It’s our past. We can change it if we want.

I don’t care what the critics said this time, I liked Be Kind Rewind.

Gondry presents Passaic as a sweet fantasy of an integrated, urban, local community whose bond—movies—is a shared national culture. In a twist on common wisdom, the homogeneity of culture on a massive scale permits the happy coexistence of strangers from diverse backgrounds and age groups on the neighborhood level. And that in an age after neighborhood has ceased to imply any common background: Customers stay loyal to failed businesses, neighbors volunteer on kooky projects, obsolescence is venerated.

It doesn’t really matter if that tight-knit community exists or not (I mean, it matters, just not so much for this): Michel Gondry’s vision, this utopian dream of coexistence, is specifically and uniquely American.

Unrelated: The Book Angels
Homemade Youtube

Too soon? Giuliani and Cloverfield

The Beast is dead.
-Ed Koch on Rudy Giuliani

I know Cloverfield was released two whole weeks before Giuliani flopped in the Florida primaries. But in the offline world, two weeks is still sometimes a short enough time span to hang a trend on. ars brevis, vita longa. We don’t have much to tie these two together, but they’re great mile markers to show our distance from 9/11.

Giuliani is a national service. He was integral to the healing process; if he didn’t come along, therapeutic America would have had to invent him. Thanks to Giuliani, it’s OK to laugh at 9/11. It’s OK for our hemp-smoking friends to scoff at the Republicans’ unstoppable fear campaign. “Looks like someone is living in the past! Contemporize, man!” We’d have a tighter parallel, more narrative resonance, if Giuliani had waited till February 5 and crashed and burned in New York, like the Cloverfield task force. But any end of an era will do.

Half the subconscious fun of the burgeoning New York disaster flick genre is anticipating the moment that will be most 9/11-esque. Is it the collapsed skyscraper or the rolling dust cloud? The mass evacuation? The rescue workers? Are those towers twins? And the guiltiest pleasure, Is it too soon?

Cloverfield (known for months only by the shorthand of its release date, 1-18-08, dates being the new nomenclature of disaster) showed the seam in its fabric when plot-point character Lead Soldier tells our heroes the U.S. Gov’t is prepared to give up the island of Manhattan. The quote arrives pre-meta, like a programmatic decree from Hollywood: New York is Fair Game. ‘Ready?’ is no longer even the question for destroying New York on film. It’s open season, and the monsters have permission to do their worst.

Because New York is already gone. And no other American city ever needs to be destroyed again—we can watch movietime New York get destroyed over and over again, in eternal return. The imagery of 9/11—different, of course, from the event itself—came at us mediated, interminably looped, lodged in our brains not as memory but as movie memory. It’s familiar, it’s reassuring, it’s part of a genre. Disaster joins the list of big New York story types: Upper West Side liberals fall in love; City Kid finds American Dream through organized crime (immigrant) or dance competitions (native); Muppets (showbiz, banking) Take Manhattan.

That brings us to the Dust—the Dust on Tom Cruise’s face in War of the Worlds, the Dust on Cloverfield’s “SoHo” streets as the head of the Statue of Liberty rolls down it. That dust is less verisimilitude than homage, Spielberg or Matt Reeves quoting 9/11 like PTA quotes Scorsese. We’ve had big movies treat the Destruction in New York theme before—WotW, I Am Legend. But Cloverfield is not a big movie, on which to test the mass-market waters for 9/11 disastertainment feasibility. There was plenty of experiment with Cloverfield: would the jerky camera work? the ARG web sites? the secret title? the youtube promos? Underneath those unknown variables, the control, the safety, the sure thing—was 9/11.

None of this is the closure we had thought we’d find looking forward from the other side. We didn’t win like we swore we would, but that time is over, and so far post-post-9/11 feels better than what we had before.

As curator of the exhibition Little Boy, Takashi Murakami proposed that Japan’s sexually stunted, violent culture of cartoons and monsters, to quote Mark Stevens’s review, “represents the strange, even psychotic response of a population traumatized by World War II, and then made impotent and infantilized by occupation.” This may be related.

Grand Theft Auto IV
Life after People

Update: Huzzah!

