like Hoffmann—and colleague of Nathaniel’s father, a man with hairy hands who scares children away with the mere threat of his touch, “a repellant, spectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruination wherever he went.” Nathaniel believes him to be the murderer of his father. Now Nathaniel is an adult student, living in another city, but he claims the sandman has reappeared in his life, posing as a seller of barometers.

Hoffmann, with friends

Clara is Lothario’s sister and Nathaniel’s fiancée. She reads the letter intended for her brother and writes back to Nathaniel, assuring him in so many words that he’s basically just a little crazy. She suggests that he simply endeavour to “be cheerful.” But Nathaniel’s caught up in something clearly beyond Clara’s understanding. He’s convinced his will is subject to some power mysterious and vast. He’s confronted again by the barometer seller, who covers a table in glasses, and later telescopes, one of which is purchased by Nathaniel, who begins to feel foolish about his suspicions and becomes fascinated by the object. And it strikes me as interesting that this fascination with seeing, specifically with seeing through the aid of a mechanical object, is what seems to lead Nathaniel to his downfall. He falls in love with another woman, one not so cheerful as Clara, but whose strange stillness is transfixing. She’s more like a coveted object than a person. Something inside of Nathaniel begins to split apart. The ending of ‘The Sandman’ is rather ambiguous, and brilliantly chilling. It’s referenced at length in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny.’

Grave of Hoffmann

Hoffmann himself has been characterized as a guy with two distinct faces, and the theme of man’s dual nature is given further expression in ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ his most famous story, one often considered the prototype for detective fiction—it predates Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by 20 years. It certainly must be the first example of this odd convention of having mysteries solved by old ladies—its title character petitions numerous local authorities to reconsider their assumptions about the murder of a celebrated maker of jewelry named Cardillac in 1680 Paris. Cardillac is actually the story’s most memorable character, with Hoffmann’s portrait compelling us to draw parallels between virtuosity and villainy, art and evil. Cardillac claims to have been followed all his life by an “evil star,” and we start to see how the jewels he so admires twinkle just like that heavenly eye. Of course ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry’ isn’t terribly macabre, which is what I’ve been in the mood for and, with Halloween approaching, what I aim to steer you toward. But it led me to finally read a horror classic I’d previously neglected, one regarded as the definitive narrative investigation into the multiplicities of self, and the beast within.

Portraits of Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

Imagine you have an old friend so beloved to yourself, held in such high esteem by others, that were he to change radically, to alter his behaviour in a wildly grotesque fashion, you wouldn’t even recognize him standing before you. That’s one of the questions that lingers with you after reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson was inspired by the true story of Deacon Brody, respected businessman by day, burglar and thief by night. But the story of Dr Jekyll and his slow surrender to his shadow self also lends itself to being read as a parable of drug addiction, and it’s notable that after having his manuscript destroyed Stevenson rewrote the whole thing during a six-day cocaine binge. The work lends itself to so many interpretations, and nearly all of them work because Stevenson’s storytelling is so geared toward realistic detail and the rich evocations of its relationships. His is a world of bachelors, of intense male friendships, allegiances that defy law or even logic in the actions that inspire. (There’s surely a queer reading out there, too.)


“I have lost confidence in myself,” Jekyll tells his friend Utterson—another lawyer. Indeed his self is not what he thought it to be. The cruel and murderous Mr Hyde is the result of some fantastic experiment, but he was surely waiting within Jekyll’s psyche all along. It takes a drug to shake “the fortress of identity,” but the more important ingredient in Hyde’s birth was surely Jekyll’s urge to let loose his demons and to do so without punishment, to have his evil other hide in plain sight. Stevenson closes the novella with Jekyll’s own words, which elevates its horror by leaving us not with Utterson’s “I thought I knew the man…” but with something rather more frightening: the man never really knew himself.

Clandestine in Bolivia: Che Part Two

To enter Bolivia clandestinely, Ernesto “Che” Guevara disguises himself. Bald up top, with graying sides, dark-rimmed glasses and buckteeth. Castro tells him he looks like his father. The way this transformation plays in Che Part Two, which leaps across the eight years between Part One’s victory in Havana and the campaign that would end Guevara’s life, emphasizes how notoriety can thwart the real work of a revolutionary. (This doubtlessly resonates with actors like Benicio Del Toro, who endeavour to shape-shift so as to better embody that elusive autonomous character, or directors like Steven Soderbergh, who endeavour to make films so wildly diverse so as to sidestep expectation.) It also underlines the gulf between the careers of Guevara and Castro, still alive today, a robust anachronism in modern politics. In any case, long before the proliferation of T-shirts and mindless idolatry, Guevara was already in some sense attempting to foil fame as a means of following his vocation.

After the divergent results of the two campaigns they dramatize, the most striking difference between Che Part One and Two is their level of immersion into the business of developing an armed uprising. Part Two gets us into Bolivia relatively quickly and from there seldom maneuvers away from Guevara’s arduous trajectory, to which the camera doggedly sticks. There are far too many idiosyncratic flourishes and too much historical selection to call Soderbergh’s approach faux documentary, but there is the sense of the documentarian’s commitment to watching a process unfold. It can be grueling to watch, and sometimes confusing. Like The Thin Red Line, the films of Hungarian director Miklós Janscó, and perhaps Apocalypse Now, it joins the tiny league of war movies you could call hypnotic. And this tells you the strange—and I think utterly fascinating—place where Che lives. It feeds you waves of historical data, builds incredible tension, and puts you in a trance all at once.

