DA at the Movies, June 2023

Zola, Janicza Bravo (2020, now playing on Tubi)

A woman named Zola, in her day job as a waitress, takes an order from a female customer, Stefani, who commends her on her breasts. The customer is so taken by her, in fact, that she goes to the kitchen area, where she isn’t allowed, to continue talking. The women become fast friends. They text. (Zola’s boyfriend stares at her as she looks down at her phone. “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”) They confide in each other. They use the word “bitch” to refer to each other in a friendly way. By night the two women work as strip club dancers. One day Stefani calls Zola about driving down to Florida to perform for a weekend. Amused, Zola asks: “We’re already planning hoe trips together?” She presses Stefani for more information and at first she’s evasive. But finally she gives Zola enough to satisfy her. She’s picked up by Stefani, her boyfriend, and another man, the driver, who doesn’t introduce himself. Eventually Zola learns that there’s more to the trip than she’d been led to believe, prompting her to start using the unfriendly (classic?) meaning of bitch.

But this isn’t strictly a tense crime film. It’s more of a realistic horror comedy, neither element diminished by the other. It's a frightening situation and Bravo, in her debut film, doesn’t stint on the uglier aspects of this precarious lifestyle: racism, intimidation, violence, sexual assault, human trafficking. And yet it’s undoubtedly a hilarious situation too. It takes an unconventional approach to storytelling, integrating aspects of modern communication, namely social media. The screenplay is based on a viral Twitter story. One risk is that it’d come off as merely anecdotal, with nothing more to say beyond: wasn’t that crazy? To an extent, it does come off as if someone is recounting everything she can remember about her long crazy weekend: slightly disjointed, a string of details and revelations without necessarily careful development, an abrupt close. These rough parts and a few others are compensated for, however, by the seriousness with which the director treats her subject, the danger that these women are in (though only one seems to fully grasp it), the squalor. 

The whole cast deserves applause. Riley Keough, as Stefani, is good enough—superficially charming, casually manipulative, giving no thought whatsoever to the consequences of her actions—to overcome one’s sense that she’s a bit too Hollywood to convince as a woman living this sort of harrowing and none-too-profitable life, though she doesn’t entirely capture the real woman quoted in the movie itself. My personal favorite is the star, Taylour Paige, whose reactions alone are enough for me to think back on and laugh about. Some priceless alchemical mix of fear and stinkface. Though there’s no fear when the audience last sees her.

A new addition to my personal movie canon. Needless to say: not for kids or the easily offended.

 

Man on Wire, James Marsh (2008, now playing on Hulu)

An example of a life that quite readily lends itself to biographical treatment: Philippe Petit chose to live it risking death, and in rare fashion, as a specialist in wire walking. Although Man on Wire isn’t a thorough account of the whole life. It’s about him up to a certain age and the stunt that would make his name. In 1974, at 24 years old, Petit walked on a wire he and his crew strung between the then-unfinished World Trade Center towers.

One aspect of the richness of biography are the stories within the story, the savory particularities that are less likely (or less savory for being purely functional) in a narrowly focused, plot-driven or fictionalized work. He’s 17 when the idea for his grand stunt comes to him, at the dentist’s office, reading a newspaper piece about the building’s construction. Consumed with it, he tears the piece out and leaves before receiving treatment. Years later, after Petit makes it to New York from his native France, he’s secretly inspecting the tower when he steps on a nail. He’s laid up in bed for three days. Then, getting around on crutches, he discovers that they make him appear vulnerable and unsuspicious. Guards hold doors and help him. So he keeps using them even after he’s healed. One neat directorial decision is a moment of alignment: the music stops and the story ends on a photograph of Petit, standing on top of the tower, balancing a crutch on his forehead.

(However, the documentary falls short of five-stars due to other small decisions.)

Years ago, I read about a musical group that, as a stunt, parked a truck in the middle of an LA freeway and performed on it. They were arrested and, as far as I know, no one protested the injustice. A headline: “Horrible band causes horrible traffic jam to promote horrible song.” Like that horrible band, Petit has no official sanction. A notion about our society tickles me: some things are technically illegal but, in this case, the only person who’s likely to get hurt is Petit and his accomplices are welcome to back out at any time—so come on! Don’t be a square bear. Scheming that is in no way dastardly. Exceptions to the law for imaginative and wondrous and fairly responsible violations.

