DA at the Movies, February 2024

Town Bloody Hall, DA Pennebaker (Criterion Collection, 1979)

Norman Mailer presides over, rather than merely participates in, a town hall event on the theme of women’s liberation. The year is 1971 and a critic who joins him on stage, Diane Trilling, considers him the most important writer of the time. Upon hearing this, in 2024, I gaped at the screen in disbelief. Ha, what a time! This most eminent man of letters comes off as if he writes in nothing but an open bathrobe. His misogyny is half-shtick, half-sincere, and both halves are equally tiresome. His swaggering style of crudeness is cringemaking. Yet everyone, with few exceptions, actually takes him seriously. Squint and one sees that he makes a valid point or two: addressing accusations that his fictional characters represent exactly what he thinks (though what he thinks isn’t that much more enlightened), that purely accusatory rhetoric breaks down any dialogue between men and women on the subject (though perhaps that was just how he heard it). Pointing out that literary fashions change isn’t saying much. The handful of writers who define an era are, for one reason or another, bound to be relegated to the background sooner or later. It’s up to the reader to resist getting swallowed whole by the trend of the day, or to defy it, nursing and tending to some healthy doubts by sifting through the past for what merits reconsideration. But watching Mailer, I’m content to leave him there, in the past.

As historical document, Town Bloody Hall may have some value, with a number of recognizable names making cameos. As conversation, however, it hardly entertains or illuminates, though the audience plays along, clapping, hissing, laughing—mechanically, so they look like they’re having a good time, as Hitchens observed of certain audiences. During the ending Q & A, Anatole Broyard gets up and asks a dumb question, stepping into the role of that audience member who has the sudden urge to offer himself up as a punching bag, on camera, no less. Germaine Greer responds to the question waspishly, which is understandable, but then her haymaker, the cheap gag, barely grazes. This exchange about sums up the night. I’m not sure I’d have stuck around that long to hear it. The original event was approximately 3.5 hours. The movie is half that length and still I only felt relieved to get to the end.

 

The Third Shadow Warrior, Umetsugu Inoue (1962)

Originally I was toying with writing a standalone piece on this called “On Power” because it could be the best film statement I’ve ever seen on the subject, nested within a magnificent plot. It takes place in 16th-century Japan. Samurai ride through a village. One drops something on the ground and tells a peasant standing nearby to pick it up. It’s a severed head. Other peasants leap back, aghast, but one looks after the samurai in awe. This peasant eventually receives a strange but alluring offer: given his resemblance to a local warlord, he’ll be paid handsomely to leave his humble village and live in luxury as one of his body doubles. Hidden in the warlord’s home with the other doubles or “shadows,” they spend their days learning to mimic the warlord to perfection—his limp, his voice, his mannerisms. They hang out. They eat well. But they only realize what’s really demanded of them when the warlord loses his eye in battle…. The peasant goes on to experience everything degrading and humiliating that comes with the pursuit of power, all without ever wielding it. Then his sorry carcass returns namelessly to the soil. A work of art that can serve as an inoculation.

 

Kill Me Again, John Dahl (Tubi, 1989)

I scrolled past this one for a long time before I finally chose it. I like Val Kilmer. I like the idea of Val Kilmer as the lead in an 80s noir movie. And I liked the movie even though it seems, at first, to follow convention closely. The money. The crime. The double-cross. The femme fatale. The detective who takes on the case against his better judgment and gets in deeper than is safe. Then, with a couple of surprises, not all that surprising in themselves but perfectly executed, it's lifted above convention and, coupled with visual kick and not a wasted scene, takes its place near the best of the genre. A debut and an underrated gem. Reading about the director, I discovered that the movie he made after this is one I watched years and years ago and have been eager to watch again, another one that doesn’t get mentioned enough, Red Rock West. I’ll be making it a double feature.

