In The Company Of Glenn

The Absurdist roots of the "Milkshake!"

When I reviewed Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood back in December, I noted that while it had all the trappings of a more conventional historical/social epic, it was in fact an "absurdist, blackly comic horror film."
I still stand by that, only I wonder if I mightn't have put a capital "a" on "absurdist."

Even then I had a specific antecedent in mind, and now that—potential spoiler alert—"I drink your milkshake!" is in seeming fact becoming a cinephile catchphrase of sorts, it might be an opportune time to get into it.

Where to go for your Mailer post-mortem...

The death of Norman Mailer made me...well, it made me go looking to see what other bloggers were saying about the death of Norman Mailer. I would have been better prepared to assess his efforts in my own specialized field had I been able to check out the Anthology/Film Society of New York retrospective of his movie work over the summer, but I was not able. Hell, I can't even find my copies of Tough Guys and/or Ragtime to get an apropos screen grab...Ah well.

In the meantime, would it be too terribly unfair to assume that some of those who are most pointedly looking down their noses at once-Stormin' Norman, before his corpse is by most lights sufficiently cold, are, at least in part, responding to the fact that they themselves are, and forever shall be, somewhat, shall we say, experientially challenged relative to Mr. Mailer himself? (Look at that bowtie on Kimball...my lord, he makes George Will look like Ice Cube...) By the same token, the sentimentality indulged on behalf of a very unsentimental writer by some of his admirers ("The fact that Mailer continued writing up until the very end says more about him as a creative being than anything that any critic could offer," gushed one, but come on—the fact is you'd be harder pressed to name one writer worth his or her salt who, unless too infirm to, didn't go down swinging) and at least one former acolyte, is pretty ghastly too...although I guess it speaks well of James Wolcott (as is my usual practice with this critic-turned-cluck and his monolithic corporate sponsor, I leave it to you to find the link) that he actually looked up from his peculiar, frenzied attempts to whine and wheedle his wife into the dance critic's seat at The New Yorker long enough to take notice of Mailer's passing...

If you yourself are perplexed by precisely why Mailer is mourned, Roy Edroso at alicublog will clue you in briskly, cogently, and with no sentimentality whatsoever. He also furnishes pertinent and off-the-beaten-path quotes to support his argument about why Mailer matters—to literature, before politics or even "culture." Check it out.

Jean-Pierre Melville IS Vladimir Nabokov IN Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless'!!!

We all know that genius director and New Wave godfather Jean-Pierre Melville makes a hugely memorable appearance in Jean-Luc Godard's neither particularly good nor influential (...psych!) 1959 debut feature Breathless...but do we all know that Melville based his mandarin novelist character Parvulesco on none other than Vladimir Nabokov? It's true!

Literary interlude with juicy gossip. Really.

Not too long ago, I heard a really juicy rumor concerning an on-set liason between a Very Big Movie Star, who had just recently ended her marriage to an Even Bigger (although not taller) Movie Star, and a Distinguished American Novelist who had dropped by to see how the film adaptation of one of his recent books was going.

Not for anything, but I bring this up by way of explaining why a particular passage in Philip Roth's latest (and so far very fine) novel, Exit Ghost, made me laugh a little harder than it was perhaps meant to. In said passage, an imagined dialogue between Roth alter-ego (or so it's said) Nathan Zuckerman and a much younger woman he's besotted with, the topic of Zuckerman's relative fame comes up, and the woman jokingly tells him, "You're no Tom Cruise." To which Zuckerman replies, "Who's Tom Cruise?"

Nice one, Phil!

A literary interlude.

Some musings from the title character of Stanley Elkin's A Bad Man, 1965:

The pusher, he thought, there's a salesman. But it was hopeless, he reflected bitterly, with a wishful pitch, like the acceptance speech of a dark horse, already half formed in his head.

A literary image.

Hugh put one foot on the parapet and regarded his cigarette that seemed bent, like humanity, on consuming itself as quickly as possible. —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, which opens with a different citation from Volcano, inspired me to go back to Lowry's book, which I haven't looked into since my teens. (For some reason I developed a Lowry obsession at a peculiarly young age—well before I was old enough to drink! I fondly recall reading Douglas Day's excellent biography of the author in hardcover...) I suppose I'm also interested in prepping for the forthcoming Criterion DVD of John Huston's film adaptation of the book, which I am obligated to admit I've never seen. But having just been knocked out by Albert Finney in Sidney Lumet's very strong new picture Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, I am, among other things, much looking forward to seeing Finney in the complex, tragic role of Lowry's alcoholic Consul.

The section of the book from which the above quote comes features the musings of the Consul's stepbrother Hugh, who's just left the newspaper for which he works. (He goes on quite a bit about journalists and journalism: "[E]ven when there are no wars think of the damage they do..." and so on. For a minute I thought I was reading a better-written version of Instapundit or something.)

One thing I'm not expecting to get from the film is the feel of the book's beautiful, sometimes knotty, prose. I got stick from a commenter just today for a sentence construction that was potentially confusing but not strictly, um, wrong by my sights—okay, okay, I imagine a copy editor would have flagged it—but took some comfort in the memory of this Lowry sentence: "Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius, that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had acquired an unalterable habit of age."

A thought for this week.

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Works continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the Work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.

—Roberto Belano, The Savage Detectives

Substitute "Filmgoer[s]" for "Reader[s]." Consider the various periods in which Bergman and Antonioni were in and out of "fashion." Discuss. If you'd like.

Woody Allen in prose

Woody Allen hasn't made an entirely satisfactory comedy in quite some time. (As for drama, I'm gonna hold my tongue, as I don't want to enter into a debate on Match Point just now.) As is our wont, we critics cite a number of reasons for this—Allen's kind of out of touch (Jason Biggs in analysis?); he casts his too-old self as a romantic lead too often, and when he tries to change that game a little, casting himself as a kind of father-figure in Snoop, it's almost creepier; his art-film tendencies tend to get the better of his comic instincts; and so on. That his comic films veer and vary widely makes the fact that his comic prose has remained pretty much on point for almost fifty years kind of, well, odd.

My very much esteemed colleague Janet Maslin takes note of this fact in her New York Times review of Mere Anarchy, the latest collection of Allen cameos. While the collection might not be as singularly inspired as Getting Even or Without Feathers, his first two such books (which have been brought together, along with Side Effects, in a handy single volume entitled The Insanity Defense), it's still remarkably solid.

In the prose, the consistency of the mode of humor—which involves, among other things, Allen treating the entire universe as if it's a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, as we'll see in a minute—is its strength, whereas that very same consistency tends to weaken the movies. This is an interesting formal concern that bears further addressing.

A word from Leo Tolstoy

An animated conversation was underway among the officers about the latest news, the death of General Sleptsov. Nobody saw in his death that most important moment in life—its conclusion and return to the source from which it had come; rather they saw only the mettle of a dashing officer who had hurled himself at mountaineers with his sabre, hacking at them in desparation.

Hitting the "Road" with Kate, Leonardo, and Sam

Upon reading last week's news that Kate Winslet and Leonardo diCaprio had signed on to star in an adaptation of Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road, to be directed by American Beauty helmer Sam Mendes (who's also Winslet's husband), I said to myself, "Huh? Wha?" It was kind of early in the morning.

But now that I've revisited Yates' book, I again say, "Huh? Wha?"