It's a Wonderful Life: cold comforts

Grudging altruism, ceaseless compromise, half-measures, a natural talent for holding down the fort, unfulfilled longings that, more harrowingly, perhaps never really could have been fulfilled: all of these things, accumulating over half a lifetime, drove George Bailey to get stinko, drive into an old tree, then stumble toward that snow-caked bridge over which he planned to tumble into the oblivion of river below. Suicide is painless when you’ve never once tasted what you truly craved, when the walls close in. And, for the third time in the movie, George does fall into the water. (Am I the only one that sees Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart makes the plunge, over and over, first for his brother, then into the hidden pool, and then into the river?) Only it’s to save a man from drowning, not to drown himself—yet again, George is a slave to self-sacrifice. That the drowning man is really a trickster guardian angel who proves to George that he’s well-friended, even beloved, that his town would be a nastier place (though one with a far more bustling night life) without him, doesn’t entirely remove the ache of it all, the fact that George Bailey still never got the hell out of Bedford Falls. And I think this is one of the enduring things about It’s a Wonderful Life: the magical consolation that ends the movie is, in the long run, in the years we imagine to come, only marginally consoling. Life will probably not get much easier for George Bailey. But, like some poor soul from Beckett, he’ll go on.

I’m only slightly embarrassed that I’d never seen It’s a Wonderful Life until last night. Everyone I know has seen it on TV; I don’t watch TV. But anyway what’s especially interesting about the movie is the way it actually seems designed/destined to be watched long after its making. It was a box office disappointment in its day, won none of its Oscars, and only became a holiday broadcast staple in the 1970s. It’s a movie about everything that leads us up to our worst moments, the long march of our pasts and the hard work of accepting cold comforts. The movie was always meant to be a classic, which means to be loved sometime in the future, when everyone involved was dead or dying and nostalgia has wrapped itself tightly round the movie’s breast. The sad truth: apparently George Bailey really is worth more to us dead than alive. Though while the screen is alight, he is, somehow, alive. And, as it turns out, he’s in a pretty wonderful movie.

Those summer nights...

Anyone who’s lived in a cold climate knows there are certain rites that seem only to transpire during the summer, and the briefer the summer, the more urgently those rites are conjured. In anticipation of summer, Criterion has released two films on blu-ray that brilliantly examine the sort of bacchanalian follies that accompany the coming season.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was Ingmar Bergman’s first international hit, reuniting Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand, the nimble, charismatic stars of Bergman’s A Lesson in Love (1954), which like Smiles, is a romantic comedy, a genre Bergman rarely worked in (in the cinema at least) despite his obvious facility. Set in 1901, thus taking just enough historical distance to emphasize how little the nature of romantic entanglements alters with shifts in social mores, the film is indeed very funny. It’s also, more characteristically for Bergman, sexy, poignant, and painful. Smiles on a Summer Night is funny precisely because it’s painful.

Fredrik Egerman (Björnstrand) is an attorney sliding into middle age, attempting to soften the blow by marrying a woman less than half his age. He treasures her more than he desires her. He has photographs taken of her that he admires with the pride of ownership. Or paternity. Fredrik also has a son, roughly the same age as his new bride, who studies theology, broods almost professionally, is agonizingly self-absorbed, and tries to seduce the maid (Harriet Andersson) with lectures on virtue.

Desirée Armfeldt (Dahlbeck) is an actress. Closer in age to Fredrik (Dahlbeck was only 25, but possessed a preternatural, very sensual maturity), she was once his mistress. These days she has a thing going with a married, mustachioed, clownishly egomaniacal military officer, but it seems to have run its course. (One of my favourite lines is spoken in venomous deadpan by the officer’s jealous, deeply tormented wife: “Men are horrible, vain and conceited. And they have hair all over their bodies.”) An unexpected reunion with Fredrik inspires Desirée to hatch a plan that will correct the current flawed romantic geometries. It all goes down in her wealthy mother’s country mansion. Fredrik and his wife and son, the officer and his wife, not to mention their lusty servants, are all invited. The plan involves wine infused with mother’s milk and stallion sperm, a duel, chambers custom designed for facilitating extramarital sex, and at least one attempted suicide. The suicide, incidentally, is a comic highlight.