 

Royal Warriors, David Chung (Criterion Collection, 1986)

A pair of criminals on a plane attempt to break loose from police custody. As mayhem erupts, three law enforcement officials onboard, unknown to each other, intervene. The criminals wind up dead, the plane lands safely, and the three are hailed by the media as heroes. Soon a bond between them is forged. But the criminals have brothers in arms who track down the heroes to pay them back. On the whole, I found this to be one of the less satisfying Hong Kong action movies I’ve seen, with no particularly memorable fights or chases (to say nothing about the drama). This subtitle, though, will forever bring me joy: “Michael, I will revenge for you!”

 

Amanda, Carolina Cavalli (2022)

My knowledge of Italian cinema amounts to some Westerns and dramas, nothing from within the last 50 or so years. I took a chance on this movie to hear Italian, to see the actress starring in it, glimpsed in the button reclining in an inflatable pool mattress, in action, and to learn what a modern Italian comedy is like. This one is a debut. It can be grating and twee. Some scenes are incongruously serious in tone. But it’s promisingly weird. And more often than not, it has the intended effect. Benedetta Porcaroli plays Amanda, a woman in her midtwenties who lives at home with her wealthy mother. She has no: friends lover job ambitions prospects reliable source of pleasure. And her behavior is primarily what suffuses the movie with weirdness: she’s a tornado. In one scene, she’s in the passenger seat of a parked car with her sister, who says she hopes her daughter doesn’t grow up to be like Amanda. After a pause, Amanda replies with what turns out to be the closest thing she has to a catchphrase: “Go fuck yourself.” She gets out of the car and starts running to who knows where. The camera remains fixed, watching until she’s nearly out of sight. Her sister calls out: “We’re in the middle of nowhere!” Still running, Amanda shouts back: “You’re in the middle of nowhere!” One day Amanda seizes a chance to revive an old friendship with a woman who’s become a shut-in. At first it seems to work. Then the conflict Amanda customarily stirs threatens it.

She has at least one thing going for her: even when everything and everyone discourages her from being who she is, which isn’t evil, just abrasive and bewildering and exhausting, she never stops unsettling the world, to shake something out that’ll moor her and give her life meaning.

 …Arguably, that’s a thing.

 

Panic in Year Zero, Ray Milland (1962)

What happens immediately after major US cities are struck simultaneously by nuclear weapons? An anonymous all-American (white) family is driving to a vacation spot when a bomb goes off in the Los Angeles area, where they just left. Panic sets in and order soon crumbles. Freeways clog. Desperate people begin sacking towns for supplies and townspeople, in turn, take up arms and set up roadblocks to keep non-residents out. Degenerates see an opportunity to go on a crime spree. The father swiftly does what he must, even if it’s morally dubious, to ensure that they all survive. He steals guns at gunpoint and escapes to a cave in the mountains to wait out the chaos. The plot proceeds smoothly. The acting may be unremarkable but the drama of the situation is convincing. And it’s ultimately thwarted by the badly misjudged choice of musical accompaniment: unironically sprightly jazz, as if they were hurrying to get to a wedding on time. That’s mainly what I took away. Conclusion: Nuclear war, the collapse of society, and weddings are best set to grim soundtracks. 

 

Tampopo, Juzo Itami (1987)

I first encountered this director years ago in a novel by Kenzaburo Oe called The Changeling. Since then I’ve always kept his work in mind to view one day. Tampopo is his most acclaimed film. It’s a cartoonishly festive sendup/celebration of the gastronome lifestyle and, in particular, the art of making ramen. It’s somewhat baggy, wandering from the core story to include self-contained side stories that are all quite unlike each other, though each has its own charms. But the crackling energy of joie de vivre links everything together and never flags. And it similarly presents a lesson about mastery from another (albeit fairly different) Japanese food classic, Jiro Dreams of Sushi: What are all the steps involved in whatever you’ve chosen to devote yourself to and how can each be improved upon? This is one way of separating the dabblers and mediocrities from those determined to get better (or to be counted among the best). Breaking something down in this manner makes all the work involved—and all the issues that must be addressed—highly visible and daunting. It also allows one to appreciate everything that goes into creating the object of admiration.

