Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "art"

I was driving in my car some years back, listening to the classical music station, when there was an interruption for one of the usual pledge drives. The female voice on the radio related some anecdote from a composer (I’ve forgotten who) who said words to the effect that he preferred hanging out with businessmen rather than other musicians. When asked why, he said that all musicians ever talked about was money, while all businessmen ever talked about was music.
It’s a funny little anecdote, but it’s also instructive, and does a good job of showing why, contra the old saw, artists are usually not brave. They can’t afford to be, since they subsist, live or die at the mercy of powerful patrons (from the Medici’s to the “Big Five” or whichever number of publishers occupy skyscraper real estate, to those involved in disbursement of grant monies). Writers and visual artists and people reviewing their work especially like to lard badass encomiums on themselves, like “transgressive” “boundary-breaking,” or “brave” but it is very rare to see someone openly challenge the Gods of their age, or to violate taboos.
In a different time and place, being considered obscene by the powers-that-be could be literally and physically dangerous, as in the case of someone pulled up in the sweep of the Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) aesthetic/cultural cleansing that took place when the Nazi party took power in Germany. The artist Georg Grosz, famous for his Lustmord (passion murder) depictions of mangled and eviscerated female bodies, along with his depiction of military bigwigs as pimps and soldiers as dispensable grave-bound cannon fodder, chafed the Nazis, and he had to leave the country after receiving numerous death threats. Ironically, on relocation to America Herr Grosz underwent an artistic conversion of sorts, finding that the salty air and calming winds of Long Island’s mini-archipelagos changed his view of the world so much that he said that if the Nazis hadn’t burnt his early works inspired by the claustrophobia of Weimar Berlin, he might have burnt them himself.
The criminally underrated German Trummerliteratur (literally “Rubble Literature”) writer Wolfgang Borchert was repeatedly thrown in brig for his impromptu plays mocking various Nazi officials during his time in the Bundeswehr, and there is a good case to be made that his repeated imprisonments in less-than-august conditions contributed to his early death at the age of 26. Check out his short story Rats do sleep at Night, if you haven’t already.
Also, in the spirit of nonpartisanship I should mention that Russian expat author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag for mocking Joseph Stalin in private correspondence, not even in artwork that was displayed in a gallery or writing in published form that could have been taken as a direct challenge to the system.
We have of course had obscenity trials in non-Nazi, non-Communist nations, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think the ultimate outcome of the cases brought against Hubert Selby for Last Exit to Brooklyn or William Burroughs for Naked Lunch did anything but help sales and increase public interest in the works in question. Publishers salivate for this kind of stamp-of-approval obscenity and even use it as a marketing point in future editions. The retconning of a classic by Mark Twain, the expungement of the word “Nigger” for “Slave” is a disturbing bit of appellative jiu-jitsu, but it pleases our Gods and is therefore probably not considered wrong except by a small coterie of cantankerous librarians handicapped by little things like principles or real courage.
One way for artists to sidestep censorship laws (the kind whose transgression can make you a head shorter) arrived in the form of something that came to be known as the Inner Immigration, the process by which artists who opposed the Nazis remained in Germany, did not become party members, but kept their resistance and opposition confined primarily to allegory and metaphor that hopefully served as a means of communicating solidarity to others opposing the Nazis while not directly challenging the system.
This tactic evolved into a full-blown philosophical Weltanschauung in the hands of Ernst Junger, the right-wing writer, philosopher, and veteran of the Great War, who was idolized by Hitler and yet privately excoriated the man in his journals, calling him “Kniebolo” in his coded diary. A typical journal entry reads, “If we win, we'll have to hang Kniebolo." Junger was the author of the unreconstructed Prussian militarist’s favorite Great War account, Storms of Steel and he was also offered a seat in the Reichstag by the Nazis, but instead quietly served in the Army of Occupation that had pierced the Maginot Line into Paris. While seemingly enjoying the life of a celebrity-soldier, drinking the best wine on the roof of chateau while watching explosions in the distance, he penned On Marble Cliffs, a strange magical realism parable about a sociopathic forester who tortures and kills indiscriminately in his quest for total power.
The book served as inspiration for the Von-Stauffenberg Circle, who plotted to kill Hitler and yet failed, and those close to the Fuhrer suspected that Ernst Junger had deliberately written the book to foment an uprising and may have even been a tangential conspirator in the plot, though he had an airtight alibi when the chain of events was set in motion. Hitler, as a veteran of not just the war but the Battle of the Somme where Junger had also fought, stayed his hand against the ex-soldier and recipient of the Pour La Merite (the equivalent of our Medal of Honor).
Ernst Junger’s own personal resistance morphed from the collective “Inner Immigration” movement to a more retreating, internalized form of disobedience to state tyranny and remaining true to oneself. He called this type the “Anarch,” adding him to his already-extant taxonomy of types like The Arbeiter (Junger was also an entomologist and his penchant for classification showed some interdisciplinary bleed into his other areas of inquiry). He distinguished this type from the anarchist by contrasting the Anarch’s lack of action but total sovereignty of one over their own mind, against the anarchist’s pyrrhic campaign of bombings, attacks, and head-on confrontation with an increasingly armed and technologically sophisticated state in order to convert the world to his way of thinking via violence.
Those critical of Junger’s Anarch or just cynical (depending on one’s own viewpoint) would say that private, internalized disobedience confined primarily to the life of the mind isn’t much different than the ostrich planting his head in the sand. Just as some accused Kurt Vonnegut of being a quietist for his refrain of “So it goes” when he saw humans melted like grasshoppers in the firebombing of Dresden, there are those who think Junger was merely trying to absolve himself of any guilt or complicity in what his worship of the martial may have in part inspired or wrought (though I think this is a stretch, since Junger’s conservatism was always unabashedly aristocratic and he bridled at the plebian, bull-necked beer-swilling Nazi streetfighters).
It’s easy of course to judge at this remove, and it’s also important to remember that the fear most of us have of being humiliated, ostracized, or somehow unpersoned (sic) for writing, saying, or perhaps even thinking the wrong things is enough to get us to Crimestop our Crimethinks before they bloom into challenges to the orthodoxy that, horror of horrors, might lose us some twitter friends, cost a couple book sales, or lead to an awkward argument with a colleague over a beer at the bar after a reading. The threat of a death in a work camp or a Parabellum 9×19mm round to the back of the head followed by a quick burial in a lime pit wasn’t enough to stay some men’s hands from writing certain words. What Ernst Junger or Alexander Solzhenitsyn might not do to avoid death, we might do for a like on facebook.
Writers are, for the most part, feckless teachers’ pets, natural-born apple polishers. They seek awards, baubles, blurbs and prizes with the fervor of a boy scout who’s only a couple of merit badges away from filling out his sash and making Eagle Scout. Returning to the land and the age of Solzhenitsyn’s imprisonment, it would probably be best to remember what someone pointed out about the Pravda broadsheet (the paper of record in Russia for roughly eighty years): that one could glean the truth from the newspaper by reading it, and inverting its details to arrive at the facts. If the paper was graced with a headline that said, CONDITIONS IN ASBESTOS MINE IMPROVING, the safe bet would be to assume that any worker asking for a water break got a visit from the local Cheka officer that ended with the “suicide” of the worker in question.