The characters in Smiles are archetypes of a sort, types that especially recall Chekhov. Like Chekhov, Bergman fills out these types with loving details and idiosyncratic comic exaggerations that his superb cast executes with nuance and efficiency. The result is a film at once delightful and quietly knowing, about age, gender roles, heartache, and the tumult so often left in true passion’s wake.

Fat Girl (2001), perhaps the most perfect work from writer/director/provocateur Catherine Breillat, concerns the sexual initiations experienced by two sisters during summer holiday. The elder, more attractive sister, 15-year-old Elena (Roxanne Mesquida), meets an Italian law student. One night, in a disquieting, transfixing, all-too-recognizable bravura early sequence, he uses his powers of negotiation to shamelessly guilt-trip Elena into anal sex (anal, he promises, doesn’t count). The sisters share a bedroom in the family’s summer cottage, thus the younger, overweight sister, 13-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), witnesses the entire transaction. She becomes an absorbing mirror.

Breillat’s camera seems always to be moving, but slowly, not prowling but studying, never intrusive, yet never strictly observational either. Fat Girl, which follows the events of this fateful summer to their abrupt and arresting conclusion, is built upon relatively few episodes, a model of concision, yet every sequence breathes: nothing is rushed. Breillat’s work repeatedly examines female sexual persona in a way that feels almost compulsively subversive, pushing equally against erotic sentimentality, male fantasies and feminist conventions with formal rigour, intellectual confidence and almost always, somehow, a sense of play. There are too many risks being taken in Fat Girl, too much spontaneity and exploration, for it to feel schematic. And I don’t know that Breillat’s ever found anyone who’s embodied her sensibility more acutely than Reboux, who was discovered by Breillat in a McDonald’s. Pretending that two posts in a swimming pool are her fiancé and lover, lifting her nightgown to examine her barely formed breasts and whisper to herself “putain,” letting her sister ostensibly comfort her by shoving a giant toast into her mouth, Reboux gives one of the most remarkable, unaffected and devastating performances of the last decade.

The war against forgetting: Salvador Allende

Patricio Guzmán has devoted much of his career to navigating the foggy history of his native Chile, particularly those few jubilant and turbulent years marked by the unprecedented non-violent ascension of its democratically elected socialist government and that long trail of dark years marked by terror, torture, order and oppression, by ostensible prosperity and cooperation with imperialist foreign powers, that followed. There’s this notion that Chile’s elder populace (those who didn’t, like Guzmán, go into exile), thinned out along its peculiar narrow stem of diverse topography, have constructed their national fog by way of a collective willful amnesia surrounding those aforementioned years. This amnesiac fog is invoked in the very title of Guzmán’s film Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997). I wonder if the process inherent in journeying through this fog, unable to apprehend a view of what’s ahead or behind, hasn’t contributed to that special wandering, uncharted feeling that accompanies some of Guzmán’s finest, most personal films.

This feeling is certainly among the most compelling elements of Guzmán’s Nostalgia For the Light (2010), a masterpiece essay film that traverses the Atacama Desert in search of distant stars and bones of the disappeared. Yet this feeling can even be found in the more conventional documentary Salvador Allende (2004), now available on DVD from Icarus. After repeatedly encircling the Allende enigma, most famously in the three-part, Chris Marker-produced The Battle of Chile (1975-79), Guzmán took this project as an opportunity to take direct aim at Chile’s controversial fallen president, about whom there remains a conspicuous paucity of commentary. Yet there’s nothing especially direct about Salvador Allende. It finds its path as it proceeds.

Guzmán narrates Salvador Allende, emphasizing the first-person approach, while his soft voice can also frequently be heard off-camera posing questions. Guzmán was in his early 30s when Allende came into power (and passed 15 doubtlessly despairing days of detainment in the National Stadium following the coup) and is able to cull a healthy portion of Salvador Allende from his own archive of footage, shot between Allende’s 1970 inauguration and 1973, the year of that other September 11, when US-backed military forces ousted Allende’s government (a day Guzmán hauntingly evokes with repeated images of flames consuming the Palacio de la Moneda following the aerial bombing). Early in the film, Guzmán explains that he wants to get to know the Allende beneath the icon. He travels to Allende’s native Valparaiso, where the city’s former mayor persuasively insists that Allende (who received support from Cuba, but not from the USSR) was neither Marxist nor Leninist but libertarian, having received his first political education from an anarchist Italian shoemaker. But as the film goes along this effort to focus on Allende the man quietly dissipates, replaced by a more straightforward chronicle of Allende’s pre-presidential political career, conveying his charisma and popularity, highlighted by memorable images such as the one of gleeful rural children chasing his departing campaign train.