After Tampopo, Itami would go on to make a movie lampooning the yakuza. It got him slashed in the face. He wore the scar proudly.

 

The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris (1988)

Thanksgiving weekend, 1975. Dallas, Texas. A policeman, Robert Wood, stops a car on the road. As he approaches the vehicle, the driver shoots him multiple times and flees. The policeman dies. His partner shoots after the car as it disappears into the night. Eventually law enforcement tracks down a suspect, Randall Adams, 28. Appearing in interviews with the filmmaker, I see a man with a detailed explanation of his activities on the night in question, conveyed with anguish and astonishment at his fate. He has no criminal record. And there’s no discernible motive for why he’d murder a policeman out of nowhere. The other suspect is David Harris. He was sixteen at the time. He’d picked up Adams earlier that day, who’d been walking around, looking for an open gas station. The teen was driving in a stolen car. He’d also stolen the gun used in the crime. He already had a criminal record. Later, he bragged to friends that he’d killed a cop. And still later he committed armed robberies (and murder). A likely motive for the shooting: evading capture. Meanwhile, his side of the story makes little sense: Adams, a stranger, was driving his car for some reason that isn’t explained and shot the police officer. Then Harris leaves Adams at a hotel and decides not to call the cops. And the whole time he relays this questionable account of a murder, it’s with all the emotion of recollecting an errand he once ran, occasionally smiling.

The Thin Blue Line is heartening and instructive in how effectively it makes a case, using techniques such as repetition and reenactment that were then innovative and that today are standard (though often misunderstood). But it’s more chilling as proof of how easily justice can be denied to an innocent person, even when the real culprit would seem rather obvious. (This mood is enhanced by Philip Glass’s score.) According to Adams, a policeman pulled a gun on him, trying to force him to sign a confession. An infamous psychiatrist, Dr. Grigson, talks to Adams for 15, 20 minutes and comes to the exact wrong conclusion, accusing Adams of being a psychopath deserving of nothing less than the death penalty and Harris as the innocent. A key witness can’t get his facts straight and admits to deliberately omitting at least one, with a laugh. Morris, in an interview with Slate decades later, mentions Rashomon and its multiple perspectives on the same crime as an influence. But where Akutagawa ends with jejune despair (and Kurosawa forces hope), Morris answers by getting to work, probing into the available evidence and achieving true clarity. And, after Adams spends eleven years in prison, justice. A judge nearly sheds a sentimental tear as the prosecution refers to the thin blue line of law enforcement that saves society from chaos. To be more precise, it’s the sort of rigorous investigative effort people such as Morris display that has any chance of saving us.

This Year's Balzac Novel

     With canonical French writer Honoré de Balzac, I’d suggest starting either where I did, with Old Goriot, or the latest novel of his I’ve read in my annual return to his work, Eugénie Grandet (1834). (Attempting to pronounce that last name the French way has unexpectedly defeated me. Sounds like I’m hacking. So I settle for the anglicized Grandet [Gran-DAY.]) The theme I associate most closely with him—the corrupting power of money—is presented here with typical acidity, in a masterfully plotted novel of beginner-friendly length. It takes place in the French countryside and concerns the Grandet family, whose patriarch is Monsieur Grandet, a wine salesman and miser. Or, as I took to referring to him, a “cheap bastard.” Though he’s accumulated the sort of wealth that’s made him and his family the talk of the region, he jealously guards every last coin, every crumb of food, and every candle in the rundown, cheerless home he shares with wife, daughter, and servant. The novel isn’t satire but, nevertheless, Monsieur Grandet’s ruthless pennypinching, sharp business practices, love of caressing his riches, and generally detestable personality (he refers to himself as a cat and his wife and daughter as the mice) can make the reader wonder. A nephew temporarily staying with the family learns that his father has gone bankrupt and committed suicide. Inconsolable, he shuts himself in his room and refuses dinner. Monsieur Grandet’s first thought: Hey, at least we’ll be saving on dinner. One day Madame Grandet, who’s spent her marriage suffering her husband’s tyranny in silence, takes ill, her skin turning yellow. Monsieur Grandet says he likes the color yellow. However, it isn’t simply an exaggerated portrait. Balzac’s consciously constructed monster of the age contains traces of humanity, meted out at no suspiciously apt moments: watching his daughter brush her hair, making luggage for his nephew, an evanescent doubt or two. And as in other Balzac novels, the monster eventually clashes with someone who isn’t so calculating, doesn’t worship money, an innocent. That innocent is the titular character, the monster’s daughter, Eugénie. She’s been kept ignorant of basic comforts and her mother has been largely cowed into submission, leaving her to appear simple and pure of heart, initially. Yet Balzac is sensitive to each stage of growth that leads to conflict with her father, and more, to maturity in the form of an awareness of how many others in society at large share his attitude toward life. Contradiction that makes for a flesh-and-blood person on the page: fragility revealed by disappointment and sorrow blended with the quiet strength to endure, soul intact.