And if you hear a writer’s work being praised as “Audacious” “Brave” or “Speaking Truth to Power” your best bet would be to assume that the relationship between the writer in question and the publication granting their imprimatur mimics the ritual played out between my dog and I every time I leave the house or come home. She sits, wags her tail, and I give her a treat.
That’s writing, that’s publishing, and that’s reality with very few exceptions. Your basic options are to be a prostitute or a prophet without honor, and before you judge or choose your path (assuming you’re not already well down the road) just remember that the latter gig does not pay very well, and that you may piss off the wrong person or people and not be welcome at the best parties. On the other hand, compromising yourself may hurt, but we in postmodernism have a pharmacopeia of mother’s little helpers to make it easier to make eye contact with the mirror should you cave to the fear. Alcohol’s been with us for awhile longer. Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, used to smoke crack to help him get through writing episodes of Alf. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life (and by making it on the margins as a writer), our souls can always shrink a little smaller, and we can always descend a little lower.

Empty Center: Reflections on Postmodern Art

I think it’s lame to complain too much about how bad postmodern art is, if only because it’s been done to death, and besides that I don’t think that all postmodern art is trash. “Nothing is ever absolutely so,” as Theodore Sturgeon once said, and he’s probably right. Amorphous blobs of paint selling in Manhattan galleries to stockbrokers and their phony philanthropist arm candy is a bit of a travesty, but I like Basquiat, whose work has been called everything from neo-expressionist (which is technically early postmodern) to primitivist (which I think he took as an insult).
Jokes about how a child could finger paint as well as this or that famous artist are probably true in some cases, but as mentioned earlier this was old hat even back when an episode of Murphy Brown was based around the concept.
That said, I read an article recently in the German news (maybe at Spiegel) that was a pretty good example of how low postmodernism can sink. And it’s another reminder that if you don’t have artistic talent, but want to make a living in the arts, the visual arts are still the way to go. Postmodernism can be used as a way for the well-off to really con the hell out of rich people in ways that have very little to do with art, except at the conceptual and theoretical level. Art should explain itself, not have massive glosses that require more effort to create than the piece itself.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany, which houses some of Monet’s works, among many others, is in desperate need of repairs. The ceiling is undicht, as the Germans would say, meaning there are leaks in the structure. The museum is going to undergo general repairs, but in the meantime, there have been some on-the-fly cosmetic measures, which in their execution are literally one or two steps away from using electric tape and hoping for the best.
To give you an idea of how the problem is being handled, staff have dealt with one obstinately dripping leak in the ceiling by placing a bucket on the floor of the gallery, where it can collect water, which can periodically be emptied by the guards making the rounds.
Apparently, though, the bucket itself has started drawing a crowd, and inviting people to take photos of it. When a member of the museum staff went to retrieve the bucket, he was puzzled by the group hovering around the water-collector-turned-eyecatcher. One of the people who was staring at the bucket turned to the guard and remarked that it was an interesting piece of installation art. Perhaps they thought the bucket capturing water was meant to symbolize the duty of the museum to preserve masterworks, which would be otherwise pass as transiently as water onto the floor, without a receptacle to retain them.
Who the hell knows what the people gathered around the bucket who mistook it for an exhibition were thinking? All I know is that when what your brand of art can be conflated with a maintenance issue on the grounds of an art gallery, you’re in trouble.
In college I remember reading about some douchebag (or pair of douches) whose great artistic feat was to throw some kind of tarpaulin over the Reichstag building and call it “Wrapped Reichstag.” The draping of the material was meant to cast a cloak of impermanence over the Reichstag, in order to highlight the mercurial whim of history, underlining how the building could be burned, bombed, and undergo various physical changes just as Germany absorbed the shock of so many terrifying historical epochs, or something along those lines.
If the Reichstag was experiencing a pest problem at the time (and Berlin is an old city built on what is essentially swampland), then maybe two birds could have been killed with one stone were the draped cloth made of something impermeable enough to allow fumigation to go on inside.
I guess those are my two main takeaways from the postmodern movement. Buckets collect water, and tents trap gas. So, the next time you call a repairman and he fixes your refrigerator or air-conditioner, make sure to pay him what he’s worth: something on the order of seventy-two million dollars and change (it’s what Mark Rothko’s “White Center” sold for).

That’s a paraphrase, or it might be an accurate quote extracted from a review of Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers that I saw floating around on the internet recently. It’s hard to say, since I can’t locate the review anymore. Still the words of the critic have been ringing in my mind for some time. He confuses the public with the private. This statement was thrown out as a bit of qualifying criticism of Oliver Stone’s ultraviolent satire on America’s obsession with celebrity and … ultraviolence.
It’s hard to know exactly what this critic meant with their words, though I think he or she (probably he) meant to say that Oliver Stone shared too much of his own sexuality while making Natural Born Killers. There are all these strange sexual grace notes in the film (for lack of a better term) that bubble up to the surface and don’t seem to have much to do with the plot. Just off the top of my head I remember some strange nipple-twisting between Tom Sizemore and Juliet Lewis, as well as some erotic asphyxiation between the Sizemore character and a prostitute at a seedy motel.
Are these Mr. Stone’s personal paraphilias? Should they not be up on the big screen? Does it matter? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, though they’ve been running through my mind, so I might as well share them with the one or two people who may stumble upon this blog entry in the next decade or so.
Anyway, the only answer that I can half-produce to the questions above is a bit convoluted, but here goes: Yes, Oliver Stone (and Spike Lee and David Lynch) are rare directors who throw private elements of their ids on the screen, and I find it fascinating (if not always enjoyable) to see what’s going on deep inside someone else’s head, if only because one just does not see it very often. Even directors with the reputation of auteur usually present their hobbyhorses or personal obsessions in such a way as to conceal as much as to reveal. Very few people in any artform are willing (or even eager) to show the worst parts of themselves. An even smaller group can’t seem to help themselves. Their darkest parts pound their way to the surface like a telltale heart, all obstacles and consequences and torpedoes be damned.
Imagine, though, if we literally had no control over what we wrote, that books were just sometimes literal aggregations of private thoughts we fear others might know, or whose discovery we suppressed, even from ourselves?
It would probably produce a much more interesting literary landscape than I see when I usually pick a book at random off a bookshelf at the library or the bookstore and start reading. Humans are, for evolutionary reasons, herd animals, who even when outcasted, are hardwired not to piss off the wrong people. Maybe even a hermit cares what others think, or may think, when he puts quill to parchment.
The director David Cronenberg once said words to the effect that we’re all obligated in our real lives to be good citizens, but conversely in our creative lives the inverse is true. Sadly, I think a lot of people can’t shake the Good Citizenship Chip even when alone, even when laboring under a penname. But who knows?

“Palimpsest” is a five-dollar word for the effect that occurs when you write over something, and yet traces remain of the previous inscription, even if you attempt to erase what came before. A literal version would be that you got to your math class in high-school and got seated for a history course, which just happened to take place in a room where last period an English teacher had control of the blackboard. Your instructor, wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and tie, angrily wiped the eraser across the board, trying to efface all traces left by his predecessor, who perhaps he thought should have done him the courtesy of doing this before he came in to teach.
Short Shirtsleeves did a fairly good job, but when he started writing about George Washington’s crossing of Valley Forge, if you squinted you could faintly detect some writing about the significance of those Nasty Ewell kids in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
That’s your palimpsest.