His ex-girlfriend, in a talking head interview, gets emotional talking about it. His best friend, in his interview, tears up at the memory and stops speaking. A guard who was there to stop him becomes transfixed in something he realizes is like nothing he’d ever seen before and would never see again. As the cops take him away, reporters breathlessly ask him: Why? I chuckled but I’d been thinking the same. The planning, the time and money investment, the devotion of his assistants. To what end, really? A moment? Petit responds: “The beauty of it is that I didn’t have any ‘why?’” I understood beforehand that this would be an impressive, awe-inspiring feat. But Man on Wire proves him right about that and more, showing the beauty of the vision, the process, and the act.

Under arrest, Petit balances a cop’s hat on his nose.

 

Terminator 2, James Cameron (1993, available on Netflix)

Subtlety isn’t generally associated with the action movie genre but, watching possibly the greatest action movie of all time yet again, I think that’s precisely what separates James Cameron’s Terminator 2 from most every other I’ve watched. Others have met, perhaps even exceeded, his standard for the obvious part: explosions, special effects, gripping vehicular chase sequences. The difference is what connects them.

A reminder of the plot: In the future, there’s a cataclysmic war between humans and killing machines. The leader of the human resistance is John Connor. He reprograms one of the machines, a Terminator, and sends it to the past to protect his teenage self. Meanwhile, the machines send an advanced version of the Terminator, the T-1000, to the past to kill John Connor. In the past, the teen John Connor (Edward Furlong, in a remarkably assured debut performance) informs a friend that his mother is in a mental institution. After surviving the first movie, she’d been training and targeting those responsible for creating the killing machines that would threaten to destroy humanity when she’s caught. John believes she’s crazy and nurses hate for her. But when the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently forced to address sexual misconduct allegations) arrives and saves his life, he realizes everything she’d been saying was true.

The first thing to appreciate in what happens next is quality plot development: John is hit by guilt. Now he wants to rescue her. A transition to the next action sequence that makes perfect sense for the future leader of the resistance. But before the audience is rushed off to that, one of the movie’s major themes is established when the Terminator says no. Relying purely on machine logic, John’s sudden demand makes no sense: his mission is to protect him and he’s willingly making that mission harder. There’s a standoff between them, marking the line between human and inhuman.

The same scene, in the parking lot, continues. John Connor wants to check on his foster parents. He walks to a nearby pay phone. But he doesn’t have a quarter, so the Terminator smashes it, sending the quarters within streaming out. A lesser movie wouldn’t see the opportunity to do something with this. Connor could have just taken a quarter and called. Instead, Cameron gets a laugh, underscores the Terminator’s machine thinking and strength, and builds the pair’s relationship. Three things where there could have easily been nothing. These freighted moments are embedded throughout.

So often I’ve made it to the credits and felt empty even when I’ve been given precisely what was advertised. The answer: One-dimensional moviemaking. Too much blank space, weight and emotion an afterthought. Terminator 2 is an exceedingly rare example of a multiplicity in the action genre.

 

Brain Damage, Frank Henenlotter (1988, almost gone from the Criterion Collection)

It’s a comedy horror movie that, along with his earlier Basket Case, makes me more wary of self-consciously campy cinema. A man wakes up feeling strange. He discovers blood in his bedsheets. He experiences a euphoric hallucination (gets super high). When he enters the bathroom, the tub has been filled with water. He tells the intruder to come out. What responds is a talking penislike creature. It wishes to make a deal: it’ll excrete the chemical that got him high if he’ll escort it outdoors from time to time so it can feed. The man agrees. When high, he doesn’t notice that the creature feeds on human brains. What makes the movie campy is that it’s low-budget, shlocky, and heavy on wooden acting and dialogue. Practically the whole movie is a wink to the audience, which is another way of saying that there’s no serendipity. The ancient drugpushing penis monster started singing and I wasn’t entertained. But there are a couple of elements that can be taken at face value: Henenlotter’s use of visual effects to depict the euphoric high and the drug addiction theme. In the latter case, it’s not much: the desire for the drug high can override morality. Digging beneath the camp, thinking it might be cover for a more profound idea, I’m twice left cold.