I must applaud this plot once more. The very word might bring on a foretaste of bored predictions and squandered time: of hokey or overwrought incidents provided at regular intervals because something has to happen, wrapped up neatly (and without reverberation) in the end. The answer, this novel shows, isn’t necessarily indifference or chaos or whatever the day happens to give. Balzac establishes a world and a situation with his representative figure. He all but announces his intent to create a work that’s part social criticism. And at every point I think artificiality is about to peek through, what happens instead follows the logic of the ordinary, events shaped by human weakness and unremarkable developments. Nothing is given short shrift: Balzac retains precision of form as the book moves and pulses.

All this has been to say that I don’t think I can wait another year to read Balzac. This edition of Eugénie Grandet was translated by Marion Ayton Crawford and is part of the Penguin Classics series, the label of which (usually) sets my mind at ease. 

To Be Honest

     I was in an office park on another afternoon exploration of Union City, CA, rollerblading around a company’s loading area, when I noticed a truck had its back doors open. I didn’t see anyone nearby, so, as I was increasingly apt to do at that age, I transgressed, climbing into the truck. There wasn’t much to see, just a lot of nondescript packages ready to be sent out. As I poked around, feeling the rush of being a bad boy, I thought I heard someone. I crouched down and froze, listening, waiting. The doors of the truck slammed shut. Then, moments later, the engine rumbled to a start. Not wanting to give myself away, I made no attempt to alert the driver to my presence, thinking some sort of opening to escape would present itself. The truck picked up speed. I imagined that as soon as it came to a stoplight, I could open the doors. But I didn’t move, too afraid that something could go wrong and I’d hurt myself or that, I don’t know, I’d be held responsible for any lost or damaged packages that tumbled out after me or that I’d cause a traffic accident. The only other choice was to sit there until the ride was finished. Ten, twenty minutes went by. Ended up in Oakland.

This has been a version of a lie I used to tell. It wasn’t a terrible lie: there was a grain of truth. I really would ride around in my rollerblades, exploring the hidden corners of Union City, including an office park. Sometimes I even courted trouble. The skeptical, though, might have (correctly, in this instance) winced at the outlandishness of my adventure. I was never pressed for more details but with every repetition, my discomfort grew: sooner or later I’d be found out and summarily pantsed, metaphorically and literally, maybe—not unheard of in the realm of kid justice—for a story I eventually tired of. In later teen years, I remember at least once someone uttering those fearsome words to me after hearing one of my made-up stories, something along the lines of: I don’t believe you. And occasionally I would speak to or be in earshot of a kid who was clearly lying in the same way and feel embarrassed for him or her. The kid who could always conveniently top everyone else’s story. The new kid who sought to establish her reputation by alleging that her mom dated famous musicians. The classic: the kid who got laid in a distant land one summer, where none of his listeners had ever been or would ever go. Finally, in my senior year of high school, I was asked to repeat the delivery truck story for someone who hadn’t heard it and I immediately fessed up: “That was a lie.” I was high at the time. Getting high, for me, intensified whatever I was feeling, so what this request likely turned up the dial on was a sense of fraudulence and self-loathing, catalyzing honesty. Disappointing my listeners and doing harm to my own legend hardly stung. And what a relief! How much less stressful life is when you don’t spend it lying and then worrying about your lies and running from scrutiny and sputtering to prop up lies! From that day forward my legend has been built on the unmatched honesty and purity of a secular saint.