Psychiatry is littered with invocations of the palimpsest as a useful concept to explain the residues of certain traumas. Sigmund Freud wrote a famous piece about this, which is called something like the Wunderblock.
I’m thinking about the idea now, only because it also seems to have some relevance to literature, and an age-old struggle in the arts more broadly. Artistic movements are usually split between those whose intent is to establish a break with the past, and those trying to establish a link with a past that may be receding, gone, or may have never truly existed.
Read enough about classicism (in either architecture or in poetry) and what you’ll repeatedly encounter is people who felt that they were hidebound, constrained, almost imprisoned by previous forms, or an antiquity whose significance and superiority had been beaten into their heads in high-school (or, among the very well-educated, at an even younger age).
Art Noveau/Jugendstil was a conscious effort to break away from the grab bag pastiches and ideas modern Europeans borrowed from the Romans and the Greeks. The inheritance was great, but also burdensome. Considering that the Prussian State was basically an Army with a nation attached to it, and that it plunged the continent into a conflict that bled the peoples of Europe white, it’s little wonder after the Great War that artists (already usually left-leaning) would start to distrust or even be disgusted with all of that imposing and unctuous statuary bossing them around from behind inscrutable concrete eyes on the Siegesallee (Victory Lane), in Berlin. Why not go back to the taproot, was the thinking, why not listen to what flowers or the curvature of tree branches can tell us about composition, as opposed to these secondhand relics of empires whose path along this Appian Way ultimately led to an aesthetic dead end and a whole lot of literal death?
The problem with this thinking, though, as well-intentioned as it is, is that a lot of these marble and stone palimpsests have survived for a reason. They not only resurface from time to time in cultural or artistic currents after long periods of dormancy (or even outright disparagement) but sometimes crop up in the later works of people who previously disavowed the stuff, or found themselves exhausted with this old inherited history shortly after being introduced to it.
Robert Graves once said words to the effect that the remarkable thing about Shakespeare was that he was great, in spite of all the people prattling on about how great he was. F. Scott Fitzgerald once talked about how works of literature went from being ignored, to having an illicit allure, to being taught to kids who were having to read these books under duress. It’s hard to really appreciate something, or even evaluate it fairly, when it comes not as a gift but as an assignment with a letter grade and a due date attached.
To pick up a tangent, though, the question should be asked: Say that one wants to make a total break with the past, create something de novo, ex nihilo, sui generis, from scratch (choose your poison and your idiom as well as your language, from the selections on offer above). Is that even possible? Certain artifacts, of both high culture and pop culture, seem so deeply imbedded in our minds and spirits that even if you wanted to create something genuinely primal or new, there would be traces of the past in there. Certain movies, like The Godfather or Star Wars, seem to be embedded in our collective DNA. That they are only retellings of older foundational myths only speaks to the Ur-power of the inescapable refrain in art. Our first cry (no matter how loud or where it is pitched in timbre) is a refrain, or an echo of something that came before. It doesn’t matter whether or not a bookmaker talking about his “pound of flesh” has ever heard of Shakespeare, since Shakespeare is in the air, like pollen. We’re all breathing the past every moment, whether or not we want to accept it or reject it.
In any event, the trend in the arts (from resistance to the past, to acquiescence and then to finally praise) seems be one that is as much a part of nature as it is of the aesthetic realm (and naturally you don’t need me to tell you the borders between nature and art are not only porous, but may not exist). One is young and rebellious, then settles down, and then dies. A twenty-something year-old is more likely to want to “shake up the world” with his or her writing than someone who is in their fifties or sixties, who, after having gone through this phase, realizes that we don’t shake shit. The world shakes us and that’s all there is to it. How you cope with it with your creations is your business, but the force against which you rail or write or sculpt is implacable and will eventually beat you. You will not only die someday, but you also just have to endure and accept the fact that the dead also claim some of your life, living through you and obscuring some of your own perceptions and creative drives. This is not to say that their sole purpose is to drag you down or piggyback on your lifeforce. They’re there to help, as well. The old Nietzschean saw about “gazing into the abyss” and it gazing back into you is true, but it might also be worth remembering that when you gaze out at the world, your grandfather (and Plato and Shakespeare) are also with you, checking the sideview mirrors and scanning the frozen food cases at the local grocery store as you pass the hours of your day.
You can rail against this process of course, be “angry at the Sun” as the longform poet laureate of Big Sur, Robinson Jeffers, once put it. And Philip Dick quite nobly used to rail against death, saying that there was something intrinsically wrong about it, and that he would rebel against the evil of death claiming his friends until his own dying day. But one can find such lamentations in antiquity as well. Even our baggage carries its own baggage, and faded palimpsest overlays layer upon layer, strata upon strata, of other formulations written to questions without answers.
In this way creativity is like physical exercise. It can stave off the inevitable, and mitigate the various poisons assaulting us, but it cannot alter the fundamental reality that not even art can really save us. It can provide distraction from damnation, though, which is something.

Everybody in any department in a college likes to claim their department is one of the best in the country. That’s natural. No one is going to demand X amount of tuition dollars, and your time, and when questioned on the worth of the deal they’re offering, tell you “We suck,” in so many words.
Sometimes it’s true, though. I have a Masters in Germanistik (German Language, History, Culture, Arts., etc.) that I got from the University of Cincinnati. I had never planned to get a college degree of any kind (even an associates). I was prepared to work unskilled, crap jobs for the remainder of my life while laboring on my fiction at night, trying to make it as a writer after work.
The war happened though, and since I wrecked my shoulder in Iraq, and there was money available to get my BA (and even more money if one was diligent enough to look), I got much further with my education than I had initially expected.
And the UC German program is one of the best in the country. Almost any time I
read some scholarly article on anything related to my field, I will invariably find a reference to some book or article written by a professor from whom I personally took courses. A couple weeks ago, for instance, I was looking for a book on German colonialism pre-World War I, and discovered the best text in question was written by a woman whose name sounded familiar to me. I spoke it sotto vocce a couple of times, and asked myself, From where do I know her? Then it hit me. She had been my teacher at the undergrad level.
One of the best books I’ve ever read about inter-war Germany is Lustmord by Maria Tatar. Her book doesn’t just cite one of my professors with whom I had several classes, but cites her work as an undergrad, which is something I don’t think I’ve encountered very many times in academia. Professors will use students as research assistants and as gophers for scut work (no one wants to sit all day on their knees in some basement, reading manifest lists for where and when Nazis shipped “undesirables” in steerage cars from Germany to Poland) but this teacher of mine had to have quite a bit on the ball, I thought, to make it into the “Sources” portion of Tatar’s book while still just a student herself.
Lustmord could probably best be translated as “passion murder,” but something is lost in the translation from German to English. The book deals with the obsessional quality of a lot of art produced in the aftermath of World War I, especially as regards the depiction of slaughtered women, sometimes brutally eviscerated and dismembered women.
So much of cinema (from Hitchcock to DePalma on down the line) is centered around a woman being tortured, killed, or pursued, especially in the suspense and horror genres, but this is never allegorized much farther than saying it’s a variation on the “damsel in distress” trope, which goes back to fairy tales. The Lustmord is, in Tatar’s eyes, a much stickier wicket.
Put in the simplest terms (which still, alas, are not very simple), men coming back from the Great War found themselves maimed, psychologically crippled, and displaced by women in the work environment. This created a kind of free-floating anxiety that was compounded by the appearance of the “New Woman” who wore more masculine clothes and did things that women of the previous, Wilhelmine era would not have dreamed of doing (smoking in public, riding motorcycles).