 

The Thing, John Carpenter (1982, available on Tubi)

An ancient alien creature has been discovered buried in ice and awakened. It absorbs and imitates other life forms and now it’s hidden among the men in a camp in Antarctica. Awareness of its presence instantly spreads a sense of paranoia, a perspective that sometimes gets belittled but, in this instance, as in others, is perfectly defensible. One is in imminent danger but doesn’t know when the monster will strike, what shape it’ll take, or who can be trusted. Loneliness, unchecked paranoia, and an overpowering sense of doom lead to panic, baseless accusations, and impulsive violence that would only be doing the monster’s work for it. Before chaos and madness engulfs them, however, reason intervenes, setting up the central conflict: some of the men try to orient themselves with the facts and devise a plan for identifying and destroying the true threat.

The movie takes a varied approach, working as much with sustained uncertainty and dread as repulsive body mutations and blood. It doesn’t continually feed the audience gory scenes, letting the viewer imagine what happens to certain members of the crew and providing effective (as opposed to cheap) shocks when the reveal comes.

From the director of such movies as Escape from New York and They Live, I get a strong sense of political commentary, however oblique. Though there are only men in the film, one is soon put in mind of nations: first the Norwegians, then the Americans. One way to view it is as a story about the potential breakdown of civilization. With this in mind, the anonymity of the characters works in its favor, making it easier to imagine oneself in their shoes. Carpenter preserves pace without a loss.

The first time I watched the movie, back in college, I guessed, based on the ending, that it was adapted from fiction (from a short story, to be precise, but it was actually based on a novella—another form that works on compression, so damn! I am always, at the very least, partially right). I’m sure it would leave some viewers dissatisfied but I think it’s shrewdly ambiguous. Despite the best of efforts, undertaken on the fly, perhaps no one will be saved. Even so, I’m not left paralyzed by despair. It’s a pessimistic but realistic possibility. Yet every time the monster is stymied and forced to retreat even momentarily, I inwardly pumped a fist.

To top it off, the score was done by Ennio Morricone.

 

Jade, William Friedkin (1995, almost gone from the Criterion Collection)

The movie, a dreadful erotic thriller, has a little something for every ridonculous movie fan: Intrusive music that alternates between thunderstorm melodrama and silky sexy travesty. Gratuitous nudity. Questionable acting choices. Laughable cuts. Distracting visual allusions to the title. Dangling plot threads. A headache-inducing degree of incoherence. And one of the greatest lines of ridonculous dialogue. David Corelli (played by CSI: Miami’s David Caruso) is inspecting a crime scene, in a bedroom. He opens the mini-fridge, then turns away, contemplating its contents before solemnly exercising his powers of deduction: “Cristal, Beluga, Wolfgang Puck: It’s a fuckhouse.” Though I wondered why he never flashes a badge or a gun, I still had no idea Corelli isn’t a cop until I read about the movie afterward. (He chases a murder suspect in a car, conducts what appears to be an interrogation, is always accompanied by cops, who tend to lead murder investigations….) Parts of it can be singled out and enjoyed.

But running through the whole movie is a blatant and rather sickening misogynistic streak. Three of the four roles played by women (half of which are insignificant) include one whose screen time is basically reduced to performing oral sex on a male character out of nowhere. Another woman gets scratches and bruises on her face that may or may not have been sustained while in police custody. She’s a prostitute threatened into speaking up without a lawyer present and treated like a hardened criminal. Not the slightest hint of a moral qualm about that or anything else. Later, she dies brutally. And the woman in a starring role plays a would-be femme fatale who’s no more than a conveniently duplicitous sex object passed between male characters and the victim of the movie’s nasty ending. The attitude behind Jade is too chilling to ignore or wave away as another product of ineptitude. It’s trash: too trashy to be wholly fun.

Studies in Ridonculousness: No Brakes

Canonically terrible movies don’t necessarily start that way. Some begin passably enough and only gradually fall apart. Some flip a switch, the drop in quality hilariously fast and shocking. Replicas, a cheap sci-fi thriller directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and starring Keanu Reeves, is the kind of terrible movie that doesn’t manage to get through scene one without doing something wrong. A scroll through its page on Rotten Tomatoes shows near-universal exhaustion and disdain among those pesky reviewers: important clues for ridonculous movie adventurers such as myself. I was amused but also fascinated. Terrible movies can put in sharp relief how much a good filmmaker does right.