Later in Salvador Allende Guzmán details Allende’s difficult presidency, his agrarian reforms and nationalization of the mining industry, the hostilities directed at his policies, and his outspoken contempt for US interference and multinational corporations. A notable, revealing interview with former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry confirms Nixon’s explicit commands to get rid of Allende by any means necessary. Yet, appropriately for a film about a politician devoted to workers and the poor, Guzmán finds many of his strongest sequences by giving the floor to ordinary Chileans. He documents a lively debate between several former UP militants about whether or not Allende should have defended the government and properly armed the militia. This debate also pries open the thorny question of Allende’s suicide, undertaken just as the army was about to take him prisoner, an event which only compounds the mystery of his life. One could argue that Salvador Allende falls short of its ostensible goal in that Allende is virtually as enigmatic a figure by the film’s end as he was at its start. But the fortitude of this enigma is also, it seems to me, the film’s point. Allende, though revered by Guzmán as he is by millions around the world, is a truly singular, enduringly contentious figure—so singular that very few have made significant attempts to tell his story. The value of Guzmán’s film is that even in its limitations it makes an enormous contribution to a conversation about Allende that needs to be maintained. In Guzmán’s films the personal inevitably merges with the political, and the articulated memories of the filmmaker and his subjects continue to wage a non-violent war against the perils of forgetting.

The Voice Imitator: 104 opportunities to encounter Thomas Bernhard in one page or less

I have recently endeavoured to compel fellow readers to explore the works of the late Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Thomas Bernhard, whose novels I have only recently begun to explore and whose plays and poems I hope to explore imminently, yet I have been reminded over the course of this endeavour that it may prove difficult to compel fellow readers to explore the works of Thomas Bernhard due to their (in)famous prose style, distinguished by very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves while they are in fact building a seductive and compelling rhythm and tension and secretly working to reward the reader with the utmost narrative clarity and an arresting sense of voice. My endeavour has been aided by the recent reprinting of many Bernhard’s novels, such as The Loser, about suicide, genius, and Glenn Gould, and Correction, about suicide, genius, and a cone-shaped edifice, by the recently published Prose, and by the even more recently published My Prizes: An Accounting, though none of these has filled me with as much hope of compelling fellow readers to explore the works of Thomas Bernhard, despite their very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves, as The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press, $12 US), whose darkly comical, anecdote-like stories, about suicide, murder, accidents, governments, and generally peculiar behaviour, are so short as to never exceed a page’s length and thus diminish the potentially off-putting effect of those very long sentences that seem to ramble, mesmerize and merely repeat themselves. There is additionally something ironic about a work from Thomas Bernhard being called The Voice Imitator since I can think of few other late 20th century writers whose writerly voice has been more closely imitated or, as it were, paid homage, by writers whose work I’d already come to adore, such as W.G. Sebald, Geoff Dyer, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, who have done such inspired work of imitating or, as it were, paying homage to Thomas Bernhard’s writerly voice that I will with this sentence cease my own pale imitation or, as it were, homage, to the writerly voice of Thomas Bernhard.

Bernhard’s micro-fictions are often founded in personal experiences, often shared with a small group of anonymous friends. He seems attracted to precisely those strangers who go out of their way not to attract attention—twice in The Voice Imitator a story begins when Bernhard and his companions become fascinated by a solitary figure in a tavern made conspicuous by his “taciturnity.” Just as often, Bernhard’s stories seem culled from truncated news reports or hearsay: the lavish mountainside hotel abandoned by its grieving owner and left to the elements having never once been occupied; the fortune teller murdered for failing to provide a philanderer with an accurate prophecy of his wife’s death; the postman consigned to an insane asylum who asks that he be able to continue wearing his postman’s uniform so as to not go insane; the discovery of a giant skeleton in a village always thought to be inhabited solely by very short people; the fireman who pulled away a safety blanket just as a suicidal jumper jumped because he was overtaken by “an inner compulsion.”