The proliferation of crime in post-War Germany, even violent crime, is greatly overstated, but the fascination with crime (tabloid-style journals, Krimis, etc.) definitely spiked. Still there are those with us who would say that part of the reason crime didn’t spike was that fine arts and the popular press allowed people (and especially men) to exorcise their atavistic urges by creating this lurid stuff and consuming it. Maria Tatar quotes filmmaker John Waters in her book, with words to the effect of “Do the painting of the rape, not the rape.”
I love Waters, his style, his pencil-thin mustache and his strangely dapper sleaze. I’ve seen most of his films and laughed at Desperate Living’s insanity and outlandishness (I lost it when the fat black maid smothered the man with her ass cheeks and she and her employer had to flee to Mortville) and Homer’s Phobia is still one of the best Simpson’s episodes ever (it’s the one in which John Waters runs a campy-kitsch vintage store in the same shopping mall where Flanders has his Leftorium).
All of that being said, however, I think Waters is wrong, or at least greatly reductionist in his tautology. I myself could be wrong, of course, but it’s something I wish I knew more about and I don’t know where to start to attempt to satisfy my curiosity regarding the central question this Tatar-Waters connection sparked for me. But I’ll pose the question here: How much of art is catharsis, and if we’re talking about literally cathartic enough to keep one from otherwise committing a crime, how many artists actually fall into this category?
There are certainly boneheaded criminals who have written fiction about their escapades while they were engaged in them, or after the fact (see John Orr, the serial arsonist). But who was ever going to commit a rape but instead painted a rape and lost the urge? And how would you prove that, since what you’re essentially asking someone to do is prove a negative? I suppose if a man raped ten women, then started painting rapes, and ceased to rape, well then one could conclude that he did as Waters instructed, painted the rape instead of doing the rape.
But then again, if he’s painting in prison, the iron bars which are caging him might have much more to do with his newfound civility than something like painting.
For me personally, I have written about some horrible characters doing horrible things. I don’t think it was catharsis, so much as creation. One could argue that deep in the id, or in the lizard brain, or whatever subsumed well below the prefrontal cortex and the motor neurons, there’s a part of most men that wants what it wants regardless of how the other organism in question feels (I don’t think any of us could eat meat without this portion of the brain being active in us, or a more complex part of the brain going dormant, at least during mealtimes). That said, I don’t think I was ever personally in danger of committing some crime if I didn’t write about it instead.
I can’t speak for any other author, though.

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.”
That’s a quote from Soren Kierkegaard, one I think about from time to time, especially as it relates to artists. How serious should an artist be? How serious can they afford to be? Is irony always a smokescreen to conceal real emotion, or is it sometimes employed, as an aftereffect, to take the edge off real emotion? If one’s not careful, hard-won emotion evoked in the audience can quickly deteriorate to sentimentality, melodrama.
I was watching some Simpsons DVD commentary a little while back (yes, to quote Bukowski, some lives are meant to be wasted.) On the commentary track a writer said that the staff always made it a point to follow every strong emotional moment in the show with something that undercut it. Watch enough of The Simpsons, especially those seasons in the halcyon days between the third and eighth year, and you’ll see this technique constantly employed. It’s so obvious on second and third viewings that you wonder how you missed it the first time. But then, that’s how magic works.
Remember Lisa on Ice, when Bart and Lisa are pitted against each other in the hockey rink, on rival teams? Bart is a goalie while Lisa is discovering a heretofore-untapped kind of bloodlust coursing through her veins, turning her into a reckless enforcer with a wicked slapshot.
The episode comes to a climax with Lisa’s team facing Bart’s, and Homer egging on both, stoking their unhealthy competition until it becomes toxic.
Finally, with the score tied, Lisa is given a penalty shot against Bart.
Homer is baying for blood from the stands along with all the other fans, while Marge is doing her trademark disconcerted groan and clutching Maggie to her breasts.
Bart and Lisa, rather than breaking the tie, flash back to fond memories of their early childhood together, eating ice cream, playing pranks on Homer. Then they throw down their sticks and go to embrace each other in the center of the ring.
It’s a sweet moment. But then it’s followed by a massive brawl in the stands. As usual when Springfield devolves into a mob, Hans Moleman gets the worst of it while the ornery types like Snake and Willie thrive in the melee.
Does this final scene work?
Sure, though not quite as well as the one where Rod and Bart are playing miniature golf and Bart coaxes Rod into calling it a draw. That episode ends with Homer and Flanders in their wives’ Sunday dresses, mowing their lawns while the entire neighborhood looks on, laughing and pointing.
Still, there’s a principle at work here, first spotted by that writer on the commentary track, that I’ve been mulling over for some time.
It makes me think of David Lynch, and the film critic Roger Ebert’s relationship to the surrealist auteur’s work.
Don’t ask me how I hopped from The Simpsons to David Lynch. That’s just how my mind works, in wild improvisational leapfrogs, from one subject to an only tentatively related tangent.
I remember reading Ebert’s review of Wild at Heart, Lynch’s adaptation of the hardboiled road novel by noir writer Barry Gifford. Wild at Heart wasn’t a massive hit, but it did alright at the box office and with most critics. It also boasted a killer soundtrack featuring Chris Isaac’s haunting croon, and showed genuine chemistry between its leads, Nic Cage and Laura Dern.
The film won the Palm D’Or at Cannes, which pissed Ebert off to no end, as he thought Cyrano de Bergerac should have won. In the beginning of his review Ebert at least had the decency to admit that his problem with Lynch was his problem, some kind of inbuilt bias. He allowed that something in him resisted Lynch, that he saw the man’s talent, but sensed Lynch was hiding behind a façade, playing a shell game. Ebert claimed Lynch would make a good movie again, something that fulfilled the promise of the groundbreaking Eraserhead. But first Lynch had to stop playing games and say what was really on his mind.
Was Lynch playing a game, not really speaking the truth of his heart (as corny as that sounds), but rather defending that well-placed barb that kept him insulated?
Facing one’s emotions in their art is terrifying. It involves trying to see oneself as they really are, not as they wish they were, or wish the world to see them. James Jones used to say that there wasn’t much separating the serial flasher from the writer, that they were driven pretty much by the same impulse. Author Damon Knight once said that the sign of the amateur writer, just starting out, is to create a main character who is flawless, in complete control of themselves and their environment. There’s a tendency toward wish fulfillment, and fantasy that has nothing to do with genuine imagination.
But that’s neither here nor there, and, returning to the question about Lynch, I have to admit stalemate, say I understand where Ebert’s coming from but can’t quite concur. And there’s something Laura Dern said during an interview about Wild at Heart, something that makes me doubt Ebert’s take. “Most modern love stories are basically just ‘I turn you on, you turn me on, and fuck you.’ But there’s a sweetness to David and the relationship between Sailer and Lulu.”
That sweetness is found in a lot of Lynch’s other works, fused so tightly to the darkness that it tends to get overlooked.
To be fair, the fear of being perceived as melodramatic was not just a theoretical pitfall for Lynch. For a lot of his fans and his tougher detractors like Ebert, The Elephant Man is a maudlin and manipulative misfire. It’s not quite I Am Sam (John Hurt goes neither full nor half retard), but it is an unabashed tearjerker.
