“Well, if there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”
Luke Skywalker, Star Wars
Los Angeles is the movies, and the movies is LA. If you drive north of the city on the 101 for an hour, you get to suburbs filled with peripheral industry people. Somebody did a rewrite on Lethal Weapon II and put a downpayment on a house. Another person did the same with royalties from an insurance commercial. That’s every third house in Sherman Oaks or Woodland Hills.
Drive up the 101 another half hour and you start hitting farms and beach communities. This is where industry people go when they don’t want to be found. Hang a right and drive another half hour inland and you’ll get to the citrus groves and chaparral hills. That’s where I grew up. My house is 45 miles as the crow flies from the Hollywood sign. 45 miles and a different cultural universe.
It used to be almost impossible to watch cool movies. If you were lucky, your had access to an independent video rental store with some personality. We had a Blockbuster. Our selection of “Foreign” movies consisted of about one shelf of DVDs.
Anime, black and white classics, silent film, these were hard to find. Forget gay and lesbian movies. You could put in the work to see them. You could make a trip to a bigger city with a better selection. Universities sometimes had media libraries. You would watch movies on a 15″ screen with headphones in an uncomfortable study carrel warmed by CRT tubes. Local libraries having big, good movie collections is a recent phenomenon. If you could afford it, you could order from a mail order catalog, or from Amazon. Amazon’s deep catalog of old books and movies used to be a killer feature.
If you were lucky, really lucky, you knew someone with a killer home video collection. That used to be what it meant to be “into film”. It meant shelves and shelves of tapes in their basement or living room. Those people shaped so much of my taste. Indie dramas, foreign films and music documentaries from L——. Queer cinema classics and Merchant and Ivory films from M——. Studio action films from G——.
This assumes that the movie got a home video release. There were plenty of movies that never got a VHS release.
The arrival of Netflix DVD-by-mail changed everything overnight. It had a broad collection, accessible to anywhere the Postal Service reached. It improved some other parts of the video rental experience that sucked. No late fees, keep it as long as you want, drop it back in the mail when you’re ready to send it back. “I have to return some videotapes” is a punchline in American Psycho. We really did have to figure out when to return tapes all the time.
Netflix swept away Blockbuster. It delivered the killing blow to the independent rental stores*. It devalued physical media. Netflix originals ducked legacy union contracts by streaming instead of releasing in theaters or on home video. Now it is killing its DVD by mail service, as it has wanted to since the early 2010s.
I sometimes think about those people with big collections in the 90’s and early 2000’s. They paid a lot of money, and even the big collections only had a fraction of what is available on the big services now. In the last 10 years I have paid a lot for streaming. I have nothing in my house to show for that spending. We used to have more power to shape the culture that got left to the future through the objects we left behind. Movies can disappear, or be censored so easily now. The entire paradigm where I hand you money, you give me something I want, and we both go our separate ways seems to be ebbing away. In this new world, anything that provides you ongoing value, that brings you joy must be paid for, again and again, until you cannot afford to keep it.
*Except my beloved Movie Madness in Portland, Oregon, which has not died but did retire—it’s now operated by a non-profit.
The Last Jedi was a really beautiful and important movie to me, and there are others who have written longer and better than I can about why (most especially Film Crit Hulk, both about the movie and the reactionary culture clash that followed).
While the Star Wars movies were certainly a part of my childhood* but they never captured my imagination to the extent that other media would, like Harry Potter or Dune. Maybe to some, that would be enough to discount my opinion. But I did like them, and I’m grateful that I was able to be exposed to the original trilogy in the quiet years before the prequels were released, when the culture at large was not interested in them beyond extended universe books and video games.
*In fact, the copy of Star Wars that we had in the house was a single extremely long playing VHS with all three movies taped from a TV broadcast. Honestly, I think this is very legit, fandom wise.
There’s a funny paradox at the heart of the mega-franchise dominated culture we live in now: the health of franchises is determined by the attention they attract, which determines which get sequels. At the same time, the more attention a franchise has, the more any given movie in it is required to include characters and events to support the infrastructure of the universe, which leads to the movies becoming thematically incoherent, long and boring (see: every Marvel movie with a colon in its title).