Awestruck string music typically plays when something uncanny is depicted onscreen: superpowers, futuristic technology, alien cities, and the like. It’s the musical equivalent of the oohs and aahs that are the desired audience response. Usually I barely notice the convention. However, I noticed it here because it perplexed me, playing while neuroscientist William Foster (Reeves) does nothing more than swipe at a screen. The screen is projected onto the air, which is slightly if unimaginatively advanced, I suppose. But it’s hard to tell what this is accomplishing with regard to his experiment to transfer a dead person’s consciousness to a robot seated before him. Taken by itself, the visual effect doesn’t appear much different than playing Woodoku on a phone. When the transfer is complete and the robot comes to life (briefly, so to speak), it may as well have been done using Claymation, so jarring is the chintzy artifice.

Keanu Reeves, one of the greatest action stars of all time, isn’t the center of the action but the drama. Without explosions and gun-fu, he never quite comes off right: impassive, muted, awkward, tone-deaf. Consider the scene after the opening. The experiment is botched. Afterward, William's boss tells him the program is soon to be shut down and he’ll be out of a job. “This is my life’s work,” William says flatly. It soon ends with him saying “oh shit” and running out the door, as if he accidentally left the stove on. One would expect him to be radiating misery and preoccupation, unless he’s a more optimistic or eccentric or slippery sort. But no, the crumbling of his life’s work simply appears to be of little consequence.

He arrives home to his wonderful family as they prepare for a trip. He and his wife, Mona, played by Alice Eve, have a conversation about…the morality of William’s work, I believe. (It goes by in an instant and is as quickly forgotten by everyone involved, audience included.)

The family is on the road when a storm breaks out and they’re nearly hit by an oncoming truck. Mona suggests getting off the road to wait it out. William ignores her, as if he’s driving alone. Moments later the car hits a fallen tree branch and careens through a barrier and over the side of a cliff, into a body of water. Everyone dies except William who, aside from some blood splashed on his forehead (possibly not even his), is completely unscathed. The normal reaction would be to call for emergency medical care. Silent anguish. Crippling guilt. Maybe tears. But William, previously displaying no signs of madness, sees an opportunity in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy to experiment on his family and turn them into clones. He calls an assistant from his laboratory, Ed, to come and help him, no questions asked. When the assistant, played by Thomas Middleditch (an actor I've since found was accused of sexual misconduct) arrives and learns what’s going on, he suggests calling “the police or somebody.” After this bit of token resistance, he agrees to drag four dead bodies from the site of an accident in the middle of a stormy night and transport them to William’s house.

Ed: “What if something horrible happens?”

William: “Who gives a fuck?”

That’s not what William says but I feel it better reflects the movie’s attitude toward the implications of his experiments.

Ed, again with no further resistance, goes on to commit another major crime by stealing technology worth millions of dollars (and somehow walking out with it) and setting it up in William’s basement. But there aren’t enough vats for every member of his family, so he’s forced to choose one of his children to leave out of the experiment, though not before trying to delegate the terrible decision to his assistant, who refuses, finally putting his foot down in this one minor matter. And that’s not enough for one night! William also decides it’s a bad idea to preserve the memory of his youngest daughter in the rest of his family’s minds, so he deletes her in them and sets about erasing any evidence of her existence in the house.

The next morning, Ed, somehow rested and rather unshaken, leaves saying, “good luck.” Just another end of the day at the office.

And so on through nearly two hours.

