Some Notes on a Grimly Unfunny Movie That is Making the Rest of the World Crack Up

Alcoholic Customer: Do you serve beer or any alcohol?

Enid: I wish! Actually you wish... after about five minutes of this movie, you're gonna wish you had ten beers.

-- Dialogue from Ghost World, screenplay by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff


Many years ago, I took a date to see a comedy that didn't make me laugh once. She didn't laugh either -- maybe because I didn't; movies are best watched alone, and they're risky date events, at any rate. Anyway, the movie was Porky's, it was thought by many movie-goers to be the funniest movie of all time, and spawned at least two sequels, so great is the apparently inexhaustible flow of mirth from the vein of humor known as the "teen sex comedy." A few critics chimed in too, almost always with the familiar caveat that yes, it's crude and vulgar, but it's also really, really funny; not a few championed themselves as regular guys who aren't afraid to lower their sights a little where comedy is concerned, and some questioned how anyone could not laugh.

How could I not laugh? I have nothing against crude and vulgar, and silly and senseless go a long way with me. I draw the line, though, at witlessness, which was my problem with Porky's. I was all but alone with this problem, I'll admit, as everyone else in the theatre was laughing while I sat there like a rock. Friends didn't understand, and tried to get me to fess up that surely I secretly snickered at the scene where the dykey gym teacher grabbed the kid's dick when he jammed it through the peephole in the girl's locker room, or that I privately busted a gut when the girl howled like a dog during sex, or that I absolutely lost my shit when a prank phone-caller sent a waitress on a furtive search for Mike Hunt. Nope, nope, nope. Instead, I was just bored, and I wasn't real sure why. Actually I did know why; I just couldn't find the right word -- bad movies are sometimes bad in a unique way, and they make you search for the root cause of your dislike. All the jokes in the movie were loud and flat. It seemed to be the work of someone who clearly thought he was funny, and the box-office that movie racked up proved he was not alone in thinking so -- much in the way that the most popular radio deejays are the ones I least hope to be stuck with in an elevator. To my taste, the jokes were too broad, and all the way through it I felt like I was being elbowed in the ribs by the most obnoxious creep in school.

The same director, Bob Clark, went on to direct a really awful yuletide favorite, A Christmas Story, which I hated for exactly the same reasons. Now it was as if that obnoxious creep was at your dinner table, trying to fit in, impress your folks, laughing a little too hard at his own jokes, trying to be affable, and just embarrassing the shit out of you. The movie was the definition of "treacle"; it was so cute it made your teeth ache. It's an enormous hit every year on television, and I'd rather have nails driven through my eyes than watch it again.

In fact, I fully understand the impulse to dive-bomb the annual Christmas movie, for all the obvious reasons. When I found out that Terry Zwigoff had directed just such a movie, I knew I'd watch it, as Zwigoff directed two of the best movies of the past decade: Crumb and Ghost World. I was rather enamored, in fact, of the latter. I loved it so much I went out and read the Daniel Clowes' graphic novel on which it was based, spent maybe an hour and a half reading background material on the movie's website, looked up the official Thora Birch website, and even used a still from the movie for the wallpaper on my iMac. It was as if the movie had turned me into a damn fourteen-year-old girl. I loved the world of that movie and the people in it, and I just wanted to stay there as long as I could.

Why then, was sitting through Zwigoff's Bad Santa a replay of my Porky's experience? Because it milked a one-joke situation for as many laughs as possible, or because, perhaps, it seemed a little too much like a Bob Clark movie, both pushy and mean-spirited? Both, I guess. Most critics are absolutely wallowing in it, as are the folks at Milk Plus, with me being something of a lonely exception.