Bernhard seems drawn to these stories for their grave ironies and subtle insights, though so often it’s difficult to discern what’s based on fact and what is pure invention. Not that it matters. The Voice Imitator is filled with deliciously unqualified generalizations and assumptions. In ‘Genius’ Bernhard writes that in Vienna, “lack of consideration and impudence towards thinkers and artists has always been greater than anywhere else.” If Bernhard’s legendary loathing of his home country renders such a claim highly suspicious it in no way diminishes its power to evoke a singular psychological landscape. Characteristically, these stories keep circling themes of suicide and despair, but they also return again and again to tales of unlikely connections between people. With any luck, The Voice Imitator might even forge new connections between Bernhard and those readers willing to give this extraordinary author a chance.

Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune: Talkin' heads remember unjustly forgotten singer-songwriter who sang 'bout injustice blues

Phil Ochs went to New York in 1962 to become the world’s greatest songwriter, but he met Bob Dylan and thereafter amended his ambition: he’d settle for second greatest. Dylan, who unfortunately does not appear in Kenneth Bowser’s Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune, was reportedly unkind to Ochs, despite a friendship that would last until Ochs’ death in 1976. Yet Dylan’s advice to Ochs, his insistence that songs be grounded in the personal as much as if not more than the political, tells us a great deal about the difference between these mutually single-minded, era-defining artists.

Unlike Dylan, whose best work often plays as memoir, Ochs was committed to the song as editorial, ripping material directly from the New York Times—his first LP was titled All the News That’s Fit to Sing—addressing injustice through a lens of black humour rendered more ironic still through the nasal boyishness of his vocal delivery. So long as the dream of social change through music-as-reportage seemed plausible, Ochs was on top of the world. When the world proved less capable of change than Ochs and his more idealistic peers had hoped, Ochs’ music began to recede from the charts, while Ochs himself slid into a slow downward spiral marked by alcoholism and despair over Vietnam and the deaths of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Victor Jara. He was later strangled by thieves in Africa. They spared his life but wrecked his vocal chords. He finally hung himself in his sister’s home. He was 35.

There but for Fortune brims with talking heads, including many who knew Ochs intimately, such as Joan Baez, Ed Sanders, and Ochs’ brother Michael, who served as the film’s co-producer, and others who take inspiration from Ochs’ legacy, such as Billy Bragg, Christopher Hitchens, and Sean Penn. These commentators collectively chronicle the significant episodes in Ochs’ life, while Bowser and editor Pamela Scott Arnold emphasize the political events that shaped Ochs’ art and psyche. Blessed with an immense trove of archival material, which Bowser carefully weaves in, There but for Fortune can’t be faulted with neglecting to relay the facts.

Where the film does seem to fall short is in its exploration of the truths behind the facts. Bowser, probably best known for Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, is too respectful to be more precise about Ochs’ bad habits and failings as a family man. More importantly, Bowser refrains from delving below the surface of his subjects’ testimonies, from rigorously questioning why such a giant failed to secure an enduring place in the popular culture of his lifetime or maintain a posthumous renown as vibrant as many of his contemporaries. Ochs was nothing if not opinionated and daring. Ochs had a perspective, which is something you can’t really say about Bowser’s work here. Still, see the film, and be grateful to Bowser for going as far as he did to remind us of this very special talent whose contributions arguably have no equivalent in today’s music.

Paul Bowles at 100

There’s an incident described in Paul Bowles’ autobiography Without Stopping, relayed without sentiment or much elaboration, in which the author flips a coin as a method of deciding between two actions: heads he sets off for Europe as soon as possible, tails he overdoses on barbiturates. Bowles doesn’t recall having had the idea to do this, only suddenly, compulsively, performing the act. “It occurred to me,” he writes, “that this meant that I was not the I I thought I was or, rather, that there was a second I in me who had suddenly assumed command.” Whichever “I” took command of Bowles’ life at such turning points was clearly drawn to games of chance, and at times to outright danger—yet perhaps this “I” had a shapr eye for the odds. Had Bowles found tails, and had he followed through with its dictates, he would have died far too young, far in advance of most of the journeys and friendships with famous and talented people that would bless his life, far in advance of becoming the celebrated composer and fiction writer so many cherish. But Bowles got heads, went to Europe and many other, much stranger places, married a woman who would also prove a marvelous, eerily like-minded writer, produced a great deal of music and wrote or translated a good number of books, and lived until the age of 88. Last 30 December he would have turned 100. So this is a belated happy birthday.