All action thrillers contain a measure of absurdity, which is either part of the fun or beside the point. Take, for example, another Keanu Reeves movie I watched on Tubi recently, Speed (1994). Absurd in many ways yet there’s balance, as it does a number of things successfully, by standard measures: A memorably over-the-top concept (a bus armed to blow up if its speed dips below 50 mph). Surprise casting (Jeff Daniels as a cop, huh. Dennis Hopper, what the? Cameron! [Alan Ruck.] The guy [Carlos Carrasco] from Blood In, Blood Out! aka Miguel’s Citizen Kane). Charming side characters, who eventually turn the speeding bus into an impromptu party to celebrate ingeniously averting death repeatedly, a mood that infects the viewer. In a vivid, sprawling Los Angeles, CA. Sustained tension, even as the movie gets more and more pleasurably absurd. And Keanu Reeves at his best. It was only during this latest viewing that I remembered how the villain, an elderly man whose revenge motive doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (though what sense did the Unabomber make?), who’s somehow planting sophisticated bombs in conspicuous locations unassisted and largely undetected, is otherwise knowledgeable of every single move the police make to stop him, asks for a surprisingly unsupervillainous sum—a few million dollars, to support himself adequately in his old age—and is fooled by false bills that burst blue paint in his face. (The canvas bag they’re contained in doesn’t have a $ sign on it.) Perhaps this is true of other such action movies, but especially here one can imagine, at least vaguely, easier, less costly ways to resolve this situation. Instead, the crazed bombing campaign and the operation to stop him causes extraordinary chaos, including: countless car accidents on the freeway, a destroyed bus, a destroyed passenger plane, and a subway train wreck. Mass injuries, lives lost, 8- or 9-figure property damage! It was costly but it was, by conventional measures, an adventure. Neither can be said of Replicas. The concept is basic sci-fi. Everything else about it tips entirely toward (pleasurable, unplanned) absurdity, placing it firmly in the category of the ridonculous: Its attempts to establish tension. Its indifference toward logic and moral conflicts and probably sound science. Its special FX and action. Its practically non-existent characters. Best of all, those constant twists, up to the very last image.

Ed the assistant (his life!) says: “Let’s pump the brakes on the crazy train.” First of all: This is about 45 minutes into the movie, well after departure. Second: It's a crazy train. There are no brakes on a crazy train. The ride ends, as Keanu Reeves showed us decades ago, when you run out of track.

The Answer Has Finally Arrived: Be Cooler

     Will Lloyd, writing for the New Statesman with his collar popped (one hopes), diagnoses the problem with today’s “literary man”:

The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to.

Despite the claim of Woolflike penetration into the pathetic gender, it’s unclear precisely what's meant by cool. After all, there’s a simple definition and there’s the subjective standard. Women writers apparently meet his standard. So what is it? In any case, he does provide a couple of relatively more precise examples of what it’s not, in the form of uncool bestselling modern writers, one of whom, loyal readers will recall, I became intimately familiar with recently. And he reminds readers that the currently unfashionable Ernest Hemingway was once considered the standard of male cool, overlooking something that would give him a clue as to the ultimate value of his subject: Times change and what was once cool, sooner or later, rightly or wrongly, is going to be far from it, because fashions and loci inevitably change with them. Jazz was once synonymous with cool. Now most people don’t know anything about it, won’t deign to sit through it. My first encounter with the word “misogyny” was as praise in the pages of Rolling Stone, when the publication esteemed the Rolling Stones’s Aftermath for its “misogynistic cool.” A line like that probably wouldn’t slip by unnoticed in a major (centrist or leftwing) publication today. A later generation will define itself by rejecting what was once cool, labeling it antiquated, oldfashioned. So, in a way, it doesn’t matter if Lloyd elaborates on his image of cool because whatever it is won’t be. No one and nothing in history has ever sustained that status in the wider world.

Nor does Lloyd enlighten the reader on why it matters to be cool in the first place, or why men are too inept to write anything of literary merit without a living paragon of cool to shepherd them. This implies that a living paragon to all younger, aspiring women writers does exist, the unanimous model and inspiration and shepherdess for them all. In his lack of fine distinctions, Lloyd is paying these writers less of a compliment than it would at first seem.

I haven’t banished that word from my vocabulary. It makes for a good dry monosyllabic response. Sometimes, depending on the situation and my degree of wonder or approval, I spell it with upwards of six o’s. It has its uses. As does its opposite: I've been known to find things uncool too. However, when faced with what I consider to be a great work and a great writer, searching for the words to convey my enthusiasm and admiration, to settle on “cool” would be glib at best. “Cool,” as a concept taken seriously, is better fit for more self-obsessed pursuits like branding and influencing.