I’d been playing a game to see if I could get someone to buy the lie. But, closer to the point, I wanted to seem interesting. Then I grew up and stopped sweating it. In the years to come I would make the connection to literature. In writing but especially in reading, one of the greatest pleasures is what really happened: that perfect detail or situation or character that’s powerfully, excruciatingly, hilariously real. And, over and over, it’s proven that these can be found in the most seemingly unremarkable lives. (Meanwhile, anyone who’s ever watched a late-night talk show has probably been sent to bed early by the anecdotes of a world-famous guest.) It’s a skill to forage from your life. And it’s another skill to make something of what’s foraged for someone else’s consumption. In the sense of bypassing the work involved, I think of the fabulist as lazy. There are no boring lives, just boring people living them. Sometimes they take the easy way out at the risk of ignominy.

I don’t wish to devalue another great pleasure of literature, what didn’t happen: imagination, invention, comic exaggeration, manipulation of autobiography that isn’t underhanded. And I suppose it’s a shame, with the advancement of research tools and surveillance technology, that the tall tale is largely extinct. But imperfect memory is no infallible defense. And to those who are in the habit of lying merely to convince others that you’ve led a life you didn’t actually lead, that is essentially underhanded: if pangs of conscience don’t torment and madden you first, assume, no matter who you are, that one day you’ll have the eyes of the world on you and that a scrupulous journalist or investigator or amateur sleuth will come knocking. From there, only the most shameless self-deluded career bullshitters try to keep up the act, through widespread mockery and scorn, through court proceedings and prison.

…Okay, something that really did happen: A girl invited me to hang out. I put on my new sweater, strapped on my super cool super sexy rollerblades, and rocketed out the front door. Midway there, I suspect it was excitement that blinded me to the signs warning that the road ahead had just been paved. Speeding along, I suddenly came to a dead stop and tipped forward in what felt like the blink of an eye. I had just enough time to use my hands and forearms to break my fall. And I was stuck to the ground. And my hands were burning, half tarred, in full view of a busy street. That’s about how it feels to get caught in a dumb lie.

When I got there, she and another girl kindly laundered my sweater. To no avail.

Too Soon?

     Last week brother Miguel and I agreed to stop watching a horror movie after half an hour, for different reasons. I found the dialogue somewhat mannered, the atmosphere minimal, a minor role overacted. It plods. No soundtrack, either, or at least one that made any sort of impression—a shame, since in most cases I prefer them over the horror movies themselves. Miguel’s contention: “Too soon.” He was referring to the setting: lockdown during the worst days of the coronavirus. I suppose I haven’t been hungering for works of art that reflect on the period, which, despite what can seem like the willed amnesia of the outside world—too late!—we haven’t entirely left behind, and seeing it rendered as drama onscreen was rather jarring. It’s not that the subject is too touchy, or too weirdly fresh, to explore. What seemed too soon to me, given when the movie was released, was putting out anything other than the latest scientific information or the first draft of history from healthcare workers, essential workers, or journalists, processing and creating without distance on the subject. But I’m more inclined to think it’s a matter of quality rather than timing. Rushed artistic works that rely heavily on the tumultuous moment to garner interest aren’t welcome. Quality always is. During the same week it so happens I was also thinking about who the best essayists alive might be. With this question in mind, I considered those I didn’t know well enough to rank and one of the first names that came up was Zadie Smith.