The wild thing about The Last Jedi, the thing that makes it such an outlier, is that it managed to have artistic depth in a form and a creative structure that are difficult to work within. It did three very difficult things: it worked as a movie (it was fun to watch, the story made sense, there were good jokes), it had a thematic gestalt, and—the most difficult part—the thematic ideas of the movie complicate and enrich our understanding of the stories we have bonded with.
Put another way, it’s hard to make one of these movies that say anything, and it’s even harder to make one of these movies say something that makes sense, and it’s even harder to make one of these movies say something that both makes sense and is meaningful.
There are a whole host of good but flawed movies in which a clear director’s sensibility shines through: Sam Rami’s Spider-Man, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, as well as Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and James Mangold’s Logan. And there’s also many other movies that are workmanlike but are so much fun that we don’t care that they don’t say anything: James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Jon Favreau and Shane Black’s Iron Man. And then there are a whole bunch of hacks, turning out movies that are fun enough and are forgotten the second you walk out of the theater.
The most depressing part of the followup to The Last Jedi is that J.J. Abrams is the king of the hacks. And so this movie is going to end how all of his movies end, with slowly moving shots of characters we don’t quite understand experiencing what seem like profound emotions that aren’t quite proportional to the events that just happened, all set to shimmering strings in Michael Giacchino’s score. And none of it will have meant anything, and we’ll walk out of the theater and it will be like none of it ever happened.
Christmas breakfast in my grandparent’s home, 1974
When my grandmother died, my first thought was of a conversation we had when I was 10 years old. I was visiting her house by myself for four days, my independence as an older child and her failing health meeting each other briefly before continuing on different trajectories. I was saying something obsequious about my grandmothers house—her disdain for others terrified me and I never wanted to be anything other than her favorite grandchild, which of course I was—and she said one day this house can be yours. I did not realize until after her death that this is one of those things you say to children, and you never mean it. I did not realize that in the months after her death the long process of occupancy would be reversed and one day the house would go back to being as empty as when my grandparents bought the house and some days after that would be the last time I walked through the house and some days later I would not allowed to visit the house any more.
[For a second I smelled the exact stone and calcium smell of water wetting the grout in the shower when you first turn on the water. Instead of closing my eyes and drawing the memory out, I blew out my nose because I worried I was going crazy.]
DAVID HOCKNEY “BEVERLY HILLS HOUSEWIFE” ACRYLIC ON 2 CANVASS 72 X144″
Arnold Schoenberg watering his garden in Brentwood, California
I think I love that house more now than when I actually had access to it. The form and symbolism of the 1950’s ranch house means so much more to me—visions of blank faced David Hockney figures diving into teal swimming pools, Arnold Schoenberg watering his garden in impossibly white shorts encasing hairless legs, the mysticism of the cool Los Angeles evenings, the smell of jasmine in the air. The midcentury modern pieces in the house were oddities to me, and then I understood that they were valuable and only after that did I understand them for myself.
Of course I don’t want the house that existed as much as a fantasy house that I started to build in my head as soon as it stopped being mine. I want the house that has a small formal dining room with a charming pass-through built in from the kitchen, not the dining room filled with letters and documents that never got resolved. I want the bathroom with the original art deco inspired hardware, not the bathroom filled with the assistance devices that let my grandmother live independently as long as she could manage, and maybe a little bit longer. I wanted the hardwood floors that exposed the clean lines of the original design, not the carpets that made the floor manageable for my grandmother and her poor circulation.
I haven’t thought about the house in years, but when I wanted to take a look at a satellite photo, my fingers typed the address as my conscious mind denied that I could remember it.
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Last night, after writing and posting, I did not go to sleep. I stayed up and read more Dharma Bums and listened to John Adams’ The Dharma at Big Sur.
