On the losing end: Denis Johnson's Nobody Move

Nowhere in Nobody Move (Harper Collins, $24.99) are we ever told how Jimmy Luntz ended up singing in a barbershop choir. It’s mise en scène as mystery, the way Denis Johnson uses a seemingly natural penchant for crafting narratives riddled with ellipses to keep his characters from behaving the way people in books are supposed to, from sitting still long enough for us to crack them fully open and facilitate this thing we call identification. But even if the singing thing is left dangling, we do know that Luntz’s dominant vocation is actually gambling, even if he displays only slightly more skill in this arena than in warming the cockles of pensioners with his harmonizing skills. We’re even given a little story that helps to illuminate the formative roots of Luntz’s gambling habit, told by Luntz himself at the precise moment when it seems he’s about to have his testicles downsized and eaten by his captors. As a kid Luntz was once offered an impressive sum of money to clean a man’s trailer, which he went about with great diligence over a four-day period. When the job was finished he was told he could either take the promised payment or accept a single lottery ticket. He takes the ticket. Do I need to tell you the result?

I know of no losers in fiction quite like Denis Johnson’s losers, a fascinatingly pathetic species as elegantly exemplified by Jimmy Luntz as by Bill Houston, who features prominently both in Johnson’s Angels (83) and Tree of Smoke (07), or the young man identified only as Fuckhead in Johnson’s story collection Jesus’ Son (92). Early on in Nobody Move Luntz neglects his chance to kill someone who will surely kill him. Now in a position in which he’d be wise to appear as inconspicuous as possible, he then checks in to an all-log motel, soaking wet, with no car, no socks and paying in cash. Besides the gambling and singing, we’re also informed that Luntz was once a boxer for a couple of years. “Clumsy in the ring, he distinguished himself the wrong way—the only boy to get knocked out twice. He’d spent two years at it. His secret was that he’d never, before or after, felt so comfortable or so at home as when lying on his back and listening to the far-off music of the referee’s ten-count.” That music is of course as much Johnson’s as anything heard in real life that could have possibly served as a muse. An author of poetry as well as fiction, he’s our preeminent clown-lyricist of the also-rans—who also stumble, break a limb and ruin someone’s year before realizing they actually have no idea where the finish line is.

Tree of Smoke was the book everyone was waiting for Johnson to write—his admirers and detractors alike. A sprawling, unruly, multi-character novel than span the arc of America’s misadventures in Vietnam, it couldn’t help but announce itself as a flawed masterpiece designed to dazzle readers of a certain sensibility and set rolling the eyes of others. It scooped the National Book Award. Anyway, I loved it. Nobody Move is a peculiar successor, the book probably no one was waiting for Johnson to write, a mercilessly taut little comic thriller originally written as a serial for Playboy and as seemingly slight as Tree of Smoke was inherently profound. And it is a hoot, at once managing to deliver the genre goods and defining even more clearly the author’s signature style, themes and characters. If you’ve never read Denis Johnson, and you’ve got a soft spot for crime fiction, it makes a very fun introduction.

So Luntz is picked up by Gambol, who’s collecting for Juarez, from whom Luntz borrowed money, which was quickly lost while gambling. In a scene that’s never even described, Luntz shoots Gambol in the leg and steals his Cadillac, which will change hands many times over the course of the story. Luntz will then meet Anita, a delicious soon-to-be divorcee who also happens to be accused of embezzling a couple of million dollars. She makes her very memorable entrance into Nobody Move by getting plastered at a matinee of a boxing flick—perhaps the product of a childhood fascination with John Dillinger, Johnson seems to really like having criminals enter movie theatres to do things other than watch movies—then signing her divorce papers, then going to some quiet spot by the river to practice shooting her gun at jars full of metal. Later on she pees on her mobile phone. I was in love with her before she even met Luntz. And then he falls in love with her. Or anyway he’s at the very least blissfully astonished that a woman so good-looking is willing to accompany him back to his log motel. She makes love, Luntz observes, “like a drunken nun.” I have no idea how Luntz would formulate such a conclusion but it does indeed sound exciting.