Almost all the writers I think of as models are dead. And there isn’t a single one I desire to emulate in every way, down to style of dress. In an imagined meeting between us, it’d surely make things awkward, especially as one gets older. And it’d kill any chance of being original. And it’s a better tribute not to dare. My model, my guide of guides, is necessarily a composite figure, with parts that aren’t me cut out, and imbued with qualities derived from men and women. In the future, this could extend to people who identify as neither. Some of those qualities include: Bravery. Intelligence. Scrupulousness. Humor. Compassion. “Cool”: fine as a casual compliment, tawdry compared to the higher virtues.

A satire: the man who, fearful of his irrelevance and the irrelevance of all male writers, takes up the mantle of cool.

For someone so confident and unsparing in his ridicule (a ridicule devoid of irony) of the sad and deluded and uncool (who could easily be man or woman or neither), the quality of Lloyd’s argument—a straw man, a glaring factual error, general shakiness due to lack of support—is surprisingly poor. Quite uncool of him. Was he wearing a pair of aviator shades when he wrote this? Dizzy from the AXE body spray fumes? Use responsibly!

And, no, I don’t secretly care about cool.

Swept

     “Hey. Hey bro. Do you know where the ladder is, I—hey! Where are you…?”

“Thank you. Thank you, bro.”

“Can you check me out?”

"Thank you, bro. Just getting something to eat. I’m bout to go on my break.”

“Hey, you don’t have to clean, I’ll clean, it’s too early to clean. I can clean in twenty minutes. You need to work on the rolltainer in the back. You need to put away all that dirt [bags of potting soil], bro, I mean….”

“Hey, you don’t get a break, bro. You started at six-thirty. I saw.”

“Hey, you need to tell me if you’re going to take a break. I’m busy. I need to watch the register.”

“Hey, you don’t have to do that [put away the dirt]. Just clean and do recovery. On the shelves.”

“I said you don’t need to do that. Bro. BRO! Man, this guy doesn’t listen.”

“Hey. Hey bro. Can you clean? I want to get out of here on time, bro.”

“Hey bro. How long is it taking you to sweep? You want me to sweep? Hey, hey BRO!”

“Hey. Hey BRO! You’re just gonna leave that broom there? That’s your broom. You need to, like, put it away. No one wants to clean up after you.”

“HEY! I asked you to lock the door! Now someone just walked in here! I mean, bro, I want to get out of here on time, bro.” The columnist heard his name called but, having chosen silence this shift, didn’t reply. Locking the front doors is something he never does. He’s not even 100% sure how to lock the doors. He’d ask but….

The columnist refers to the notebook that lists tasks for the night. Once finished with each task, he’s written “finished” next to it. Notice he hasn’t crossed out each task on the list as he finishes. That’s because his coworker doesn’t understand what crossing something out on a list means. He suspects it’s an attempt to obscure the writing and get out of work, giving him no choice but to start yelling. This coworker, if it hasn’t already been made clear, is the authority figure on site.

The manager has written something the columnist hasn’t seen before: that he should be ready by the time his coworker is ready. He takes between five to ten minutes after lights out. Reasonable, he thinks, for someone working right up until then, which would be the typical expectation for the closing shift at a job. Nevertheless he must have received complaints. This could only mean: be ready at the exact same time as the person he’s working with or earlier, despite not knowing when exactly someone will finish. But he takes heed. A minute later and the coworker he’s paired up with tonight will start yelling.

The columnist stands reading about gold mining in South Africa in The New Yorker, ready to leave.

“Hey. Are you gonna put away the broom? That’s your broom, bro. You left it there.”

“Hey. That broom is still there. Can you put away that broom? You left that broom there, right? That’s your broom, bro!”

“Hey! Your broom! Put away your broom! Are you listening? Hey! Man.”

“Man! I mean, bro! Your broom! It’s in the back! That’s your broom, bro! I don’t know what’s up with this guy. You crazy, man.”

“Put away your BROOM! That’s your BROOM! You left it there, right? Man, I’m calling [manager]. We’re not leaving til you put away that broom. I really don’t like working with you, for real, for real. Voicemail.”

“He’s here right now. He’s just standing there. Hey! Put away your broom! He won’t put away his broom.”