As usual I reminded myself that since nothing was real, it did not matter too much.
—Without Stopping

William Burroughs, who came to know Bowles in Tangier in the 1950s, once quipped that Bowles should have titled his autobiography Without Telling, referring to Bowles’ indefatigable reticence regarding his sexuality. But Without Stopping actually tells us a lot about this very particular, very peculiar man, especially his enduringly hazy sense of volition and sense of the fluidity of self. That troublesome “I” referred to above tells us something about the narrator of ‘You Are Not I’, an escapee from a mental institution who seems to undergo some sort of psychic transference by placing a stone in her sister’s mouth. I read Without Stopping only after reading Bowles’ more famous works, namely the novels The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down and those incredible short stories, and found it to be easily one of the most vivid and fascinating items in the canon, though to be sure, it only deepens the mysteries surrounding Bowles’ life and work. The couple traversing the Sahara in The Sheltering Sky find only death or perdition; the widower in ‘Pages From Cold Point,’ who relocates he and his son to a remote island so as to escape what he deems a doomed and grotesque civilization, finds that what’s most repulsive about the life he’s left behind has been following him all along. Nearly everything Bowles published reads like a warning to Westerners to stay home, yet Bowles, raised comfortably—if under the terror of a reportedly draconian father—in the Eastern US, cultivated a legacy as the quintessential expatriate, always seeking roads less traveled and living out much of his life in North Africa. He couldn’t bear staying home. Thing is, however terrifying or fraught Bowles made traveling sound, something in his stories remained seductive. He certainly made me want to go everywhere.


“You don’t take a honeymoon alone,” he interrupted.
“You might.” She laughed shortly.
—‘Call at Corazón’

It’s easy to emphasize Paul Bowles’ weirdness—we’re talking about a guy who took an extraordinarily long time to differentiate between the sexes as a boy, and one who happily married a woman despite the fact that both he and Jane Bowles seemed primarily if not exclusively homosexual. But I think Bowles’ manner of grappling with ambivalence in both his personal life and his fiction is what resonates so intensely with readers. Those characters who most resemble Bowles seem perpetually torn between companionship and solitude. In an especially memorable chapter of The Sheltering Sky Port returns at night to a desolate, beautiful place he’d visited earlier in the day with Kit. By returning alone and in secret he seems to be correcting the earlier, shared, and somehow flawed experience of the place. Yet Port isn’t tempted to abandon Kit—he wants to keep sharing things with her, even at risk of spoiling some of them. Perhaps this tension is itself desirable. Perhaps, for all its detached, quietly unnerving qualities, The Sheltering Sky is simply an accurate portrait of marriage. It is, in any case, as good a place as any to discover Bowles if you’ve never read him. That or The Delicate Prey and Other Stories.

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.

Art in America: Terry Zwigoff's portraits of infamous or insufficiently famous men, their problematic legacies and vanishing worlds, return on DVD

Terry Zwigoff had played in a band and been close friends with legendary American cartoonist Robert Crumb for over two decades before finishing Crumb (1995), and it makes you wonder if more documentary filmmakers shouldn’t be turning their cameras on their most intimate acquaintances—providing their intimacy doesn’t blind them to these acquaintances’ more difficult tendencies. Crumb benefits enormously from Zwigoff’s relationship to his subject, yet familiarity in no way inhabits discovery or critique.

Crumb draws a portrait of the artist in middle-age, on the verge of leaving his San Francisco home forever to re-settle in France with his wife. It describes a deeply eccentric nerd and preternatural curmudgeon who learned to make a life for himself by submitting to a relentless compulsion to interpret the world around him, the result being sometimes satire, sometimes fantasy of the most brazen, grotesque, perverse incarnations, and often both—I wonder if this mixture hasn’t endowed Crumb with a legacy not altogether different from that of Naked Lunch author William Burroughs. Those who have seen Zwigoff’s Ghost World (01) yet are unfamiliar with Crumb will likely see him as the real-life version of the later movie’s hapless Seymour, but with talent and purpose.

Zwigoff’s clearly enamored if not obsessed with Crumb’s work and sensibility—Zwigoff conveys real love for everyone in Crumb’s family, who, it rapidly becomes evident, are as much this movie’s subject as Crumb himself. Yet Zwigoff’s interest isn’t reflexively defensive. What’s morally or politically troubling about Crumb’s monstrous, big-assed, powerful-legged—and, in at least one case, decapitated—women or his nostalgia for bygone eras awash in racist imagery is all on the table, and Zwigoff invites several articulate commentators to examine it, some of whom regard Crumb as a contemporary Brueghel or defender of full-figured female beauty, others a narcissistic pornographer of the most dangerous kind. I don’t think this is Zwigoff’s attempt at objectivity. I think he’s just trying to get things right, to look at Crumb’s work from as broad a perspective as possible.