Maybe Lynch feared emotion for practical reasons, as a matter of a bad experience, for the same reason he didn’t like to talk about Dune. Or knew directing Return of the Jedi wasn’t for him when George Lucas—who hadn’t quite yet devolved into a total whore—showed him some concept art for a bunch of little spear-throwing furries called Ewoks.
The Coen Brothers have seemed to have undergone a similar transformation from smirking irony to something much more profound and vulnerable. I loved Raising Arizona as a kid, but again, as an adult and reading Ebert’s review, I see where he was coming from. It’s a funny movie, but it’s glib and somewhat condescending to its characters.
And watching Miller’s Crossing, I felt (but could not yet articulate) what bugged Ebert about the movie. You hear the characters speak, and rather than seeing them as people, you think of the writers and admire their skill with the dialogue. It’s too self-conscious, and obsessed with its own prowess to the point of being smarmy.
It's facile and mechanical, even beneath all the rousing and melancholy bagpipe dirges and a truly inspired performance by John Turturro as a wormy slimeball with a genius for self-preservation. But Bernie Bernbaum is still just a cipher, a trope, despite Turturro’s gameness and willingness to go way over the top. “The Schmatta Kid,” ends up less a tragicomic, loathsome weasel than an antisemitic caricature through which the Coens work out their deep-seated self-loathing.
It wasn’t until Fargo that the figurative ice cracked (ironic, that their warmest and most human film to date took place in such a cold locale.) No Country for Old Men proved that this leap into the unknown, barb-free world was not a one-off, that the Coens, like Lynch, had finally ceased fucking around.
I know what you’re going to say:
That they did The Big Lebowski between Fargo and No Country. But Lebowski, while lighter in tone, is still all heart, a smarmless (sic) soul-bearing by two unrepentant stoner savants. The glibness and facileness really belong now to the characters rather than the directors. And the eyes of the directors—while gimlet—are much more forgiving than mocking of the foibles. They sees the Vietnam-obsessed, petty Walter Sobchak and his nebbish jinx of a schlub sidekick Donny as oddly noble, worthy not just of sport but admiration. If only for their enduring friendship in the spite of their calamitous chemistry that sees them constantly pitted against each other.
And this time the humor is meant to reveal rather than conceal. You watch The Big Lebowski and its beauty is in the complexity of what appears to be offhand, in the infinite regress to something truly Zen. It’s shaggy dogs all the way down, man. From the overlong yarn itself to the convoluted kidnapping plot, to Jeff Bridges with his tattered bathrobe and blonde locks like the floppy ears of a golden retriever.
You can of course do this little exercise with as many artists as you want, trying to arrive at an answer to the question I posed about when to use irony and when to abstain.
But the truth is that there is no exact answer, and, as usual, my questions are rhetorical, because art isn’t quite a science. It involves craftsmanship and analysis, sure, but it also involves something that cannot be intellectualized by even the most cerebral and reflective of artists. Even Kubrick—supposedly the coldest and most clinical of master auteurs—told Tom Cruise the following when Cruise asked him what he wanted: “I want the magic.”

There’s a story Nicole Kidman tells about her experience working with legendary director Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut. They were between takes and she mentioned the criticism commonly lobbed at Kubrick, that he was a perfectionist. The subtext seemed to be that he was monomaniacal, obsessed to the point it hurt the work.
His response to her perfectly encapsulated his position on the critique. “Don’t you want it to be perfect, Nicole?”
It’s a good answer, and certainly one should strive to do their best at all times. And yet the question might not be quite as rhetorical as Kubrick probably thought. There are, in fact, times, where perfect is not what’s called for, some instances where rough edges improve rather than harm.
Examples of this are far more numerous in music than in film. Think of all the various subgenres that highlight the fuzziness of strangely-tuned guitars, deliberately sought-feedback, even noise for its own sake. Art rock, lo-fi, garage rock, and punk all have strands that repudiate the perfect as inauthentic, sterile, soul-draining.
When Nirvana recorded their second studio album, Nevermind, they made the jump from respected regional indie SubPop to industry juggernaut Geffen, and naturally their production got the requisite makeover. A new producer was brought in, and his work was double-checked by another producer, who changed and tweaked the mixing levels with one of those space age soundboards. The result was a massive, international hit so influential it divided modern rock along one of those B.C. / A.D. cleavages. And yet the band’s ultimate feeling about the album—especially Kurt’s—was that it was like an artifact encased in Lucite. It couldn’t really be touched, or enjoyed. Its perfection alienated the ear rather than reaching out to it.
They would correct this mistake (if indeed such a great album can be called a mistake) with In Utero. For that album they would bring in Steve Albini, whose style was so antithetical to that of his predecessor that he even eschewed the label “producer.” He saw himself as a recordist, and made it clear beforehand that Nirvana wasn’t even one of his favorite bands.
Albini proved much more hands-on, literally, his approach involving positioning mics over each instrument at a particular distance and angle to achieve that imperfect-perfection. And the difference shows.
Whether you like Nevermind or In Utero more (or if indeed, you like either) would probably reveal as much about your taste in songcraft as anything else. But the sound difference is there, and evidence of two different aesthetic philosophies.
But if it’s easier to understand the appeal of imperfection in music, does it still remain possible to see the principle at work in film?
Sure.
Take Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, the relatively low-budget movie about a drug-addicted cop having a crisis of conscience and a nervous breakdown after dealing with the rape of a nun. Plenty of scenes were shot guerilla-style, with Ferrara sneaking into clubs so closely on Harvey Keitel’s heels that he bumps plenty of unwitting extras, who look at the camera. Even the scenes that were shot with permits or in the interiors of friends’ apartments were many times underlit, but the graininess wasn’t distracting. It was (much like the deliberate lens flares employed by Kubrick) part of a larger aesthetic choice. Critic Roger Ebert noticed as much in his review of the film:
“This film lacks the polish of a more sophisticated director [than Ferrara], but would have suffered from it. The film and the character live close to the streets.”
The shaky camerawork, the blending of pros with nonprofessionals, even the dialogue sometimes not picked up clearly by mics makes it better than it otherwise would be.
The writer Charles Bukowski, near the end of his life, complained that every time he tried to pick up a new novel it would just fall from his hands. “The slick polish grates. The lies jump out.” There’s that same word Ebert used, “polish.”
Kubrick definitely didn’t lie, but he did polish, tune and tweak. His longtime collaborator—Jan Harlan, relation of both Kubrick’s wife Christiane and the Nazi filmmaker Veit—said that Kubrick was still editing Eyes when he died. Would he have improved it? And if so, would the improvements have made the film better, or (paradoxically) worse?
It isn’t as if perfection didn’t serve Kubrick well at times. The sublimity of 2001 works because the movie is in some way about the fearful yet ungraspable symmetry of our universe. It’s a movie that even a race of aliens far superior to us could probably admire. Hell, even the creator of the universe would probably find it fascinating, although he/she/it might dispute a few details, like a celebrity reading an unauthorized biography of themself.
The perfection approach works equally well for Barry Lyndon and Dr. Strangelove and Clockwork Orange. For these movies are in some ways god’s eye views of human follies: of our self-destructive urges (Strangelove); of our petty obsession with caste and decorum, status and ritual (Barry Lyndon); of the medical-scientific desire to solve the conundrum of human aggression, the destructive demiurge that can’t quite be separated from the creative (Clockwork Orange).