John Adams is musically, for me, in that whole vein of Hockney and old Los Angeles and West Coast and Kerouac and Modernism and Buddhism and highways and style and yearning. The Dharma at Big Sur is one of the first new-to-me pieces of classical music I’ve liked like this for a while. I first came across Adams’ music in the context of a class on 80’s minimalism, but he’s not really a minimalist. What I love the most is the interplay in his music between tuneful foregrounded music that is not super outside late romantic harmony without being stuffy, and these lush and complicated background orchestrations. It is like the interplay between conscious and subconscious thought.
After that, my music app recommended Becoming Ocean by John Luther Adams. This is like music that is only subconscious. Like the ocean itself, the music is wild and deep and disorienting. I am not that familiar with his work, and even though the harmonies are not that far out there, theres an absoluteness to this music that I haven’t been able to wrap my head around yet.
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Overnight, I dreamed that I was a freight truck driver headed west on 84 towards Portland. I was cold, but running the heater all night caused my truck to run out of gas. I woke up panicked that I wouldn’t be able to make it back to the highway.
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I had enough time in the morning to write morning pages. The feeling that I am on a right track to awaken my creative brain…sometime…hopefully in the near future… is as close as I get to happiness, so I must be happy. Plus, I was wearing a brand new outfit, which is enough to lift my mood because I am deeply vain.
I forgot to eat breakfast before getting on the road to North Portland and our weekly staff training session. On the drive over, I listen to the latest episode of This American Life. There was this story about men that paid to be on a mailing list where another man pretended to be young women and strung these guys along as a pen pal, asking constantly for more money. This story was reported like 20 years later, and many of these men are still stuck in whatever hellish state of loneliness they were in to get trapped in the first place, and I was getting close to having some of my empathy circuits blown out just imagining that existence. It made me question whether my melancholy was a twisted form of optimism, because there’s a whole other way of looking at the world where I don’t have it bad not because my existence is so good but because there are infinitely deep wells to drown in.
Our staff training was as grim as it usually is. There’s a little anecdote from The Count of Monte Cristo that I think of. The Count is throwing an outlandishly grand dinner party, and is describing the lampreys that he has brought alive from Italy to his house in France:
Oh, do not give me credit for this, madame; it was done by the Romans, who much esteemed them. Pliny relates that they sent slaves from Ostia to Rome, who carried on their heads fish which he calls the mulus, and which, from the description, must probably be the goldfish. It was also considered a luxury to have them alive, it being an amusing sight to see them die, for, when dying, they change color three or four times, and like the rainbow when it disappears, pass through all the prismatic shades, after which they were sent to the kitchen. Their agony formed part of their merit—if they were not seen alive, they were despised when dead.”
When I think of the way that I’ve cycled so many times between inspiration, to disappointment, to anger, to numbness, to frustration at my job, I think of those fishes changing color like the rainbow and I hope it’s all amusing for somebody because it’s pretty tiresome for me.
I distracted myself by reading more Bums. I read through the beginning of Kerouac’s mountain climbing trip with Snyder. I kept being surprised that the book is so much of a homosocial romance. Kerouac seems caught in that space between wanting to be Snyder, and wanting to possess him. The writing comes alive when he’s describing Snyder as the coolest hep cat in all of the west coast, but there’s this weird strain of taking small moments as though Kerouac sees in him things no one else does:
We parked the car and got all our gear out and arranged it in the warm sun. Japhy put things in my knapsack and told me I had to carry it or jump in the lake. He was being very serious and leaderly and it pleased me more than anything else.
Kerouac’s enthusiasm for almost everything else—the nobility of the working class, the plight of the Native American, the wisdom of those crazy Zen masters—has to be measured against the colossal counterweight of condescension and self-congratulation. But his boyish hero worship of Snyder reads totally clearly, and totally authentically as coming from the space between envy and attraction. There’s a no-homo sexual undercurrent that comes up from to time, like when Snyder invites Kerouac to jerk off while he wanders away from camp, or when Kerouac is totally distracted by Snyder wanting to hike in nothing but a jockstrap.
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Work.
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On my way home from work, I stopped by Trader Joe’s for some mulling wine, and Movie Madness to rent another movie. I walked through browsing, and decided for no compelling reason on Olivier Assayas’ L‘heure d’été (English title: Summer Hours).