Though Johnson continually inserts little curve balls of expository enigma—I especially liked it when he made note of a dream Gambol has where he’s skiing naked—the action and escalation of tension never let up. Which is to say nobody stops moving in Nobody Move, trapped as the entire cast of characters is in a closed circuit of comeuppance that can only be broken by accident, submission or, much more likely, agonizing death. Johnson’s humanism typically reveals itself through the discovery of some fragile sort of grace arising within the nadir of personal disaster. This sort of redemption is less present here, but there is in all this a kind of meditation on the nature of luck, though what it finally seems to point to is a strong suspicion that every time anybody gets lucky it can be traced back to some design, however fumbling that design may have been conceived. And this tension between the random and the predetermined is reflected in the architecture of the novel itself, which seems always ready to fall apart yet never does. It’s a trick that Johnson’s become a truly deft hand at. I can’t wait to see how he pulls it off next time around.

Monster's mall: Observe and Report

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

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

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

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

Men at Work: Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match and A Hell of a Note arrive on DVD

As the studio-backed auteur films of the 1970s climbed into the stratosphere, those delirious heights from which the whole heady shotgun wedding of art and commerce would soon come crashing down, another American cinema slowly emerged from the rich soil of the marginalized. Independent movies of this second golden age were so often “regional,” if not in geography than in spirit, showing us faces, places and activity typically ignored and doing so through an industrial model infinitely more modest than the one available to the movie brats who conquered Hollywood. These movies were made cheaply and required tireless work, often made on weekends between regular jobs over very long periods of time. Maybe that’s partly why so many of the lasting images of the independents from the 70s concern men at work. From Peter Falk’s convivial crew in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) to Henry Sanders’ inward abattoir labourer in Killer of Sheep (77), blue-collar life and the poles of wild times and desperate dreams of transcendence it engenders found a new and often exhilarating level of expression. Yet one of the most indelible and entertaining examples of the working man’s movie, one that’s genuinely regional in every sense of the term—save racially—has been long forgotten and is only now making a celebrated return.

Watchmaker Film has lovingly packaged the first DVD release of The Whole Shootin’ Match (78), the feature debut of a scrawny Texan named Eagle Pennell, accompanied by A Hell of a Note (77), his 25-minute dry run which showcases the same inspired comic pairing of actors Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman. Authenticity is a precarious word to throw around when discussing movies, but if we invoke it to describe how temperament and tendencies reflect content, than Pennell’s the real thing. He told stories about strangely lovable—and occasionally detestable—losers, dreamers and drinkers whose shaggy charm could never be accused of benefiting from excess polish. And these films, reputedly constructed from single takes, sometimes under-lit, sometimes overexposed, radiate ramshackle enthusiasm. There are bits of humour in Pennell’s work, not to mention certain images of vast landscapes or gloomy bars, that are so instantly winning, yet they’d never satisfy the technical or storytelling standards of even the most slouching film academy. They exude faith in the pleasures of watching human behaviour and in only the most mundane forms of catharsis, blotchy black and white and boom shadows be damned. Their narratives are the narratives of country songs, and they speak to the inner life of the labourer. In one memorable scene, a character watches a movie and sincerely wonders what the director does for a living.

A Hell of a Note announces the sense of flow that is Pennell’s modus operandi. It’s first sequence finds Davis and Perryman resigning from roof tarring in a marvelously fluid gesture: they both whip it out and piss on the as-yet un-tarred roof, their streams of urine converging into a creeping puddle heading strait toward the boots of their cranky and imminently former employer. They then head to a bar to drown sorrows, meet girls, get in awesomely awkward fights, dance, and ponder new opportunities. A sudden injection of tragedy brings it all to a grinding halt, but most of A Hell of a Note is cyclical and un-dramatic, the sense of inevitability kept buoyant by often sublime gags and an endearing undercurrent of friendship declared.

This is even more the case with The Whole Shootin’ Match, which features no such tragic conclusion but rather builds up to a moment of clarity, or at least as close to one as this hillbilly Hope and Crosby can hope to approximate. Loyd (Perryman) and Frank (Davis) have evidently been pals a long while, having collaborated in a number of failed get-rich-quick schemes, everything from a flying squirrel farm to the chinchilla business. Things kick off as Loyd proposes another dazzling new enterprise: polyurethane. Hang onto your hats.

The distinctions between Perryman and Davis’ characters are more pronounced here. Loyd is the persistent optimist and inventor. One of my favourite scenes conveys Loyd’s silent glee over his crafting of a spinning wand that makes bubbles. Frank is the philandering family man whose innate cheerfulness and obvious love of Loyd keep him within safe distance of depression and complete alcoholic collapse. As the story ambles on its way, with more bars, fights, dancing, drinking and working en route, Loyd and Frank are teased by success when Loyd’s new super-mop—he has a revelation in an automated car wash—gets picked up by a local manufacturer who gives them a whopping $1000 just for signing a contract. You can probably guess how things turn out. The final sequence finds them looking for Indian treasure in the hills outside Austin and coming to what feels like some sort of fork in the road, even if neither of them is entirely cognizant of the fact.