This approach doesn’t quite work for me when it comes to The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. I fully understand that both are influential masterpieces. But I can’t watch them again and again like those previously mentioned films.
Full Metal Jacket, for me, is far inferior to Platoon, despite Kubrick being a much better filmmaker than Oliver Stone. But that static quality to Full Metal Jacket— its frozen self-awareness, the white cloudless sky of what is obviously not Southeast Asia—sinks the film. Kubrick, like Terrence Mallick, ignores the prosaic miseries of men in war. He has them quote Nietzsche rather than complaining about how uncomfortable their dirty underwear feels after weeks without washing. Full Metal Jacket is the Nevermind of war movies. It’s packed away in a Lucite box, a museum piece you can stare at but not touch.
In Platoon you can smell Vietnam, the acrid insect repellent, the antimalarials dropped into fuggy canteen water, the mildew soaked into army surplus canvas. It is an imperfect movie in which, excepting the finale, there are no battles that can be understood as setpiece encounters. That’s another thing Ebert got right when talking about Platoon, that the battlespace is a confusing, unsatisfying three-hundred and sixty-degree arena. Yes, Oliver Stone tried to graft his own philosophic pretensions onto the film, but his personal experience of the war made it impossible for his didactic streak to prevail.
What about The Shining? Author Stephen King’s words are worth paraphrasing here. He said that the movie was like a beautiful Cadillac without an engine. It was gorgeous but didn’t really go anywhere. And contra the novel, in which the Overlook Hotel burned, in the film version everything around the hotel froze, including the mad writer Jack Torrance.
King ultimately accused Kubrick of having a materialist overintellectual mindset that would not let him countenance the idea of the supernatural. The only monster in Kubrick’s The Shining was a man going insane. It was the work of someone who thought too much and didn’t feel enough, was how King put it, I think.
King’s detractors fired back that he was a man who felt too much and didn’t think enough. But if that were true, none of the titanic minds of the movie world (like David Cronenberg or Kubrick himself) would have been drawn to his material as they so obviously were.
King said his main tact as a writer was to create sympathy for his characters and then put them in harm’s way. Bearing that in mind, you can see why he didn’t dig Kubrick’s picture. Shelly Duvall pants and emotes and looks pale but her fear alienates and even repels more than it draws the viewer in, in sympathy; the boy who plays Danny is only slightly less creepy than the two axe-murdered twins who urge him to come play with them. And Jack Nicholson is...well, Jack Nicholson. He glowers and arches those satanic eyebrows the same batshit gusto as Gomer Pyle and Droog Alex in their respective films glowering from that trademark Kubrickian angle.
Believe it or not, there’s actually a religious corollary to what we’ve been talking about here. I learned it from a housepainter who was a bit of a wiseacre. His fellow housepainter had noticed that he’d applied a little too much gloss to some shiplap siding on a house. The smartass turned from his ladder and said, “You know, Muslim rug weavers deliberately loom one flaw into every carpet, because they believe perfection is an insult to god. For only Allah is perfect.”
Maybe that’s the secret.
Perfection works when and where the Zola-esque/Flaubert-esque “god’s eye” omniscience is warranted. Vietnam needs a worm’s eye view, though, preferably a worm rooting around in the blood-soaked, shrapnel-spalled loam. The Shining needed someone to stand beside Danny and Wendy when Jack starts to wield his axe. But it feels like Kubrick—who probably would have denied a sadistic streak—is somehow allied with the axe-murderer. Nicholson’s a brilliant actor, especially when playing against type, in understated, quiet roles (like About Schmidt). But his intentionally over-the-top blowing-a-gasket-Tony Montana-style performance is essentially wasted here. We don’t care (or at least I didn’t) about him or his victims. He might as well be wearing a hockey mask and obscuring that movie star mug. And you could have swapped Danny and Wendy out with a couple big-bosomed coeds, who were dared to spend a night (rather than a whole season) at the Overlook.
It would have shortened the runtime and provided more t & a besides just the decomposing woman in Room 237.

There’s a great anecdote in Stephen King’s On Writing, which has always stayed with me. It’s been about fifteen years since I read the book, so my recollection will be a bit rusty. That said, a paraphrase should serve the purposes for my musings on this entry of my ill-trafficked blog tonight. Apologies in advance, though, to King and those fans of his more familiar with the book, if I mangle the story in the telling.
Somewhere in the first third of the book King talks about the writing of Carrie. The book is created under suboptimal conditions. King is working as an English teacher at a local high-school while his wife Tabitha is busting ass at a donut shop. They already have one or two kids (Joe and Naomi?) and they are living crowded in a small trailer. King doesn’t even have a functional desk, and so he types out the novel while bracing his typewriter on his lap. One day, King vows, when I’m more successful, I’m going to get a huge desk. He begins to fantasize about this thing, which he calls the T. Rex. I can’t remember exactly how he envisioned it then, but recalling it now I can see my own version of the desk in question. It’s made of solid lacquered walnut, with an ameboid shape, bowing out like an acoustic guitar at the center. It’s edged in rolled brass that gleams like gold, and takes up two-thirds of the room in which it sits.
Eventually King sells Carrie—after something like thirty-five rejections—and gets an advance of roughly sixty-five grand. The years pass and he goes from being a pulp scribe who stays afloat selling stories to men’s magazines to being America’s preeminent popular writer. He’s richer than Croesus, and while not especially ostentatious, he does get the big house, and more importantly, he finally gets the T. Rex.
Something happens, though, when he settles in behind that large wooden behemoth and starts to type. The words still come, but the thrill is somehow gone, or at least attenuated. Even worse, King, in his isolation, begins to drink heavily and even starts using cocaine. Finally, one day, realizing that this desk is some kind of succubus—malevolent despite its inanimate state—he throws it away.
Remembering writing Carrie with a typewriter balanced on his knees and doing no good writing while behind the T. Rex, he has an epiphany. “Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
It’s a profound statement, one that, while delivered as a fact, is more an encapsulation of King’s personal aesthetic weltanschauung than anything else. It wouldn’t do any good to argue about whether or not the statement is true in some objective sense. It is true for him, which is enough.
Rereading the money quote, it occurs to me that The Shining is a cautionary tale about how things can go wrong when one creates under ostensibly ideal conditions. Jack Torrance, after all, being a writer, should have celebrated having the Overlook Hotel all to himself and his family. There was plenty of natural beauty to draw on there as inspiration, and few distractions. And yet the perfection of the environment seemed to curdle into something hideous, demented. Torrance, like Howard Hughes or Michael Jackson, had become a prisoner of the pristine world he’d sought out, made mad by his ability to shape his environment to his will. His abuse of Wendy and Danny also seems to serve as metaphor for the selfish artist, viewing everyone around him as either impediment to his creation or just another tool.
His paralysis before the typewriter suddenly takes on new meaning in this context. To create is to take something from the platonic and to make it real, and thus imperfect, or at least different, than what one initially conceived. His constant rewriting of the sentence, “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” becomes a kind of protest against trying to engage Hemingway’s “white bull.” Why even risk it when you’re probably only going to get gored, or at least make at least one mistake with the pica spear? Victory’s all but assured when the entire fight takes place in the toreador’s imagination alone.
