Parallel lives: Allen Shawn's Twin

Twin (Viking, $32.50) is the second memoir from Allen Shawn. His first, entitled Wish I Could Be There, was a personal investigation into phobias, of which Shawn admits to possessing several. Here, picking up from themes developed in the earlier book, Shawn explores the nature of his relationship to his autistic twin sister, Mary, who was removed from the family home at eight, and has since lived in various institutions designed to assist those with similar disabilities. Allen and Mary are now in their early 60s and visit regularly, yet it’s clear that the familiarity and comfort they enjoy in each other’s presence remains accompanied by profound, sometimes troubling mysteries of identity and perception seemingly inherent in their very coexistence. “It wasn’t until I reached middle age,” Shawn writes, “that I could even begin to acknowledge that being Mary’s twin was a central fact, perhaps the central fact, of my life.”

Shawn is the brother of actor and playwright Wallace Shawn and the son of long-time New Yorker editor William Shawn. He’s forged a career as a composer and teacher, though I’m far more familiar with his brother’s plays and memorable performances in Woody Allen movies or My Dinner With Andre. However, reading Twin, it becomes immediately apparent that however talented he may be in the discipline to which he’s devoted much of his life, Shawn is, like his brother, an immensely gifted writer. He displays a knack for transitioning between personal storytelling and essaying on science and history, weaving these elements into a seamless whole by way of an articulate yet arrestingly frank voice. It’s rare to encounter a book as emotionally involving from its first page as Twin—though it bears mentioning that that first page also features a joke about Mormon heaven that made me laugh out loud, and an amusing analogy between deep feelings of loss and the worry one might suffer over a vanishing pair of pants.

Allen Shawn

One chapter begins with a compelling defense of agnosticism, of acknowledging the value of religious feeling even if one isn’t inclined to value religion. This speaks to Shawn’s restless questioning and unsettledness, a fundamental aspect of his psychological makeup that no doubt feeds his continued desire to understand Mary’s inner life while never presuming that such understanding could ever be complete or even accurate. Shawn interrogates the moments in his life where he believes he may have come closest to experiencing something akin to Mary’s state of being, such as a fever-induced out-of-body experience he once endured as a child, or the feeling of being transported that comes with listening to or especially composing music. “Perhaps the closest I can come to understanding her inner life,” Shawn writes, “is when I am sick, or exhausted, or anxious, or exhilarated, or have taken a drug that changes what I hear and see and feel. Such moments at least suggest that there are different ways of perceiving and being.”

The Shawn family was unusually secretive, founded on a parental relationship at once brimming with kindness and even romance and defined in part by William Shawn’s romantic partnership with another woman, which continued concurrent to his marriage and lasted 40 years, ending only with his death. “We are a very bright, attractive and unusual family,” Shawn’s mother once told the medical staff of one of Mary’s homes. She rather hilariously compared her family to the Kennedys. Shawn doesn’t mock or take sides with either of his parents, but wonders how their complicated dynamic affected and was affected by Mary’s condition. He also comes to terms with their varied methods of accepting Mary’s separation, and his own lingering guilt. Shawn’s writing conveys such bravery and insight that it can only serve to remind us just how painfully long it can take to begin peeling back the veils enveloping our families and inherited legacies. He relates how in his final years his father once stated: “They made a big mistake making life so short.” Ain’t that the truth. But would it ever be long enough to settle such questions once and for all?

The American: tight-lipped, by contract

It is good for a film actor to have a face that remains interesting to observe even when doing nothing, but it’s better to have a face that’s never doing nothing, even when it seems like it’s doing nothing. George Clooney’s handsome, sun-beaten visage conveys an awful lot of worry in The American without much dialogue and without any ostentatious gesticulation. He’s always thinking, while trying not to transmit what he’s thinking to those around him, while somehow always transmitting just enough of what he’s thinking to the camera to keep us captivated. The American is itself a captivating, quiet, slow burn of a thriller, and Clooney’s face, the face of a genuine star and a genuinely talented film actor, is integral to its effectiveness.

The script is Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of Martin Booth’s 1990 novel A Very Private Gentleman, though this being the second feature from rock photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn, much of whatever was good or bad in Joffe’s script has been rendered invisible by Corbijn’s continual emphasis on sound, image, place, and behaviour. The American follows Clooney’s character, a professional assassin or gunrunner, from the snow-covered woods of Dalarna to the hillside villages of Abruzzo, and Corbijn’s favoured image when introducing these locations is that of a very wide landscape with tiny figures or a car traversing the absolute bottom of the screen—the movement is often so low in the composition that if you sit behind a tall person you might miss it. These images occur throughout the film and imbue it with a steady blend of beauty and dread. We feel our protagonist’s vulnerability, being so out in the open. We know from the first scenes onward that there could at any moment be a stranger hiding somewhere, probably wearing ugly pants, waiting to kill.