After he returns to the back, the columnist picks up the notebook and writes in the margin beside the list of tasks: [Coworker] yells a lot.

“If you wanna go home, go home, bro. It’s like you don’t want to be here, bro. I don’t get you.”

“You should leave. Just unlock the door and leave. This guy. Won’t put away his broom. I don’t know why they put us together.”

“Man, let’s get out of here. Unlock this door. You ready? What’s going on? Unlock this door. You can go home early. I hope I never work with you again.”

 

 

The Discomfort Zone

     I should have clarified: I’m not reluctant to read Jonathan Franzen’s non-fiction. On the whole I liked two of his essay collections, How to Be Alone and Farther Away, where one can find such pieces as “My Father’s Brain” and an unconventional celebration of Alice Munro. Although I must mention a unique experience I had with those books. At least a couple of pieces made me think of a specific scene, at a dinner party. I’m having a conversation with another guest when he suddenly, inexplicably starts raging. As his volume increases, I start nodding, backing away slowly, hands raised in fearful placation. Otherwise I thought of his non-fiction as a safe bet: the reader will get finely crafted sentences and paragraphs, some warm laughs, some silly laughs, and a thoughtful, impassioned take on his reading. Then I picked up The Discomfort Zone (2006), a memoir in essays.

Franzen thinks of himself as a novelist first and foremost and once directed attention to the skimpiness of this book as proof. Memoir isn’t my favorite genre to begin with. But one simple rule for it I’ve gleaned is to have led an eventful life. Or to have an event or generative milieu or teeming period to focus on. Or to have lived through horror. One might add: a mysterious or terrible affliction, though I’d be less likely to pick those up. Or a notable, strange, or traumatizing relationship. Years ago I read a review of a memoir by a man who wrote about a quirk of his: thinking out loud to himself. I’d give that a try. My own personal tastes, in the rare moments I’m in the mood for the genre: memoirs by mathematicians, musicians, basketball players, certain writers. I resist somewhat—a little less as of this writing, I suppose—in the abstract, thinking that a good writer, drawing directly from his or her past, will find something that’ll animate the book, no matter how bare the storage facility of memory may initially appear. But reading The Discomfort Zone, it occurs to me that ready access to whatever past one has coupled with style isn’t necessarily a surefire formula. And telling someone else’s story in fiction is a skill separate from the skill of telling a personal story rooted in fact, one Franzen doesn’t really demonstrate here. It’s as though absolutely nothing of interest ever happened to him, not to justify a book on its own merits, anyway. Roll up the steel door: Sock. Coupon booklet. Rubik’s Cube. Melon rind. It doesn’t matter so much in fiction because there’s no telling how a writer will transmute the past, though it certainly doesn’t hurt to enlarge what one draws from by having wacky and/or sexual adventures. By climbing a mountain and getting carried away by a river. By following the trail of blood. By living more life. Without the imaginative process, the reader gets the undistinguished backstory: Born in Chicago, raised primarily in Missouri. A quiet middle-class life in the suburbs. Mom, dad. Older bros pop in here and there. Grade school. High school. A church youth group. College. Intensive German language and literature studies. He meets the woman who would become his first wife. Later on they divorce. And he goes birding. The book is indeed skimpy, making it about as long as any of his novels.

Franzen deserves partial credit because he doesn’t spare himself and allows the reader to see his unpleasant side throughout the book. And eventually it becomes clear that it’s a conscious decision.

It was this other side of Avery—the fact that he so visibly had an other side—that was helping me finally understand all three dimensions of Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.

