Steven Hart's Blog, page 9

Whale song

Maybe you got flogged through Moby-Dick in high school and the experience left you scarred. Maybe you’ve seen one of the many film versions, which range from okay (John Huston’s version, undermined by the bizarre miscasting of Gregory Peck as Ahab), to hilarious (the John Barrymore version, in which the Cap comes to terms with his obsession and goes on to lead a happy life), to simply mediocre (all the rest). So how about having a parade of actors and writers read you the whole thing, chapter by chapter, on whatever device you care to use? How about listening to a chapter with China Mieville? Or maybe try a chapter with Benedict Cumberbatch, if only to get an idea of what he’ll sound like as Smaug whe the second Hobbit installment rolls out next Christmas? Believe me, you’ll be glad you gave it a try. Start here.

Thanksgiving playlist

The magic of the marketplace

Having spent a good portion of my life in the newspaper industry (as it used to be called), I always get a good laugh whenever I hear somebody chant the conservative catechism about the superiority of private enterprise over government intervention. I’ve worked in plenty of shops where the only real difference between the management and a swarm of lemmings was that the lemmings have a better sense of direction.

Apropos of which, this news story has the chief executive of Hostess Brands — manufacturer of Twinkies and Wonder Bread — trying to blame labor troubles for his decision to shut down the company. History will remember him as the only man who couldn’t sell sugar and fat to Americans. Talk about the magic of the marketplace.

Hobbitunes

Howard Shore’s extraordinary music was a big part of why I fell hard for all three Lord of the Rings films, so I was delighted to hear that Shire was on board to score all three installments of The Hobbit, due to hit the cineplexes  in about a month. His music for the first film is streaming here. Shore is still the perfect composer for Middle-earth. 

Robert Olen Butler at Noircon

I couldn’t make it to Noircon, which makes me all the more determined to get to the 2014 convention. Here’s what I missed the most.

Icarus with a laptop

It’s not exactly a language peeve, but I do get a chuckle every time some freshly minted celebrity is described as enjoying a “meteoric career.” After all, a meteorite is a chunk of rock that falls to earth at an incredibly high speed, burning up as it descends, until it either explodes in midair or leaves a big crater in the ground. I think a meteoric career is the last thing anyone would want.

Disgraced New Yorker science writer Jonah Lehrer — now there’s a meteoric career for you. Elevated at an early age, destined for greatness, or at least lots of lucrative speaking engagements, book deals, and TED talks. First he was accused of recycling his own material. Then he was caught recycling other people’s material. Then he was caught making stuff up. Apparently he even fabricated a quote from Bob Dylan, whose detail-oriented fan base served as a pre-Google Google before the Internet was even a glimmer on the horizon. Cue Addison DeWitt’s line in All About Eve: “That was a stupid lie! Easily exposed!”

I’m not here to grind Jonah Lehrer into the dust, but I will be following this American Science series of posts about Lehrer’s career and what it tells us about Big Ideas journalism of the sort epitomized by Malcolm Gladwell — of whom Lehrer was once considered an intellectual heir.

Over to you

There, I voted. Your turn now.

Snobs is as snobs does

Oh boy, another article trying to make useful distinctions between “literary” and “genre” fiction. And it’s in The New Yorker, too, so the critic clearly expects his judgments to make a louder thud and leave a bigger crater wherever they land. For a book reviewer toiling on Digital Grub Street, the topic is a never-fail comment generator, a circular argument that will never be resolved. It is to the lit hack hustling page views what accusations of liberal media bias are to the wingnut blogger — a subject that can never go stale because it was never really fresh to begin with.

Genre, served straight up, has its limitations, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. Indeed, it’s these very limitations that attract us. When we open a mystery, we expect certain themes to be addressed and we enjoy intelligent variations on these themes. But one of the things we don’t expect is excellence in writing . . . [i]t seems to me that Chabon, Egan, and Ishiguro don’t so much work in genre as with genre. All the Pretty Horses is no more a western than 1984 is science fiction. Nor can we in good conscience call John Le Carré’s The Honorable Schoolboy or Richard Price’s Lush Life genre novels.

Of course Orwell’s novel is science fiction — it fits comfortably into the genre’s dystopian tradition, as do The Sheep Look Up and The Handmaid’s Tale. Orwell uses the techniques of SF as capably as Le Carre and Price deploy those of the spy novel and the crime story. What distinguishes these novels from others of their stripe is the skill and ambition of the author. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a fine example of alternate-history science fiction, a sub-genre thoroughly tilled by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Keith Roberts, and Harry Turtledove, among many others. Chabon, to his credit, understands this and feels no embarrassment in such company. As a real artist, he understands that the quality of a given work has nothing to do with its imagined place in the lit-crit show-dog pantheon.