Clooney’s character—he goes by Jack or Edward, depending on company—is as taciturn as any of the antiheroes of Jean-Pierre Melville, yet is far more expressive, unable to disguise his nervousness. It seems there are some Swedes after him, so he keeps a low profile in Castel del Monte, where he gradually prepares a package for a mysterious woman. We see a tattoo of a butterfly on his back but learn virtually nothing of substance of his background. Still, we follow him closely enough to glean something of his tendencies and desires and weaknesses. He visits a beautiful prostitute with an unnerving gaze named Clara, played by Violante Placido, with whom he develops a peculiar rapport. He has some largely one-sided conversations with an aging priest, played by Paolo Bonacelli, who may or may not know something about his line of work—Clooney claims he’s a photographer, even though it’s obvious the priest doesn’t buy it. When in doubt Clooney simply says nothing, and sometimes it’s these refusals to respond that say he most.

It’s tempting to compare The American to The Limits of Control. Both films feature an enigmatic killer with a disliking both for small talk and modern devices, biding his time, visiting out-of-the-way European locales, doing exercises alone in a room, taking meetings in outdoor cafés, trading cryptic messages with people he probably can’t trust. Both also happen to feature memorable shots of a woman’s naked behind. But The Limits of Control is on another plane, concerned with philosophy over action, groove over structure. The American is more grounded, more familiar, moves steadily toward an end, deals openly in suspense, and reveals palpable stakes. What fundamental elements it does have in common with its recent predecessor is a knowingness about the potency of simple bits of business, the pleasure of watching George Clooney seated at a table, piecing together a rifle. It also, much more than your average tough guy thriller, understands the value of withholding information, of playfully and shrewdly managing ambiguity, of old-fashioned silence as the most seductive method of pulling us closer, and deeper, into story.

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

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

Morrison gets down with Janet Planet

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

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

Morrison getting his kicks in The Last Waltz

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

"Life takes its own turns..." A conversation with Dolph Lundgren about crossovers, comebacks, and that killer instinct

I met Dolph Lundgren on the roof of Toronto’s Thompson Hotel, which features a swimming pool, bar, and bevy of women wearing bikinis and heels. Lundgren was undistracted and quite honestly just wonderful to talk to, warm, humble, funny, and utterly candid about his life both on and off screen, as both a father and a son. Fully cognizant of his peculiar career as star and occasional director of countless low-budget actioners, he’s good humoured yet remains genuinely ambitious. He has plans to make a period drama in his native Sweden, and hopes that his memorable role in Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables will help him re-enter the mainstream.

Universal Soldier

One thing that became clear in our conversation was the depth of Lundgren’s affection for Stallone, an expression of long-term friendship that much more endearing when you consider that Lundgren put Stallone in intensive care for several days during the making of Rocky IV. This was back in the mid-1980s, when the multilingual black belt had abandoned a life in sciences—he was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to get his PhD in chemical engineering at MIT—to get into the movies. He was dating Grace Jones and debuted alongside her in A View to a Kill before landing the part of Rocky’s Russian nemesis Ivan Drago. But thanks to the ballooning video market a niche was opening up, one tailor-made for the likes of he and Jean Claude Van Damme, with whom he co-starred in Universal Soldier. Lundgren has never been out of work since, but he hasn’t had a theatrical release in 15 years. Until now.

Rocky IV

JB: You have an enigmatic role in The Expendables, playing this guy who’s drowning in drugs and sadism and turning on his friends. Gunner seems like a villain but proves to be something more complicated.

Dolph Lundgren: One reason I wanted to do the film—other than Stallone asking me, which is something you don’t think about twice—was the fact that Gunner is such an interesting guy. I was surprised he was so complex. In fact in the original script there was more drugs and Gunner was totally nuts. I’ve done bad guys before, but someone like Gunner is appealing because, being a kind of bridge between the bad guys and good guys, he offers something very specific to play, instead of coming on set and just trying to look tough.

The Expendables

JB: You’ve occupied the director’s chair several times now. Are there things you’re still able to learn from watching someone like Stallone work in that capacity?

DL: Anyone making an $80-million dollar picture with all these people, locations and big set-pieces in it at his age—there are only so many people in the world who can pull that off. So as long as I can be there next to him I’m checking out everything he does.

JB: While the action scenes are fairly cutty, there’s actually a lot of camera movement within many individual shots, which is unusual these days.

DL: That’s a good point. Stallone originally had a younger DP before hiring Jeffrey Kimball. Jeffrey’s an old-timer, he lights very old school, and wanted to shoot the character stuff as simply as possible. Even in the action, as you said, he likes to show more of what’s happening. Of course people are used to quick cutting, so you’ve got to give them some of that, otherwise they get bored. It can be funny nowadays to watch older action movies where you see a guy running and running and here comes the explosion… and still he’s running and it seems to go on forever. The funny part is that’s only 15 years ago. [Laughs] Things change.

with Grace Jones

JB: You possess a very particular kind of celebrity, one that doesn’t often promise much in the way of theatrical release yet attracts hordes of passionate fans. You even have a drink named after you! It’s a kind of celebrity that didn’t really exist before the 1980s—when you started out—and the development of this enormous specialty market for action thrillers on home video. Has this aspect of your career surprised you?