I Am Legend

On my way to see it last night, Dave quoted me a statistic that the area around Wall Street has the highest male-female ratio among residents of any zip code in the country. (He later copped to possibly maybe making it up.) The factoid’s imagery—unattached men in their downtown luxury dormitories—set me off thinking about parallels with other migrant lone men and their entrepreneurial get in/get your money/get out mentality: off-sea rigs, California orchards, Dubai construction projects, Old Prospector, Alaskan crab fishing.

For the finance industry, duh, the rewards are greater for little to no risk (to yourself), but a decent proportion of the lingering downtown population must be Wall Street casualties. The rationale of ‘Sweet, I’ll be closer to work’ morphs to ‘I’ll push for five years, make bank, get out, catch up on that social life, start the family, ride the wave’ morphs to ‘How does Goldman still get a bonus?’ morphs to ‘Shit, I waited too long,’ and the bachelor ratio stacks up higher. Boys.

Which ruined my enjoyment of I Am Legend because now I couldn’t help but watch it as a metaphor for rapacious unregulated capitalism. Our zombies—and zombies are allegories for whatever you wish them to be, Virginia—are mostly men and really white, spend the day in office buildings and carouse through the streets all evening. They just don’t see the point in giving back to the community. Meanwhile our uncontaminated hero is a research scientist. Whether he works for the army or NYU, he is safely within the borders of the nonprofit sector. A nonprofit worker in New York City, up against these guys: that means that, however well-intentioned and duty-bound, he is insane, self-destructive, lacks judgment, and they will kill him in the end.

Fake Empires

One day, I imagine we’ll need a museum to house all the art imitating or inspired by Empire, Andy Warhol’s 1965 eight-hour stationary-shot film of the Empire State Building. And I imagine that’s a good thing. It’s probably also the easiest work around to imitate (and therefore hardest to do well).

I’m thinking particularly of two recent works. There’s Douglas Gordon’s Bootleg (Empire) from 1998, which begins as a filming of an Empire screening in Berlin but then apparently then takes an intermission at a local bar.

Earlier this year Reena Spaulings and Co. filmed Imperio, a static shot of the Empire-State-Buildingesque Torre Latinoamerica in Mexico City—which saves itself as an idea if viewed through Mexico City’s rise as an international contemporary art center to one day rival New York.

(Loosening our criteria, we could stretch out to find Empire’s presence in far-afield works like Cremaster 3 [epic-length, skyscraper envy, oedipal rage] and the “i am not here and this is not happening” window scene in Grant Gee’s Meeting People is Easy: A Film about Radiohead [stoner fascination with the cityscape].)

So, predictably enough, here’s my idiot proposal:

Model Empire
The R.J. Reynolds Tower in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is a prototype of the Empire State Building constructed in 1929 by ESB architects Shreve Lamb and Harmon as a one-third scale model to test the viability of their proposed tallest building in the world in New York. It was and is owned and operated by the tobacco company, and held the record of tallest building in North Carolina for close to 40 years.

Considering the strange logic that calls for, or at least accepts, a continued grappling with Warhol’s tenacious relevance, the Reynolds Building could withstand being filmed as a posthumous maquette for the artist’s finished masterpiece. We should totally do this as soon as I can scrape a camera and a car together for the road trip. We could grab some BBQ and maybe make a pit stop at Wrightsville Beach. I’m not sure yet which would be the more rigorous: should Model Empire be 1/3 the length of the original, run time appx. 2:40, to match the Carolina building’s 3:1 scale to the New York one? Or does it need to be three times as long (24 hours) so that at the end we’ve captured the same amount of building? But who would screen that?

The National: Fake Empire mp3

American Gangster and No Country for Old Men

Yes, that’s two (2) movies discussed in one post

As if nudged by some current event, these two films both investigate the consequences of whether or not you should keep that sack of money you found. If you do like Gangster’s “honest cop” Richie Roberts and turn it in, big rewards follow. The state might even make you lead prosecutor in their most important drug case, legal experience be damned.