The Overlook was haunted, of course (at least in the novel version), and Jack is a recovering alcoholic. But the Kubrick film is more open-ended, more amenable to the T. Rex run amok interpretation. Kubrick—more intellectual and a perfectionist—seemed more fascinated by how the search for perfection and creation under ideal conditions could drive one insane. In other words, how making life subordinate to art—to the point of neglecting life—might drive one crazy, and hurt their loved ones.
I wonder, too, if the filmmaker would have agreed with King’s assertion about life not being a support system for art? Something in me tells me he would have objected to it, that perfection through pain was kind of the point. It’s not as easy as saying that one man is an ends justify the means artist, while the other isn’t, though perhaps that’s part of it, too.
There is not the sense in Kubrick’s work that there’s a therapeutic dimension, a way to soothe workaday wounds and cope with life’s travails, as in King’s books. Kubrick’s films feel atemporal even when set in the future, removed from daily concern and steeped in the philosophical and theoretical. Full Metal Jacket, while brilliant, is somehow bloodless, as clinical as dissecting a chloroformed frog. It forgoes the primally mad edge of Platoon or Apocalypse Now, for a cold rationalism that suggests a different, almost scientific madness. Small wonder also, that 2001 and Clockwork Orange never really seem to date; or that Barry Lyndon holds up as perhaps the best period piece ever committed to celluloid aside from Once Upon a Time in America.
It's even less surprising that the film version of The Shining rankled so much against Stephen King’s sensibilities. The conflict between him and Kubrick was not just aesthetic, but deeply philosophical and even spiritual. King believed in an afterlife, and in hell, while Kubrick was more of a materialist-existentialist, who thought any light brought to darkness must be mustered by humanity itself, alone.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Kubrick lived long enough to read On Writing and to offer his opinion on King’s theory of art vs. life. Let’s further suppose that he objected to King’s theory. “Life,” Kubrick might assert, “while painful and full of defeats and ultimately ending in death, requires us to make sacrifices. Those builders who labored to create the monuments which stood the test of time were not doing so to make their lives more livable. Indeed, many slaves who constructed the wonders of the world no doubt suffered injury or even died while laboring. Life is something to be transcended by pouring one’s energy wholeheartedly into the labor of creation, of art, even at the expense of life. Life is temporary. Art, if done right, is much closer to eternal. Why not sacrifice one in the service of the other?”
Again, it’s not a matter of who might be right, but a mere contrasting of philosophies for the sake of a post-midnight Gedankenexperiment on a blog. What, though, might account for the difference in philosophies between King and Kubrick?
There’s the religious aspect, of course. King was raised in New England, with its strong puritanical streak (that shifted from the metaphysical to the political and secular in the 20th century.) Kubrick, on the other hand, was raised in an at least culturally Jewish household, and was still a young man when the details of the Holocaust finally became public knowledge. It might not have taken such an incident, though, to permanently rock his faith in God (assuming he ever had it.) There’s an interview with his sister in the documentary A Life in Pictures, in which she says that FDR was so beloved that his passing spread nihilism among many in NYC.
It could simply be that King’s life was much harder than Kubrick’s. Stanley Kubrick wasn’t quite born into baronial splendor, but he hailed from an upper-middleclass household. His father was a professional and in one of the Kubrick bios I recall his friend saying everyone was awed that Kubrick’s family actually had a house! In Brooklyn! And that Kubrick spent most of his time either playing with his cameras, developing film in his inhouse darkroom, or playing chess in the park.
King meanwhile grew up thoroughly working-class, in a single-parent household, with him and his mother having been abandoned by his father. Because his mom was forced to work (still a little unusual then) he was bounced from aunt to aunt, pawned off, left to fend for himself. Even after he’d made something of a name for himself in the slicks, King was still working a laundry mangle or steam press, or otherwise busting ass at menial jobs. He tells one particularly gross story about cleaning linen tablecloths after a banquet, and getting his hands greasy with drawn butter spilled from the lobster plates.
There’s no doubt that one creates differently when exhausted, when dispirited and at the end of the day, than when they are able to give all their energy to their work. Raymond Carver not just wrote short sentences—his goal being under ten words each. He wrote short stories because his day job at the sawmill didn’t leave him enough time to write novels.
I’m not even sure that Kubrick ever had a conventional job, that as a teenager he did anything besides take photos for Look Magazine. It hardly matters, though. The human condition is universal (unless you accept the cryonics argument or Ben Bova’s theory of telomeric transcendence.) We live, we age, we watch the people we love die, and then we prepare for our own deaths. And that’s if we’re lucky.
No amount of money—no castle, no lobster dinners, no divertissement with dope or women—can ultimately distract a sentient being from this truth. Which makes me think my theory’s specious. One’s own experiences might not inform their aesthetic philosophy, but rather be hardwired in their DNA like so many other things. Whether we respond to the encyclopedic, dense, postmodern work of someone like David Foster Wallace or prefer the staccato rhythms of Mickey Spillane might be inborn, like eye color.
But still the question won’t quite leave me alone: Is art a support system for life or is life a support system for art? If your life is painful enough, you may throw yourself into your work so totally that you neglect everything else: your family, your other obligations, even your hygiene. But even in giving art primacy over life, you are making your life more livable, by providing this distraction, by the attempt at transcendence. Ignoring your life in the pursuit of your art helps distract you from the pain and problems of your life. Thus making life a support system for art ironically means making art a support system for life.
And then there are those for whom it is not just some posture, a bumper sticker for the car or a pose by some manque: art is, in fact, life. Look at David Lynch, not just giving all of his money and time to the creation of Eraserhead, but literally living on the set for some time, sleeping in a warehouse in Philadelphia.
Eraserhead ain’t quite the pyramid of Giza, but it was not an easy film to make. But Lynch has been married four times and cites the selfishness required to create his brand of art as a factor in all of his divorces. King and his missus, meanwhile, have been together more than fifty years.
There’s a lesson in there.
Or maybe not, as Kubrick and his wife, Christiane, remained together until his death, and she continues to remain loyal to his memory.

Reflections on the Perils of Reclusiveness
When I was a kid and living in the city, there was a little moviehouse in the neighborhood that held a special place in my heart. It’s still there, and still retains some of its former magic, but most of that for me at this point is tied up with memories, the magic of nostalgia. It looks pretty much probably as you might imagine. Art deco tiling on the façade, with a flatiron-shaped marque protruding out into the street. The signage is ringed with bulbs that glow softly in the evening and take on a more majestic cast very late at night, after the movie’s over.
I saw some really cool movies there as a kid, and I also saw some stinkers. Sometimes an objectively good movie didn’t leave much of an impression, while an objectively crappy one did. If you get stoned with friends before going to see a movie—especially if it’s your first time getting really high—it’s likely to be a good experience, regardless of the quality of the movie. Also, since I was only eleven or twelve when I started going there, my thumb’s up rating was as much contingent on whether or not there were boobs in the picture. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” for instance, while objectively pretty good, became great when Dracula’s weird wives showed up and displayed their big breasteses (h/t David Allen Grier.)