DL: I never knew what to expect from my career. When I was training for Rocky IV, I’d just done this Bond movie with Grace Jones, who was my girlfriend at the time. I remember Grace saying to me, “Forget the Bond movie. You’re going up against Rocky. This is going to be with you forever. This is huge.” I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but then your life takes it’s own turns. I became kind of famous, but I ended up doing a lot of smaller movies, some big ones, but a lot of small ones that went direct to video. I hadn’t expected that, but I never expected to direct either. You’re probably right about that difference in celebrity, because now that I’m back on the big screen, I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s like Mickey Rourke’s comeback, but you can’t help but feel there’s something similar going on when you’ve been around for so long and you get that groundswell where everybody kind of knows of you but you need to be in that big movie for people to rediscover what you’re all about. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Now when I do these premieres I’m sure there’ll be people whispering to themselves, “Shit, he’s still alive!” [Laughs]

Johnny Mnemonic

JB: Are you actively looking for projects that fall outside the genres you’re known for?

DL: Always. What it is John Lennon said? “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Things seem to run away from you sometimes, but then you arrive at these turning points in your career. I do feel like maybe this is one of those times when all these hours I’ve put in to making these weird movies all over the world might add up to something. For instance, I’d like to direct this period piece in Sweden. If I can pull it off it would be a transition from action to drama. Not an easy transition but there are those who’ve done it, like Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner or Clint Eastwood. I’m not in their league but I’m trying to do something similar.

The Shooter

JB: Have you tried to work in Sweden?

DL: I’ve been offered things but they’ve been very stereotypical. I figured if I was going to run around with a gun and shoot people I’d do it in Hollywood. But two years ago I did an episode of this summer radio show where you sit down and talk about your life and play music for 90 minutes. I talked about my dad and my childhood, because all the Swedes just saw me as this big, dumb blonde guy who lives in Hollywood and loves violence and doesn’t give a shit about Sweden. That went over pretty big, and then last year they approached me to host the Eurovision Song Contest. I had to do some singing and dancing, and it was quite well received. So I hope I might be a position now to do something different because they’ve glimpsed another side of me.

Masters of the Universe

JB: Did you watch a lot of Swedish cinema growing up? I confess that virtually the only Swedish films I know from the period of your youth are probably all Bergman.

DL: Sure, we all did. Bergman included, of course. It was very artsy in those days, but all of that’s in me somewhere. I still love Fanny and Alexander.

JB: Last year your home in Spain was broken into. I understand they tied up your wife, which must have been terrifying. Is it true they fled after seeing a photo of you and realized they were robbing Dolph Lundgren’s house?

DL: They didn’t really flee. They were there, stealing stuff. They were probably Eastern Europeans because they spoke bad Spanish. My wife and eldest daughter were there—my little one was asleep—and my daughter says to them, “If my dad were here you’d be in trouble!” Right at that moment they saw the picture of me and said, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re big fans of his movies.” [Laughs] My daughter asked them how they could be doing this if they like my movies and one of the robbers said, “Well, I suppose you can have a few things back.” The whole thing was like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Bizarre. Anyway, I was filming The Expendables at the time and couldn’t leave the set, so I really went nuts. I called some people I know in Bulgaria and asked them to go find these guys and have a word with them. Of course nothing came of that. The good thing is that my kids now know there are bad people in the world. I have a good security system and armed guards now, so I hope it never happens again. I suppose there was a slight advantage to being famous in that situation, but then I started to think these guys might come back and try to grab one of my kids or something. That’s why I beefed up the security. You never know with these people.

in the karate pants

JB: You’ve devoted a large part of your life to martial arts. Have you found yourself in situations outside of the movies where you’ve had to use those skills?

DL: Very few times. I rarely get in a fight because I’m quite big, so most people don’t want to mess with me. But when you do martial arts you’re not typically an aggressive person. You learn to brush things off. I think the only times I’ve had to use those skills outside of movies was when I worked as a doorman in Sweden or Sidney or someplace when I was 25. I’ve fought a lot of people in a dojo, but that’s completely different.

JB: Was a part of your original motivation to learn martial arts to defend yourself?

DL: I think part of the motivation was that my dad was physically abusive. It was very tough, you know, him beating up on my mom and me. Dealing with that is very difficult for a child. It makes you feel inadequate, so you look for something to help you feel confident. I played ice hockey for a while, did some boxing, but it was only when I took up karate that I felt stronger, like I could defend myself, and I found some of that inner harmony you get from studying martial arts. Of course, I also become a good fighter. Something kicks in and you get that killer instinct. That’s something that happens when a person’s been hurt when they’re very young. I think all great fighters have something like that in them, some kind of scar. You need a little bit of an evil part to your character to be able to knock somebody out. It all happens very quickly. You don’t even know what you’re doing until it’s over.

A review of The Expendables will be posted this Friday.