There’s a fireside discussion where Mario Monje, leader of Bolivia’s Communist Party, suggests that Guevara will fail because Bolivians don’t want a foreigner for a savior. Someone counters with the fact that Bolivia isn’t even named after a Bolivian—Simón Bolívar was Venezuelan. But the disconnect between such sly arguments and the reality of popular sentiment looms large over Guevara’s Bolivian campaign. It’s simplistic, but maybe there’s something to the notion that Cuba was simply desperate enough, and the Bolivians not quite, or if so, perhaps their hunger was of a more particular nature. While carefully placing such discussions at the forefront, neither Soderbergh’s direction nor Del Toro’s largely stoic performance overtly support any one reading, but their evocation of the star-crossed atmosphere and litany of struggles surrounding the fiasco is haunting.

It’s been 50 years since the Cuban Revolution, yet its legacy, like that of its protagonists, remains no less fraught, no easier to assess. The final images of Che Part Two return us to where Part One began, with Guevara, clean-shaven, with triumph still far ahead, leaning on the rail of that leaky little boat with its 82 men. Guevara says nothing in this sequence, but glances over toward Castro, who stands confidently near the bow. There is a quality about Guevara’s stare that’s hard to guess at, a flicker of something. It could be suspicion.

The case file as art: Zodiac on DVD

Watching Zodiac in its director’s cut nearly a year after the original version’s theatrical release, it feels that much more remarkable, that much more singular, this film so haunted by the unknowable, so unapologetically embracing of tracing the intricacies of laboring toward uncertainty. While seeing the film in the theatre with a captive audience unsure as to what to expect was for me at least an exhilarating happening, Warner/Paramount’s new two-disc special edition somehow completes the Zodiac experience: presenting a movie driven by obsession in a package so brimming with commentary, supplementary data and contradictory opinions, invites the viewer to obsess right along with Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the cartoonist-turned one-man investigatory team whose exhaustive books on the unsolved Zodiac murders provide the story’s foundation.

The material added by director David Fincher only fortifies the film’s slow building of character, period and engagingly banal procedural detail –not to mention humour. The scene in which Captain Lee (Dermot Mulroney) and Inspectors Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) lay out their grounds for a search warrant not to a living person but a tiny speakerphone simultaneously mounts anticipation of a new break in the case and feels vaguely like borrowed shtick from Charlie’s Angels.

Yet it’s the same details you saw the first time around that really deepen the chilling evocation of these otherwise disparate events linked only by shared trauma: the brief exchanges, alluding to complicated, intimate relationship histories, and even an unexplained sense of imminent danger, between the Zodiac’s victims at Blue Rock Springs and Lake Barryessa; the frequency with which we see Toschi eat, this man who’s life becomes consumed by Zodiac in turn seeking to comfort himself through consumption; the hysterical woman who claims to have been abducted by Zodiac (Ione Skye), hiding her baby in some bushes off the side of the highway at night; the sheer amount of time that passes while memories fade and research accumulates and gets filed away, sucked into multi-jurisdictional limbo. Just as no single member of the tremendous ensemble cast passes through Zodiac without making some distinct impression, everything in the film becomes equally absorbing, boggling the mind with the promise of some grand interconnectedness that may not truly exist.

Fincher’s commentary track is illuminating both technically (he seems, perhaps to a fault, a perfectionist of the first order) and with regards to the director’s own emotional involvement with the film, tied to his growing up in San Francisco during the Zodiac’s heyday. It’s fascinating how a project that mightn’t seem all that personal can finally become a filmmaker’s richest, finest, most idiosyncratic and humane work, and it’s revealing to hear how Fincher himself made a concentrated effort to avoid any kind of formal flourish that would detract from the clearest possible observance of character and action. This lack of flash becomes a vision in itself, and renders everything else in Fincher’s oeuvre, from the genuinely creepy if over-adorned Seven to the rather tedious Panic Room, a mere warm-up for the more serious filmmaking displayed here.

A second commentary track trades off between a laid-back Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., who are consistently amusing if not especially insightful (and Gyllenhaal kind of embarrasses himself by going on this long spiel about Raymond Carver when I’m pretty sure he means Raymond Chandler), and the power team of screenwriter James Vanderbilt, producer Brad Fischer and, most welcome of all, novelist James Ellroy. In sly deadpan, Ellroy boldly introduces himself as “James Ellroy, King of American crime fiction… acknowledging that this film is one of the half-dozen greatest American crime films.” Now that’s how you kick-off a commentary! (Makes you wonder what the other five films are.) Vanderbilt and Fischer speak eloquently about all the varied choices that sprung from their resolve not to show anything that didn’t have a surviving eyewitness. They also discuss the sheer weirdness of the possibility that Zodiac murdered cabbie Paul Stine, then stole his glasses, put them on his face and walked away from the crime as though disguised as his victim. Ellroy meanwhile interjects with articulate reverie over the film and some terrific non-sequiturs, such as his bizarre anecdote that illustrates why he hates Donovan or what he considers to be the moral of Moby Dick.

The second disc features a nicely put-together making-of featurette that provides a sense of the strange balance between fact-based minutia and pure creativity that went into every aspect of the production. There’s also an extended documentary on each of the murders and all the particulars surrounding them, and, maybe best of all, a shorter doc solely about Arthur Leigh Allen, the deeply enigmatic prime suspect who died just before he was to meet with police one last time back in 1992. New interviews with the pivotal Don Cheney and several others who knew Allen alternate between strengthening the case against him and poking still more holes in it. Criminology experts make a convincing plea for a practice of fitting the evidence to a suspect instead of trying to fit a suspect to the evidence, yet even if certain aspects don’t fit the profile for Zodiac, Allen remains a compelling scapegoat even in death. His long, ovular face stares at us from a handful of obscure photographs, giving away precious little, ready to have whatever foul notions projected upon it, still the centre of a mystery that’s been arduously compacted into what is finally one of the great films of our age.