You might argue that Crumb’s work is of secondary importance to the story of the Crumb brothers. Zwigoff and his crew accompany Robert on visits to his housebound, pharmaceutically dependent brother Charles, who still lives with mother in a house frozen in time, passing his days re-reading the Victorian novels he adored as a boy, and to his ascetic brother Maxon, who lives alone in a San Fran fleabag apartment, alludes to a history of sexual assaults, and meditates on a bed of nails. There’s something deeply unsettling about how closely Charles and Max resemble less fortunate variations on Robert, who seems to care for and even admire his brothers, yet is so overcome with despair over their lifestyles and psychological frailty that all he can usually do in response to their stories is emit more of his trademark dry chuckles. Truth is you’ll probably laugh too while watching Crumb, which never succumbs to pity or sentimentality and often celebrates that one essential element that might just keep the Crumb brothers—and some of the rest of us—alive for as long as we can bear it: a healthy sense of humour. Long before he made fiction movies, Zwigoff proved himself a masterful storyteller, and I don’t think he could honestly tell any story without recognizing it’s inherent laughter.

Criterion’s beautifully transferred and packaged release of Crumb this week coincides with their release of Zwigoff’s less known yet just as wonderful documentary Louie Bluie (85), a portrait of obscure country-blues musician and visual artist Howard Armstrong, whose recordings Zwigoff had cherished and emulated for decades before discovering that Armstrong alive and well and living in Detroit. As with Crumb, Louie Bluie takes a no-brainer approach to telling its subject’s story, with scenes of Armstrong doing his thing—ie: playing fiddle and mandolin or displaying his fecund, scatological and not un-Crumb-like art—and a journey back home, in this case rural Tennessee, where Armstrong learned to play whatever instrument he could find or invent, as well as several languages so he could play songs for diverse ethnic audiences. What’s magical about Louie Bluie arises not from its rudimentary structure but from Armstrong’s immense charisma and the movie’s slyly selected details.

We see Armstrong and his old partner Ted Bogan playing up a storm in the kitchen of “Yank” Rachell, another old collaborator. Armstrong solos with the mandolin behind his head while Rachell nonchalantly peruses the latest issue of Income Opportunities. We see Bogan boiling water in a frying pan to make a cup of Hill Brothers instant. We see Armstrong convince Bogan to give him one of his least-ugly shirts. We see Rachell sucking every last bit of anything we might call flesh from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken while Armstrong mercilessly and affectionately makes fun of him. None of these guys made much money from their musical talents, but Zwigoff makes it abundantly clear that what they did earn was several lifelong friendships. And as with Crumb, Zwigoff doesn’t shy away from the potentially offensive aspects of his subject’s outsized persona, allowing Armstrong to display his beloved erotic-historical Whorehouse Bible, and to hold forth on his ways with women and his inability to understand the appeal of Jesus: “Who the fuck cares about somebody nodding his damned head when some guy’s getting ready to kick his ass?”

Lovers of our less-recognized musical traditions owe a debt to Zwigoff for preserving this record of Armstrong, who died in 2003 at the age of 94, which also preserves many anecdotes and images of largely unheralded or even anonymous black musicians who developed what we call jazz, country and blues in the early 20th century. Lovers of our great if less-championed movies owe an equal debt to Criterion for rescuing Louie Bluie from oblivion.

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

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

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

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

Walking cure: Walkabout on DVD

The opening minutes of Walkabout (1971) function as a sort of cinematic assault, amputating diverse components from the audiovisual corpus of modern urban existence—crowds and traffic, tall anonymous buildings and radio signals, swimming pools, classrooms, brick walls and ground beef—and pasting them together in such a way so as to induce creeping repulsion and a kind of vertigo in the viewer as efficiently as possible. Soon a father and his two children, Englishmen transplanted to Australia, are driving into the outback for a rather incongruous picnic. A portable radio broadcasts a program offering instruction on proper table manners.