In Gangster word of Richie’s upstanding career move gets around. The anecdote flies ahead of him like Winged Rumor, which is a fancy Vergilian term for Rep or Cred. Everyone he meets, cops to gangsters, asks him the same question about the money. Again and again we watch this, like Ridley Scott was filming his scenes from a first draft. But it’s a deliberate ploy, a building of character through wooden repetition. That repetition, like an Homeric epithet or a mob nickname, bludgeons us into accepting his status on the playing field of mythology. “Wily” Odysseus, “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, “Turned-in-the-Sack-of-Money” Richie Roberts. The clumsiness works here, just like it does in Star Wars, by alerting us that what we are watching is not drama. It is the battling of heroes.

Notice the incredulity of everyone’s “You turned in the money? You’re crazy, I don’t believe you” response. Roberts walks among us, but he is not One of Us. Hence all that awkward lawyer crap: Roberts is no mere cop. He is lawyer-cop. The letter he gets on passing the Bar is his talisman, the structural equivalent of the raised-by-peasants hero learning he was the secret bastard of aristocratic and divine miscegenation. Like the nobility, lawyers are refined, they have professional degrees and own suits. When Richie’s divorce attorney cautions him to fuck her “like a cop, not a lawyer,” what she’s describing, via the old Hollywood canard that blue-collar lovemaking is the more passionate, is the conflict between Olympian and Titan. Also, epic heroes sleep around.

I won’t drop a spoiler on No Country For Old Men, but I think it’s safe to mention Josh Brolin’s Llewellyn Moss took Option B with regards the briefcase. And for that he was pursued across the landscape by the relentless Furies.

Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff presence may lull us into watching this movie as a procedural, but it isn’t. It’s Texas gothic, and by that I mean it’s supernatural. There is none of the plot explication of a good cop movie, no discovery of how Anton Chigurh keeps fucking finding Llewellyn. The closest we ever get is an exchange with Woody Harrelson:
“How did you find me?”
“It was easy.”
That might be a paraphrase—the Coens are particular with their dialogue—but I know I’m not leaving information out. These characters can smell guilt. Chigurh’s transponder is tuned to Poe’s tell-tale heart. There’s nowhere to hide in Texas. I didn’t know we were big fans of hard truths about guilt and fate, but this film is tragedy straight out of the House of Atreus. And it got to me.

Here’s me with popcorn waiting for American Gangster to begin. See that Cherry Coke in the armrest? That’s a medium.

Dylan Dream Diary

I ask your indulgence and forgiveness in advance (“No one wants to hear/ what you dreamt about/ unless you dreamt about/ them”), but I haven’t had a dream about a movie before it came out in maybe twenty years. Maybe not since the last Raiders or Back To The Future, which I guess means I’m excited for it.

In this dream, the trailer for Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” is never the same twice; it keeps changing to suit its environment. I knew this because in the dream I saw it in two different theaters—ornate, opera house-style theaters—and each time I saw it the trailer mentioned the theater we were watching in and the time of the screening. Different trailers with different people playing different Dylans, but what tied them together was that each Dylan had animated flowing cartoon dreadlocks that slithered in the air like wild Medusa tentacles.

The show stopper was in the second trailer I saw, which re-created the moments before Dylan’s conception. Dylan père’s spermatozoon was played by a bullet-shaped capsule that swims through outer space with the black tentacles feeling the aether ahead of it. At times the tentacles would reach out of the screen, aggressively, latching onto the theater’s architectural features: balcony seats, sconces, frescoes. I had the clear sense that my dad was somewhere in the audience, closer to the screen, and I wondered if he would be swayed by this trailer’s interactive technical mastery, or if he would dismiss it as too experimental.

When not ducking to avoid the tentacles, I was sitting with some college friends and Marcus Carl Franklin, the youngest Dylan. They had one of those digital slide-show picture frames, but it was big and cardboard like the TVs in Science of Sleep, and instead of family photos it had mpegs of people wiping out on their skateboards, which made no sense because none of us had ever touched a skateboard.

Also (this is about the movie, not the dream), David Cross as Allen Ginsberg is possibly even more inspired a casting choice than six Dylans.

Film Forum
Ten Most Incomprehensible Dylan Interviews of All Time: Forget that this is from an MSM gossip/listings blog. These kinds of posts are why the internet was invented.
I’m Not There Soundtrack (Pitchfork Review)