Perryman and Davis embody the dreams of those Americans who feel alienated by the larger society they inhabit yet never stop trying, in that deeply American way, to beat the system. Pennell connected with his characters so strongly that his own story came to resemble theirs even as he revealed an artistic vision never granted to them. Pennell nurtured a legend of failed potential all too aligned with his body of work, and he died, following years of drinking, professional and personal self-sabotage, and even intermittent homelessness, in July of 2002. He was just shy of 50. It’s a shame he didn’t stick around long enough to see what sort of success his good ol’ boys would achieve. His best work survives and will continue to do so. 

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: male virility as phantom presence in Peckinpah's wounded, insane sort of masterwork

The “savage poetry” that Martin Scorsese says he finds in the work of the legendary director Sam Peckinpah is attributed most commonly to more popular genre films like The Wild Bunch, but the term takes on a deeper, stranger meaning when applied to Peckinpah’s crazy and altogether fascinating 1974 film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The film wasn’t well-received in its time, but has come to be regarded as perhaps the director’s most personal and fearlessly conceived project. (Perhaps it now occupies the same place in Peckinpah’s oeuvre that Vertigo does in Alfred Hitchcock’s. The film certainly looms large over Tommy Lee Jones' wonderful recent directorial effort The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.) It’s the sort of work that seems all the stronger and more complex because of its flaws, obsessions, reveries and digressions. And it reveals Peckinpah’s conflicted attitudes toward violence, machismo, power and especially women more nakedly than his other movies. There is at base a sense of the artist attempting, however crudely, to lay his troubled heart bare.

Like previous Peckinpah films, Alfredo Garcia concerns rape and revenge, blood and money, and takes place in a milieu where women are alternately humanized and humiliated. It takes a quintessential loser—Benny (Warren Oates), an American piano player in a seedy Mexico City bar—and places him in a position which grants him bargaining power and the promise of previously undreamed-of riches, and yet none of his choices ultimately work in his favour. He learns of a bounty placed on the titular Garcia, a notorious womanizer responsible for impregnating the daughter of a powerful, mysterious figure (played by Emilio Fernandez, a filmmaker apparently more insane than Peckinpah), and shortly thereafter finds that Garcia has even seduced Benny’s girl Elita (Isela Vega). Unbeknownst to his pursuers, Garcia has since died in an accident. Benny patches things up with Elita and decides to track down Garcia’s corpse, dismember it, and bring his head to those seeking it personally, so he can collect the reward. But among such hardened criminals, Benny, the diminutive gringo, is far out of his element.

Alfredo Garcia becomes, among other things, one of Peckinpah’s thinly veiled studies of male virility. Benny’s so concerned with conquering his own sense of impotence that he ironically places the woman he loves in grave danger. In scenes that utterly define the tone of the film, once Benny comes into contact with Garcia’s decapitated head, he begins conversing with it, partially out of respect for Garcia’s famed ability to please women (even Benny’s). Yet despite all this, Benny’s love for Elita feels real and often moving. Both are damaged figures invested with great emotional idiosyncrasy by the performers. Oates, one of the great faces in American movies, especially gives a marvelous performance, partly an imitation of Peckinpah himself (though, especially in voice and posture, he reminded me a lot of Tom Waits in his late-’80s incarnation). He’s so uniquely funny, tenderly transparent, weirdly sympathetic, this dust-caked, poor man's knight errant with the receding hairline in his one ugly white suit, the oversized sunglasses that he even wears to bed, and the pitiful tough-guy poses he fumblingly strikes around the heavies.

Life is cheap in Alfredo Garcia (the sadistic slaughter of an entire grieving family is only one of the film’s horrors), but it is nonetheless abundant, with rural Mexico in all its genuine colour, character and squalour (the selection of beat-to-shit jalopies in this movie is slyly hilarious in itself) filling the background. At times you’re not sure how it all fits together, and the film’s controversial scene in which a potential rape victim sympathizes with her attacker is, to say the very least, deeply unsettling and just maybe not much more than stupid. But Peckinpah was never interested in moral clarity; instead, in Alfredo Garcia, we seem him ruthlessly stripping away every last pretence of honour, order and causality from the action movie genre. Jim Kitses calls it a western, which I'll happily buy, so long as the sunset we ride off into is sapped of any and all sentimentality. 