One movie I saw there—which was great and featured big breasteses (or at least big booties)—was “Crumb.” For those who don’t remember it, this was a documentary about the legendary underground comix artist Robert Crumb. It dealt with the strange trajectory of his life and work, his initial embrace by a wide audience for his contributions to pop culture, and his eventual repudiation of it all. There’s a darkness and honesty to the man’s cartoons, which cut through the cuteness and kitsch common to popular art, and find something much darker beneath. His views of sex—and women—as well as race, disquiet and repel a lot of people, but are channeled honestly and unfiltered from the id with candor and passion. That he demonstrates technical mastery in his craft—his insanely detailed crosshatchings—makes him impossible to dismiss, even by those who hate him. His critique of America is more poignant than didactic, as is his gimlet-eyed evisceration of cultural massification. “Once upon a time,” his work seems to say, “there was real music, and there were real clothes, real food, real cities with real people. Now all that’s gone.” And yet the resonance of that former enchanted world lives on his work.
What I most remember about the documentary is the peek into his personal life, specifically his homelife and childhood in midcentury Philadelphia. His father—like a lot of World War II vets—liked to drink and liked to beat his children, or at least the boys, whom he thought were soft. The mother apparently had her own private demons, probably availing herself of “diet pills” (re: meth) and cooking sherry while publicly playing the role of dutiful hausfrau. Robert and his brothers Charles and Maxon spent all their time up in their treehouse or their bedroom, retreating into the world of comic books. They were also obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” and the movie version from the 50s. Eventually they started drawing their own comics.
Art became an outlet for Crumb’s creativity and it eventually grew to become not just a means of expression, but an obsession, and finally a means to salvation. For Charles, however, it seemed to curdle from an obsession into a means for him to retreat further and further into himself. Eventually, his artwork ceased to reflect not only the world around him, but to eschew even the influence of other artists. He finally retreated to his bedroom and began to succumb to hypergraphia, compulsively scribbling illegible micro-scripts so tiny one would need a magnifying glass to even read them. I suspect, actually, that the scribblings ceased eventually to even be words, and were instead just patterned scratches, more like the choppy waves one sees on a polygraph.
Sometime around the film’s midpoint, Robert returns to his childhood home and finds his brother, now middle-aged, still at home, still living with his mother. His body and mind have atrophied, and his hygiene has lapsed. He has even lost his teeth and doesn’t bother to wear his dentures for the filmed interview. Still, there is something not just charming about him, but a preserved bit of innocence. Beneath the corpulence and lax and atrophied muscle are bits of that youthful handsome face even. And as with many people at the end of their tether, his sense of humor is not just strangely intact, but in some ways enhanced by the mordancy of his predicament.
It's a sad scene, one that’s stayed with me because I think I was almost Charles Crumb. I suppose there’s always time for me to still get there, to retreat within myself to the point where my body and mind go. That said, I came closest to losing it all in my early twenties, so close in fact that I still get scared thinking back on those days.
I was fairly normal maybe until the age of fifteen or so, at which point I felt myself retreating deeper and deeper inside my shell. I spent more and more time reading and writing, and less time engaging with the world. Like a lot of young men, I masturbated constantly, but my fantasy world began to have less and less to do with actual girls.
I don’t think, by the age of fifteen or so, that I was capable of having a conversation with a female. The internet porn didn’t help, neither did constantly smoking weed, or my parents’ divorce, which saw me moving from city to city.
At last (in those aforementioned early twenties)—still smoking weed, spending too much time looking at porn and still writing—I knew something had to give. I’d lost the few jobs I’d ever had, none of them impressive (pizza deliveryman, factory worker, laundry press operator.) I was still living at home with my mother, our relationship growing not just strained, but weird, as we tended not to spend much time with anyone but each other. I was overweight, out of shape, and smoked so many cigarettes that I felt winded even at rest.
I decided something had to be done. I remembered a strip mall I used to drive past all the time while delivering pizzas around the burbs. In the plaza was a U.S. Army recruiter station, between a framing shop and a Kinko’s, if I remember correctly. I went in there and signed up, “took the bounty,” as the Prussian general urged Redmond Barry in Thackeray’s legendary picaresque. The fact that I was a schlubby weirdo who got winded simply by talking didn’t discourage the recruiter. He had his quota to make, and I was a (sort of) live body. Small wonder that recruiters have the highest suicide rate of anyone in the Army.
After signing on the dotted line, he informed me that I was now in the DEPS, or the Delayed Entry Program. I had a few months to get myself in decent enough shape to go to basic training. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t end up being beaten to death with soap in socks by my fellow recruits who would no doubt sense I was a mama’s boy not up to snuff...
Fast forward almost twenty years and here I sit, in front of this computer, at 1:22 am, staring at the screen and wondering if I made the right choice. Neither my body nor my mind are in what I would describe as great shape now, as the War did a number on me. But I still think I made the right choice, or at least a choice that seemed like the right one at the time.
I never believed in the War (I have to fight in Iraq in order to keep my constitutional rights in America?) but I still believed I had to endure it. For some reason I still can’t explain it, even to myself, let alone you.
I had to get the hell away from home.
It’s not that my life with my mom was uncomfortable, mind you. If anything it was maybe a little too comfortable. I was growing used to hiding from reality, losing myself in a Plato’s Cave of false pleasures. A steady diet of marijuana, weird femdom porn, and H.P. Lovecraft hardbacks followed by daily games of Scrabble with one’s mother does not a healthy mind make. Throw in two packs of Marlboro Red 100s per day and a deep dish pizza per meal and you can see how this movie ends. Probably with a heart attack in my mid-fifties, a bathrobe tie snagged around my neck, and a Barbie Doll in my rectum.
“You broke my heart when you joined the army,” my mom told me, recently. “It killed me.”
She likes to tell me that a lot, and I understand where she’s coming from. Her brother joined the Marines as a young man, and was in constant danger while over there. The Vietcong put bounties on medical corpsman, offering incentives to any Cong who brought back some of their dog tags.
As a young woman, my mother watched the nightly newscasts and the documentary footage, searching for her brother’s face among the many corpses.
Our media was much more savvy and cynical in the early 2000s and was careful to hide the bodies—refusing eventually to even show the flag-draped coffins being loaded onto the c-17 and c-130 troop carriers. Still, she knew I was over there, and that I could get mangled or die in my quest to get my GI Bill money and (maybe) make a man of myself. Whatever the hell that even means.
I had to do it, and tell the old lady as much whenever the subject comes up.
“Mom, I had no choice. If I’d stayed with you, it would have gotten to the point where I started calling you ‘mother,’ and eventually made a suit out of your skin after you died.” Maybe I could even seat her skeleton in a rocker chair, dress myself in her sweater and a wig, and find a Janette Leigh to stab.
She laughs at this, because it’s crazy hyperbole, but I thinks she also gets where I’m coming from. She’s seen “Crumb” too, and remembers how sadly things ended for Charles.
It’s not my intent to pick on him and if it comes off that way, I apologize. He appeared to be a bright and sensitive man in a world not filled with bright and sensitive people, nor one built for them. “If you let them kill you,” Bukowski warned in one poem, “they will.”
In the case of Charles Crumb, they did.
Eventually, Charles took his own life, as the documentary “Crumb” informs us in the film’s closing title sequence.
That stayed with me, and maybe even spurred me to get my ass in gear. When faced with the choice of kill or be killed, I opted for the former option, picking up my rifle for very convoluted, not patriotic reasons.
Regardless, I think about Charles, and that movie, whenever I head back to midtown to catch a flick at that theater.
Rest in peace to Charles, and everyone else who took their life. I can’t say that I blame you. I can only say that I still have a little bit too much fight left in me to join you just yet. Things could always change, for the worse, though, which is why I also don’t judge you.