I read her debut novel White Teeth back in college, published when she wasn’t much older than I was at the time. I didn’t warm to it, her youth showing in ways I didn’t find appealing. Today her name is mentioned everywhere I go to sniff out books when she isn’t being interviewed and published in some of those places. Having read a recent piece of hers about Charles Dickens and her latest novel, I felt fairly safe that she’d be a writer with style, a defibrillator aiding me in my recovery from those without. I didn’t check the reviews or even a summary before choosing to stick with the older Smith and ordering a collection entitled Intimations (2020).  Turns out we were reading Marcus Aurelius at the same time and that Smith, in this book of six essays, is responding to the start of the pandemic: “There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those—the year isn’t halfway done.” The subject was processed and the book expressly created without distance.

The first essay of the collection, “Peonies,” begins with an image likely to resonate with many who survived our plague, the writer clutching iron bars. We learn that Smith is strict in her scheduling: 45 minute blocks, with two minutes in between reserved for “free time.” A charming series of sentences:

 

In those days, the sharp end of my spade was primed against chatty baristas, overly friendly mothers, needy students, curious readers—anyone I considered a threat to the program. Oh, I was very well defended. But this was a sneak attack…by horticulture. Tulips.

 

Eventually I came to think of it as somewhat risky for an opening essay. I started going over my notes and expanding on them and referring back to it as soon as I finished, which amounted to a second reading, simply because the form she chooses makes it tough to follow, unlike the rest of her essays. One association leads to another and another and another: the bars, Nabokov’s tale about the origin of Lolita (she doesn’t buy it), a Freudian analysis of the image of a middle-aged woman peering at a flower, the cage of gender…. The torrent of experience overwhelms Smith. Our first disagreement: I enjoy getting carried away, trusting that I’ll have quiet, solitary hours to retrieve memories to fondle or laugh about. (Although it’s easier for me to preserve my solitude than a mother/wife/professor.) The method of the essay I’m most used to is orderly, thesis and support, problem and possible answer, struggle and resolution. Here, Smith rejects it, instead pulling the reader into the convolutions of her struggle: “If only it were possible to simply state these feelings without insisting on them, without making an argument or a dogma out of them!” What I hear is: the writer is going to present thoughts that aren’t properly worked out or omitted as facile before being committed to the page, that their importance lies in merely having been thought. And, right on cue, she presents one that’s shaky and disputable. The reader could argue with her but she ends the essay by saying that all these thoughts could be nonsense anyway. So why bother? Let’s say it works best as an introduction to the mind of Zadie Smith.

Another essay takes on a classic subject, “why I write” or “why write?” In response to the numerous attempts she views as inaccurate or dishonest, she attempts to get at the real reason and what she produces is one of the least convincing I’ve come across on this theme. The real reason she claims to write is to fill time: “There is no great difference between novels and [baking] banana bread. They are both just something to do.” One can read this as suicidal: a warning that there’s no life or urgency whatsoever behind what you write. And, ugh! banana bread! My admittedly scant knowledge of Smith’s work won’t let me accept that interpretation. As I puzzled over an alternative, she does what I seek the essayist to do: she interrogates that thought, allowing that there are writers who take another approach without sacrificing authenticity. Ultimately Smith finds solace in all those who are also, due to the pandemic, searching for ways of filling time. But why fill your time with writing when there are so many less complicated, low-impact ways of doing that? One could: play video games, bingewatch shows, browse around on the internet, lie around in bed, masturbate. All narcotizing diversions that would make for a comfortable life completely devoid of the pains of deep thinking and reflection and the careful weighing of words. It must be because, for a writer of any sort of merit, there’s more to it than mere time-filling. I wouldn’t go so far as to call “Something to Do” nonsense but one measure of the best essayists is how well the writer probes the subject at hand, which partly involves anticipating the sensible objections of those readers who are particularly keen to test durability. These two essays have their cracks.