Deadpan ache: Lights in the Dusk

The Helsinki of Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk (Laitakaupungin valot) is a permanently overcast city possessing what should rightfully be deemed one very, very particular power of seduction, one that probably speaks directly to the hearts of some of us while making little impression on others. Seemingly dusted with melancholy, the cityscape is an apparition of earth tones and dim reflections in anonymous glass towers, expansive alleyways, skeletal industrial structures looming over shipyards.

Caught in the generally crepuscular Nordic glow, the setting, like the story, could be from today or 60 years ago. People gather to drink and hover, some arguing the diverse merits of Russian literary giants, some standing in clumps to throb before an almost comically earnest hard rock act. Whatever their numbers, alliances or activities, these Fins are all of them captured within compositions that strongly summon up Edward Hopper paintings nursing a Technicolor hangover, imparting an unmistakable loneliness only heightened by the quiet beauty of their surroundings.

Kaurismäki’s camera however will quickly focus its attention on the solitary figures: a homeless kid, a neglected pooch, and an anachronistically handsome, painfully awkward security guard named Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), the sympathetic schmuck of the center of this exquisitely gloomy neo-noir. Lights in the Dusk is the third installment in Kaurismäki’s ‘Loser Trilogy,’ following 2002’s The Man Without a Past. While the film as a whole arguably adds little novelty to the writer/director’s exploration of the theme, Koistinen is doubtlessly the biggest loser of the lot. And though conveyed entirely in Kaurismäki’s characteristically –some might say perversely– rigorous deadpan, Koistinen’s tale is also quite possibly the most moving of them all, too. Okay, so long as one can be moved by something like a simple gesture, an implication, or the placement of a quartet of fresh bagels before the object of one’s deepest affections.

The plot of Lights in the Dusk is made of pared-down essence, tropes selected and renovated with great affection but precious little gratuitous indulgence. Koistinen is an outsider even among his scant workmates. He boasts to the kind woman who tends the all-night food stand that he’ll be heading his own security operation some day soon, his business aspirations simultaneously humble and hapless, a spiritual cousin to the barber who seeks a new career in dry cleaning in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Truth is Koistinen has few prospects of any kind, and lives in almost total isolation –that is until he’s approached out of the blue one day by Mirja (Maria Järvenhelmi), a mysterious woman with the most beguiling lips and obscure agenda. His hungry heart is hers from first blush, which means his fate is sealed from here onward.

Mirja is a Mata Hari Hitchcock blonde, a fame fatale working for some antiseptic mobster type who knows a real sucker when he sees one. When she first appears, the normally still camera pushes in on her the same way it does the mobster, an elegant move that binds the two in our memories and exemplifies the austerity of Kaurismäki’s approach, which crafts a distinctive style from economy itself. (The whole thing’s over in 74 minutes.) No shot is too long, no pan uncalled for, no facial muscle moved that isn’t fundamentally necessary here, though so much of it is nonetheless eccentric –a guy sharpens a steak knife with the base of a mug– often dryly funny, and shot through with repressed emotion and plenty of terrific zingers. If you know this guy’s movies you know exactly what I mean: Kaurismäki’s is the comic Bresson.

Mirja’s discomfort with shamelessly using Koistinen as a way of helping the mobsters steal some jewels from one of the properties under his watch is palpable, in an inferred sort of way. Early on in their non-love affair it’s already clear to both that everything’s a ruse –Mirja gets to a point she doesn’t even make the slightest effort to fool him anymore– but Koistinen can’t help but do anything other than obey Mirja’s will, even when it spells out complete ruin. It’s all so strange, even frustrating, on the surface but perfectly heartbreaking underneath. This stuff works on me, even more with repeated viewings.

The title evokes twilit haziness, a moment when signs of life or signs of hope blur into the day’s fading embers. The film’s complimentary story and tone meanwhile do provide us with some consolation, acts of solidarity, will, and enduring love that linger in the margins of its milieu, waiting for our hero to see past the haze and embrace what’s really present and attainable. So even though Kaurismäki lets his loser take a licking, and flashes it all past our eyes with merciless efficiency, there’s a warmth waiting at the end of all this, a candle in the window that should charm and reward each of us predisposed to such subtle delights.