Summer Hours is about a lot of things. it’s about French culture, art, generational shifts, legacy, death, globalization. It’s a movie that I thought was going to be really pessimistic about the world that we live in, but that turned out to be touchingly optimistic.
At first glance, it seems like it’s going to be a King Lear story. An elderly woman celebrates her birthday with her three adult children and their families. Everyone remembers the good times had in her house, and the memory of their great-uncle, the painter that lived and worked there, and whose furnishings and collected artwork still live in the house. One child is an economist that goes on French radio to protest the existence of economic science. Another lives in America and designs accessories to be mass produced. Another has moved his family to China where he works as an executive for a sportswear manufacturer. The woman gives her wishes as to the disposal of the estate to her oldest child, he who stayed in France, he who will not let these products of French culture disappear into the anonymous hands of the international art market.
And the movie will play out. The younger children who have left France and don’t care for French culture will try and sell everything and he who truly had his mother’s heart will try and save it and he is going to be heartbroken because his own children only care about videogames and how will culture survive?
But that’s not where the movie goes. It’s way too smart for that. Frederic does adopt his mother’s passion for the estate and the artwork and the idea of keeping everything intact more than his siblings, but that makes him blind to seeing his mother as a person, in a way making him more removed from her than his sister or brother. He is completely blindsided by the idea that his mother had a sexual relationship with her much older painter uncle, an unspoken truth to his siblings. We come to see that Adrienne, one of the siblings, is not so much disdainful of the paintings her mother loved, but resentful that the painter, her uncle, had stolen so much of her mother’s individual identity by entrusting his legacy to her (Adrienne, with her functional yet beautiful furnishings, also is the closest to the actual artistic expression that nucleates this family). Jeremie, the last sibling, is the least developed, but he is the only person to openly express that his great-uncle was an artist with some great works but more misses. The movie constantly twists around these kind of expectations and we truly feel both the sadness of the furnishings of this other life disappearing and yet also that maybe this is the best outcome.
But not very hopeful for the particularities of place in the face of a new international culture. Or of French culture. Or of culture at all. Until the very end.
in the last ten minutes of the film, there is a radical shift in perspective as we begin to follow the youngest generation in this family, teenagers, as they move into the estate for a last party, playing basketball on the boomy wooden floors of the artist’s studio and smoking weed leaning against plaster walls. The house comes back to life and we realize that as the adults have worried about whether there would be any legacy to leave to their children, it has already anchored itself in their hearts and memory on the strength of the pleasures of running through overgrown hedges, climbing over walls, jumping into ponds, picking cherries.
The scene of the movie is where the elderly housekeeper is asked to pick one thing from the house to take for herself. She chooses her favorite vase to put cut flowers in, unaware that an appraiser has told the family its a piece of rare 19th century glasswork. “I couldn’t choose something expensive” she says, “just something ordinary to remember her by.” The twin to her vase goes into a museum display case. Just like with Frederic and the woman herself, Assayas is saying that if you build up the art, the culture, the whatever to something other than what it is, you cut off your ability to appreciate it for what it is. If you build up a painter to be a stand in for culture, you cut yourself from truly engaging with his work. If you build up your mother into a flawless person, you might be suprised to learn that you never really knew her at all. If you build up the historical artifacts of traditional European culture too much, you might extinguish the culture that is developing right now.
Summer Hours has so many layers and so many great details I could write twice as much and not get everything I liked in, but how lucky I am to be rewarded for sustained attention.
Saw the new Beauty and the Beast 3D rerelease tonight. I don’t have any special thoughts about the movie, as it has always been one of my favorites. I was a little too young to see it in theaters, however, and it did remind me that even now with high definition televisions and movie players the theater experience is something special.
It also made me think about Howard Ashman, the composer of Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast and a beautiful soul. His tragic young death of AIDS on the eve of Beauty’s release is covered in the excellent 2009 documentary, Waking Sleeping Beauty. We can never know what movies we’re missing if the dream team of Howard Ashman, Alan Menken, and the Disney Animation team were able to continue.
hammer & jack 