And there are a few more throughout. Otherwise I appreciate everything about Intimations. It’s a slim book but nonetheless she views the pandemic from a satisfying number of angles. In her collection of “screengrabs,” we step outside her head as she observes, in a series of short pieces, various people in her life and how they seem to be coping. One quality I imagine serves her well as a novelist is her special attention to people, the feeling she conveys that she’s looking just a little closer, to better individualize someone. Smith on her masseur:

 

His head and face is optimistic in construction. He looks like optimism. Both his skull and his face are ideally round, he is always smiling, and he makes baldness look like an achievement, like something to be perfected. His skin is the color of old paperback pages.

 

She does some admirable self-questioning of her privilege and her degree of suffering. She’s cool as opposed to heated, even when she’s writing about power structures and the contempt displayed by those in power, refreshingly free of stridency and dogma, the standard mode for many. She’s vulnerable, candid. Compared to her, I gradually felt myself to be—rough! Like an expanse of dry skin before it’s magically transformed by a drop of lotion (in commercials). Lately I’ve been meditating on the word “acerbic.” The other day I was looking in the mirror, thinking about the book and brushing my teeth, when my jaw dropped: “Acerbic”? Gwog? Smith provides, through humble example, the gentlest inducement to productive self-questioning.

Once I started Intimations, I didn’t think about whether it was too soon or not. After the last piece, a list of people she’s thankful for, with commentary, I realized that I’d formed, pixel by unobtrusive pixel, from her reading tastes to her opinions to her routine to her background, a vivid image of the book’s affable main character, Zadie Smith, who enters a clothing store and leaves with a personalized t-shirt that reads: “Black Nerd.” 

Just the Facts

     With a shudder I look back on the worst professor I had in college, who, among other things, castigated the study of literature and defended the study of trash because, as she explained resentfully to some persistent students, the facts, the facts. I disagree that facts should be enough to satisfy a reader or that any book containing them is above criticism. And it’s frustrating to take a chance on a writer who does seem to think facts alone make the book. My curiosity may be strong enough to carry me to the end. Yet this obstinate neglect of a number of options for enhancement, I’m constantly reminding myself as I struggle to reach it, can undermine the most engrossing material. I don’t demand that anything I read meet the highest aesthetic standard. There is a minimum, though. It’s the difference between a smooth ride through a scenic land with a pleasant (or at least tolerable) guide and a bumpy ride through a barren land with a difficult (or intolerable) guide.

With Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023), the reader is going on a road trip that’s even longer than the book’s 600-plus pages suggest. The question of whether the ride will be smooth or bumpy is answered within paragraph one. We begin with a lurch, the first of roughly 600. At least Harris alerts you inadvertently up front: this is how it’s going to be, leave now if you don’t think you can withstand the journey. I, for one, was able to partly because Harris’s language tends mostly toward flavorless informality that’s only mildly stifling. He makes use of curse words (nothing so imaginative as the title of an earlier book of his, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit) and schoolyard insults and conspiratorial italics. Still, I was never sure I’d be able to, regularly distracted and taken out of the book at every turn by ill-constructed paragraphs and lines on the order of: “Planters premised produce production on premium prices, so they were vulnerable to market fluctuations.”

Palo Alto is a massive history, an attempted synthesis of subjects that could, on their own, be the basis for tomes,  the kind of book that can least afford a lack of structure. And yet it does. It unfolds chronologically, more or less, but his subjects tend to mash into each other in lengthy chapters that nearly lose their function, from, say, the iPhone, to China, to Russia, back to China, to Palo Alto, to Facebook, alternating in tone between lecture and riff and whatever this is:

 

Silicon Valley’s biggest winners are the slack-limbed puppets who have nailed their hands to these historical forces. Butterflies pinning themselves to the most opportune spots in the glass display box. Not the Wozniaks or even the Bezoses but the Airbnbozos whose defining feature is an eagerness to unleash forces they don’t understand onto as many people as they can, as fast as possible. Mickey Mouse surfs the waves in his stolen wizard hat, flashing a four-finger hang ten.