I’d like to read an argument that Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is inferior to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, or that Roberts’ Pavane  is overshadowed by Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration, but only if the argument is made without resort to snobbery. I’m afraid that rules out Arthur Krystal. There are critics who act as prospectors, seeking out the new and the good, bringing word of their findings to the wider public. And then there are critics who see themselves as desk clerks patrolling the entrance of a particularly restricted country club. Arthur Krystal belongs to the latter group, and the irony is that even as he pats himself on the back for upholding the club’s rules, the fences out back are being torn down, to the ultimate benefit of those on both sides of the line.

‘Girl’ talk

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than a hardcore movie buff getting much out of The Girl, the new HBO drama about the disturbing mid-1960s relationship between filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and actress Tippi Hedren. “Disturbing” may be too mild a word: Hitchcock, coming off the phenomenal success of Psycho and his hit television show, plucked Hedren from semi-obscurity (she’d been a successful model) and apparently came to see her as a puppet to be used as he pleased. Her resistance to his increasingly abusive sexual fixation led him to cripple her budding career, which should have soared after her starring roles in The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Just how far she would have gone is debatable — among Hitchcock’s leading ladies, Hedren was no match for Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, or Ingrid Bergman — but there’s no question she deserved better than she got.

The script draws from Donald Spoto’s book Spellbound by Beauty and, judging from some of the details, Me and Hitch, Evan Hunter’s amusing account of what it was like to work with Hitchcock 0n the two Hedren films. (Hunter took rueful credit for the idea of making The Birds a screwball romantic comedy that abruptly morphed into a horror film.) Spoto first delved into the director’s creepy behavior in his earlier Hitchcock biography, The Dark Side of Genius, and the revelation crystalized much that had been bothersome about the treatment of women in his films — a nasty streak partly concealed by the sexual mores of the era, but made clear in the rape-as-therapy plotline of Marnie and the misogynistic humor in Frenzy. Hitchcock was an innovative virtuoso of film technique and his gallows wit remains bracing to this day, but there were some pretty dark alleys in the back of his mind, and Tippi Hedren had to make her way through the worst of them.

Film buffs already know most of the details, and The Girl dutifully ticks them off, but for anyone not immersed in cinema history the film will come off as little more than an extended PSA on the evils of sexual harassment in the workplace. During this period Hitchcock was at the peak of his career, completely at home in the endless technical details of making big-ticket movies, but The Girl gives no sense of him as a master of a hugely difficult craft. Toby Jones gives an utterly uncanny impersonation of Hitchcock’s inimitable voice and delivery, but he captures none of the maestro’s drollery and outward charm. With his bulging forehead and fixed stare, Jones looks like he just chewed his way out of John Hurt’s chest. By playing Hitchcock as deeply, obviously weird right from the start,  The Girl loses the shock of seeing a man who personified dry British wit turning into a coarse, perverted bully. And contrary to what the closing note would have us believe, Marnie is not “hailed as Hitchcock’s final masterpiece” by anyone other than the most hero-worshipping auteurist. If anything, it’s marked down as the film that showed the old man going off the rails. Whether you think he got back on track depends on your view of the last four films: Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, and Family Plot.     

As Tippi Hedren, Sienna Miller does solid work in an underwritten role — paradoxically, it takes real talent to play a believable mediocrity, and Miller gives Hedren plenty of emotional shading beneath the icy blondness. As Hitchcock’s reserved but not entirely submissive wife Alma, Imelda Staunton makes the most of her few minutes of screen time — it’s obvious she’s seen this grubby embarrassment on the horizon for a long time. But screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes and director Julian Jerrold leave them adrift. The casting couch was nothing new in Hollywood, and in the early Sixties unwanted sexual attention was usually considered the woman’s problem — if it was even seen as a problem to begin with. A typical episode of Mad Men gives a better evocation of the time and place. Instead, Jerrold gives us clever-clever visual quotes from Psycho and Vertigo, which serve as unfortunate reminders that as bad as he could be in private, Alfred Hitchcock was still ten times the filmmaker anyone involved with The Girl can hope to be.

Look what your brother did to the door

Here’s a Halloween thought for the day: John Larroquette, prior to becoming an Emmy-winning television actor, did the opening voice-over for the seminal 1974 horror movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a favor to the director, Tobe Hooper. He was given a joint as payment. Years later he was hired to do the narration for the revamped 2003 version and had himself a nice fat payday. I’m trying to think of a suitable variation on the idea of casting one’s bread upon the waters. Scatter thy headcheese upon the roadside? I’m open to suggestions.