When I mention this standard by which to judge a writer, I think of to what extent, and in what tone, he or she will detail humiliations, weaknesses, exceptionally shameful moments, significant character flaws that cause undeniable harm. Franzen takes a different approach. It begins with the most shocking thing I’ve read in his work: In the opening essay, “House for Sale,” he expresses his lack of sympathy after Hurricane Katrina, wondering impatiently how much he should care when there are so many other disasters in the world to care about. First of all, the passage isn’t even integrated into the essay well, coming off as an outburst that ultimately would be better excised altogether. Still, people can never rid themselves of such thoughts completely. That’s why reason is so vital, as a gatekeeper, pushing back the impulsive thought, the stupid thought, the unspeakable thought. As I don’t believe society will ever suffer from an excess of reason, I try to ensure that it’s a steadfast presence in my work. But other writers devote more space to those thoughts, particularly if they suspect they're secretly common, to challenge them, presenting the inner conflict for the reader. I waited for Franzen to do the same. Within the essay, he doesn’t. Mostly though, in his awkward, ill-timed self-revelations, he resembles the more innocent oversharer. His own characterization is imbalanced against his favor and I wasn’t convinced he’s so dislikeable. He has friends, longterm relationships with women, and what makes him, for instance, seem annoying as a kid—immaturity, self-centeredness—is part of what it means to be a kid. Yet the reader is forced to take him at his word.

These are lengthy essays, six in just under 200 pages. Franzen is a writer who specializes in constructing a story over hundreds of pages. The problem he has with a shorter form is the least surprising part of the book: four are at once ungainly and truncated. I originally read his tribute to Charles Schulz as a taut heartfelt standalone piece. Expanded and juxtaposed with his own story in the essay “Two Ponies,” he sacrifices it without getting a better piece out of the deal. Or in “My Bird Problem,” he attempts to connect all of the following: the last act of his marriage and his divorce, learning to love his mother at the end of her life (though he stresses that he has his limits), troubles in a new relationship, environmental politics, humiliations while out birding, his embarrassment about being seen birding, climate change and birding, misanthropy and its softening through birding, veering from one to the next. Halfway through it, exasperated, I knew he’d fail, in keeping with most of the book, but by then I was nearly finished anyway.

It's not a total bust. Jonathan Franzen enters his mom’s house: “I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.” Jonathan Franzen at the beach, irritated at someone taking pictures of birds: “She kept moving closer, absorbed in her snapshots, and the flock amoebically distanced itself from her, some of the gulls hopping a little in their haste, the group murmuring uneasily and finally breaking into alarm cries as the woman bore down with her pocket digital camera.” A paragraph:

Birds were what became of dinosaurs. Those mountains of flesh whose petrified bones were on display at the Museum of Natural History had done some brilliant retooling over the ages and could now be found living in the form of orioles in the sycamores across the street. As solutions to the problem of earthly existence, the dinosaurs had been pretty great, but blue-headed vireos and yellow warblers and white-throated sparrows—feather-light, hollow-boned, full of song—were even greater. Birds were like the dinosaurs’ better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

He writes like that throughout. And one essay joins the other two on my list: “Centrally Located,” about responsible pranks and literature that succeeds in every way most of the others don’t. Nevertheless I was glad to get to the last page and out into the open air. The Discomfort Zone is strictly for completists and superfanzens.

I’m at a dinner party. Not usually my thing. Probably I felt obligated to go. I’m telling myself to behave, to be agreeable. As much as I can be while still being real. The hostess is attending to food and other guests. She’s the one person I know. I make a decision: instead of standing and looking around, I shall sit on the couch in the next room and stroke my chin. …Now! I take a seat. I didn’t even notice there was a man on the other end of the couch. He says hello and remarks on the gathering. I respond likewise, masking my disappointment that I didn’t have a chance to be alone for even a second. He begins telling me his life story. I laugh: He’s really doing this? Fine. I wasn’t occupied and he seems nice enough. Birth. Mom, dad. Elementary school. Third grade. Then came fourth grade. The subject of tetherball leads to a personal disclosure there's no need to repeat. Other guests enter the room and join the conversation. And they’re free to leave it. But this man is talking to me and I see no polite way out. I look to the entryway: No announcement that food is ready. Still. I concentrate on suppressing my gut’s roar of hunger, its rumble of anxiety, and its gentleman’s whistle. Eighth grade. Then High School! Freshman year. 1^st period. Then 2^nd period. Then 3^rd period. I get up and stretch. But I can’t just leave. 7^th period. 8^th period. What would I be doing otherwise? Looking unapproachable somehow, no doubt. I should thank him. Other guests seem at ease, knowing I can participate in conversations too. Winter break, freshman year. Second semester starts. 1^st period. 2^nd period. “Oh, enough!” I cry. “I’ll get back to his fiction already!” Whistle.