…Stoned rant that reminds you to find someone else to smoke with? One of the words he leans on most heavily is “recall,” as in recall this or that piece of information among numberless others encountered previously. It’s a clunky means of establishing links across the book that, due to how he organizes the material, or because he chooses not to, don’t naturally form on their own.

The rainbow dust jacket is misleading: despite how much story one would think there’d be, given the scope, this is a monochromatic book, missing almost every element of storytelling. Though Harris considers it a history-as-memoir, it’s largely impersonal, since he isn’t delving into, say, distant family history. He doesn’t do images, scenes, dialogue. Choice anecdotes are few. As for the lack of characters, Harris appears to be suspicious of the very notion of pursuing one, treating such figures as Leland Stanford and Bill Gates as personifications of “forces”—quotidian human details aren’t worth bothering with because if not them, some other men would have played the same role. Instead what he has are villainous names on a page. There’s some warmth of esteem in his discussion of certain radicals and labor leaders, in the first two-thirds of the book, before such figures cease to be mentioned. He pays them tribute but they’re heroes, hardly more fleshed out. And while he doesn’t find much amusing in almost 200 years of human history, in rare moments of levity he ventures a corny crowd silencer: “[Herbert] Hoover was like a vacuum, sucking up precious metals from around the world and depositing a hefty share back into Palo Alto’s giant tax shelter,” “Cyber cafes offered internet access by the minute, and the web itself was built on java.”

So ambition far exceeds verbal skill and what we’re left with are the facts, artlessly presented. And all of them are worth knowing as a citizen of our country, to better understand the brutal way our system has operated and what has and hasn’t changed over time. As someone born and raised in California, I can attest to this about my public school education: there are aspects of the formation of the state, with its reputation as among the bluest of the country, that aren’t nearly inculcated enough. To begin with: settler enslavement and murder of the native population, already cut down by disease spread by the Mexicans and the Spanish, was official policy. The first governor of the state, Peter Burnett, in a speech called for—his words—“a war of extermination.” One who answered the call would eventually become California’s first US senator, John C. Frémont. The Bay Area includes a city called Fremont. I checked to confirm on the city’s website and it is in fact named after the same murderous Frémont. Or as the website puts it: “Referred to by historians as ‘The Great Pathfinder,’ John C. Frémont, our City’s namesake, mapped a trail through Mission Pass, providing American settlers access to the southeastern San Francisco Bay Area.” Which historians? That’s the biographical note in its entirety.

Some of what the rest of Palo Alto covers: further episodes of violence, racial exclusion policies, environmental degradation, worker protests and crackdowns. The monopolistic power of the railroads. Bionomics, the theory behind eugenics. Stanford university, founded by a rich scam artist, molded to align with the vision of a man, David Starr Jordan, who appears to have been an accomplice in the murder of the founder’s wife and got away with it. A university that produced, among others, a rich scam artist who eventually became President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, more influential than I’d been previously led to believe. The university’s profitable role in developing advanced technology, including the weapons of war. The scam underlying private housing and redlining. The Black Panthers. The horrors of US foreign policy. Ronald Reagan, rightwing governor of the state and later President of the United States. Silicon Valley, the rise of the PC, the monopolistic power of the tech industry, and its attacks on workers. The surveillance state. The decline of unions and the general worsening of inequality up to the present day.

The capitalist always dreams of the grotesquely enormous payout at the expense of labor. Labor will never settle for anything less than fair pay and various other reasonable protections to ensure a stable, safer life that likely don’t permit grotesquely enormous payouts to a few individuals. Conflict between the two is inevitable. Democracy is supposed to stand in the middle, mediating, which really means civilizing the capitalists. The facts suggest it has failed in its role for most of the country’s history. This is where those who care about finding a solution should start. (One can look to two modern examples set by Hollywood and the auto workers, who’ve had success with a tried-and-true solution.) But speaking as both reader and essential worker, sloppiness doesn’t inspire me or rouse me to action. It just makes grasping what matters that much harder.