The latent apocalypse of the film’s opening montage manifests in the father’s next actions, which seem to have been planned in advance. He takes a pistol and begins to fire it at the kids, who run and hide. He takes a jerry can and douses their Beetle. (By this point the radio’s playing Rod Stewart’s ‘Gasoline Alley,’ which is maybe some perverse subliminal prompt for dad’s incendiary psychosis.) He sets fire to the car and then turns the pistol on himself, firing a shot to the head then flopping on his back as though in relief. Within mere moments a banal family outing has transformed into a sunlit nightmare, the patriarch dead and the only means of escape from a hostile space destroyed. The resourceful teenage daughter (Jenny Agutter) tries to remain calm and is compelled to render this nightmare a sort of game for her much younger brother (Luc Roeg, credited as Lucien John), who didn’t actually see his father’s suicide, but the pair set out into the desert with no idea as to where to find shade, water, food, or help. They’re on their own, until they meet another youngster (David Gulpilil), also without parental guidance and protection, but blacker, better attuned to this undomesticated terrain, unable to speak or understand their language, but perfectly capable of guiding, feeding, and protecting them from the elements.

A general description of Walkabout might give the impression that the film assumes a then-highly fashionable blanket condemnation of Western values and a romanticized appraisal of Aboriginal values, the former making you crazy and violent and corrupt while the latter grants you strength and wisdom and life in a perpetual Eden. Indeed, there are sequences that feel a bit overwrought in their display of civilized versus primitive behaviour, such as the one which cuts jarringly between the Aborigine boy spearing and slaughtering a kangaroo and a white butcher in a white coat chopping up meat in a very sanitized butcher shop. But Walkabout demands a level of attentiveness that forces us to look beyond the broad brushstrokes, through the complexity of the interactions between its characters and images, through the ambiguities inherent in its narrative and lack of subtitles for the Aborigine’s dialogue, and through its sheer duration versus its number of dramatic events. There’s never any lack of tension, beauty, or fascination in its many scenes of hunting, swimming, frolicking, attempted communication, or, of course, walking, but there is a deliberate lack of conventional dramatic incident, which allows us to get closer to the characters and their strange dilemma with a bare minimum of exposition. By the time we reach the end of Walkabout, we come to realize that the film isn’t primarily concerned with moralizing or engaging in facile social critique. It’s a study in the difficulties of cultural adaptation, in the role of landscape in shaping identity, in how adolescent sexuality might emerge when left to its own devices, unfettered by the constant barrage of consumerist iconography encountered in city life. Put most simply, Walkabout is a coming of age story, without the usual distractions.

Walkabout was the first solo directing credit for Nicolas Roeg, the celebrated London cinematographer who’d recently co-directed Performance (70) with Donald Cammell. Adapted from James Vance Marshall’s novel by playwright Edward Bond, Walkabout exhibits the impressionistic, vaguely narcotic mise en scène that would characterize Roeg’s uniformly brilliant work over the next decade, in films such as Don’t Look Now (73) and Bad Timing (80). His liberal deployment of ostentatious wide angle pans, flash cuts, trippy dissolves, and ultra grainy optical zooms on insects and reptiles could be said to date the film, which emerged not so long after Easy Rider (69), yet Roeg comes by such techniques honestly, endowing them with psychological or emotional nuance specific to the needs of this story and its setting. Walkabout has aged so well in fact that the Criterion Collection is now releasing it a third time. The new DVD and Blu-ray features best-yet image and sound and new supplements, including interviews with Agutter and Luc Roeg, each about 20 minutes, and an hour-long documentary about the life of Gulpilil, the truly remarkable actor and dancer who got his start in movies with Walkabout and has since embodied just about every variation on the Aboriginal persona one can image, both sophisticated and silly, in the 40 years since.

Carnival of lost souls: Nightmare Alley

It was late 1938 or early 1939. William Lindsay Gresham was in a village near Valencia, awaiting repatriation after his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, when he first heard about the geek from a man named Joseph Daniel Halliday. The men were drinking when Halliday regaled Gresham with his knowledge of this unusual carnival attraction, an alcoholic driven to such desperation that he bites the heads of live chickens to secure his next drink, decades before such sadistic entertainments would be employed and domesticated by the likes of Alice or Ozzy. The sad story of the geek resonated deeply with Gresham, haunting him, at least until 1946, when his first novel was finally published.

Stan is a handsome, bright young carny working on a modest slight-of-hand act, though he has vague ambitions for greater things. Nightmare Alley begins with Stan observing the geek for the first time, amazed and appalled. The barker assures his audience of the geek’s genetic singularity: “…he has two arms, two legs, a head and a body, like a man. But under that head of hair there is the brain of a beast.” What the geek assures Stan of is man’s fundamental frailty and perverse fascinations, the understanding of which strikes him as crucial or survival. Stan observes the audience’s primal rapture: “…the crowd moaned in an old language, pressing their bodies tighter against the board walls of the pit and stretching.” Sizing up his marks, he smiles “the smile of a prisoner who has found a file in a pie.” The weaknesses and anxieties that burrow and fester in each of us are to be Stan’s field of study as he works his way up out of the carnival circuit and onto more baroque and profitable grifts among the cultural elite. He discovers a hidden book that reads like an instruction manual for his future. “Think out things most people are afraid of,” it reads, “and hit them right where they live.” But those weaknesses and anxieties also taunt Stan as he tries to ward off his own insistent visions of looming perdition: “In the hot sun of noon the cold breath could strike your neck. In having a woman her arms were a barrier. But after she had fallen asleep the walls of the alley closed in on your sleep and the footsteps followed.”

In its love of con mechanics and its particular way of mirroring of its protagonist’s gradual mental collapse in the shifting tone of its prose, Nightmare Alley to some degree looks forward to the novels of Jim Thompson, who would be far more prolific than Gresham, though even his most ambitious works cannot match Nightmare Alley’s scope or sustain. There’s also a kinship between these authors in how they write about sex as something ultimately tawdry and doom-laden yet enduringly alluring and captivating upon discovery. There’s something tender and compassionate in Gresham’s evocation of Molly, the electrical girl with whom Stan falls in love, whose pa told her never to make love to a man whose toothbrush you wouldn’t use. (Not bad advice!) The belated loss of virginity is for Stan a revelation: “This is what all the love-nest murderers killed over and what people got married to get. This was why men left home and why women got themselves dirty reputations. This was the big secret.” Stan’s lingering psychic wounds are of an Oedipal nature. His buried desires manifest most dramatically in the affair he concocts with the icy psychotherapist with whom he’ll concoct his most ornate scheme, and whose vocation is to him just another racket. “I know what you’ve got in there,” he boasts to the doctor, “society dames with the clap, bankers that take it up the ass, actresses that live on hop, people with idiot kids. You’ve got it all down.” Stan has an interest in all forms of human folly, but those derived from lust are the ones he himself seems unable to master.

Newly re-printed and handsomely bound by New York Review of Books Classics ($17.95) with an informative introduction by Nick Tosches, the return of Nightmare Alley has been for me a tremendous discovery. I knew of it mainly from the excellent 1947 film version, brilliantly adapted by Jules Furthman, directed by Edmund Goulding, and starring Tyrone Power. I hadn’t guessed that this pulp source material for some prime noir was itself a masterpiece and something more than a crime novel. It’s a portrait of postwar shadows engulfing a vast American landscape that crushes the likes of Stan in a confluence of exploitation, alcohol, repression, ideology, materialism, religious longing, and dubious promises of upward mobility. Though there were a number of non-fiction works, including a book on Houdini, Nightmare Alley was one of only two novels from Gresham, who was himself it seems crushed by a cocktail of voracious personal demons and bad luck. He tried to ward off his own nightmare alley with booze, Marxism, Christianity, psychoanalysis, and three marriages, the most famous being to the poet Joy Davidman, to whom Nightmare Alley is dedicated, who bore Gresham two children before leaving him for C.S. Lewis in 1953. Grisham suicided in a hotel room off Times Square in September of 1962, unemployed and without prospects, at the age of 53.

Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell in the film version of Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley covers a lot of territory, both psychologically and geographically, crossing the US by truck, train, car, and on foot until Stan’s world seems not larger but smaller, shrinking to a blackened point. His carnival experience comes full circle, like the embrace of a family whose door always remains forbiddingly open, and some of Gresham’s finest passages evoke for us this family on the move, seductive and grotesque and leaving only cavities in its wake: “It came like a pillar of fire by night, bringing excitement and new things into the drowsy towns—lights and noise and a chance to win an Indian blanket, to ride on the ferris wheel, to see the wild-man who fondles those rep-tiles as a mother would fondle her babes. Then it vanished in the night, leaving the trodden grass of the field and the debris of popcorn boxes and rusting tin ice-cream spoons to show where it had been.”