This mix of Scrooge and Leaving Las Vegas -- whose story was drafted by Joel and Ethan Coen, who also executive produced -- is about an full-time alcoholic and part-time safecracker named either Willie T. Soke (according to Roger Ebert) or Willie T. Stokes (according to Elvis Mitchell and Mim Udovitch of the Times) who annually plays Santa as part of a robbery scam. Every year, Willie and his midget accomplice (Tony Cox) sell their services as Santa and elf to some unfortunate shopping mall, the idea being to rob the joint on Christmas Eve and then spend the rest of the year blowing the dough. Their plan is complicated when a dorky little fat kid with rich but absent parents takes a liking to Santa, mainly because he desperately wants someone to like him back. A cranky, cynical adult and an innocent child -- the formula for a "redemptive" story, which the movie takes considerable delight in not being.

But the story, for me anyway, wasn't really the point; the point is to see how long you can stand looking at Billy Bob saying fuck you, fuck this and fuck that in front of a lot of little kids and their parents. Five minutes in, I was almost praying that the movie would do something besides remind us of what a foul-mouthed, butt-humping, chain-smoking retard the major character is; unfortunately, this is the major joke, and enjoying the movie more or less depends on how subversive you think this is and, more than that, how many times you can hear the same joke played out. The answer from critics and at least a few of the people in the theater is: extremely, and plenty.

What seems to give most of the critics a woody is the fact that Billy Bob basically stays a pitiful excuse for a human being down to the bitter end, and that even the fat kid doesn't soften him up that much. They like the fact that the character doesn't change, which I can appreciate; on the other hand there's no character development either. If I thought it was actually a funny movie, of course, I wouldn't care; absent any laughter on my part, the movie struck me as just relentlessly unpleasant and -- coming from the director with such a heretofore fine track record -- hugely disappointing.

My advice likely won't mean much, because success often encourages people to do what they are worst at, but I wish Terry Zwigoff would get back to writing his own scripts instead of picking up rejects from the Coen Brothers. Those two have yet to make a film as good as either of Zwigoff's first two, or as bad as his third one.

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Isn't that picture of Michael Jackson freaky? It just repulses me everytime I turn on the news. It looks like one of those "If They Mated" segments on Conan. Diana Ross and Pee Wee Herman maybe?

At the request of my friends at MilkPlus:

Top Ten: 1990-1994

1. The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) is one of the rare films in this period which has my total and whole-hearted enthusiasm. It’s an A+ example of a certain type of movie I like, that I guess we all like: what I call an "unexpected journey" film. These are movies that start out in a somewhat familiar place, and instead of taking that straight road, take a wild turn toward a place that couldn’t have been imagined. Two other examples come to mind, both wildly different, come to mind: Psycho and L’Avventura. These are stories where we find ourselves as surprised as the characters in them, as surprised as the people who made them; what is revealed to them is revealed to us. I knew there was going to be a surprise midway through, but I thought it was political; I didn’t know it was going to be sexual -- more than that, I didn’t know it was going to be about love and sacrifice, and I certainly didn’t know it would move me the way it did, or that it would end with such a perfect snap. I just can’t say enough good things about The Crying Game.

2. Life is Sweet – (Mike Leigh, 1991) Federico Fellini once titled a film "the sweet life," but he was just kidding – there was nothing dolce about his vita. The title of Mike Leigh’s film is a little more straightforward, but with an edge; the middle-class Middlesex family he depicts here do not, in the usual sense of the word, have a sweet life, but they do, kinda. Wendy and Andy (Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent) have no money to speak of, although they do have an abiding love and friendship. Their twin daughters are studies in contrasts: Natalie (Claire Skinner), a hard-working plumber who saves her money and never has an idle thought, and Nicola (Jane Horrocks), a bulimic little bitch with a permanent scowl and an addiction to chocolate. The plot of the film, such as it is, is rather cinema verite: we follow the giggly and plucky Wendy as she good-heartedly helps a family friend (Timothy Spall) open a restaurant that is doomed to failure, Andy as he naively blows good money on a broken-down van pawned off on him by his weasely pal Patsy (Stephen Rea), and Nicola – a knock-out performance by Horrocks, by the way – as she wolfs down chocolate bars, alienates her boyfriend (David Thewlis) and her sister, and slides further into depression. As the film lopes along, it also gradually builds to a confrontation between the happy-go-lucky mom and her woe-is-me daughter that is so emotionally shattering you’re reminded that this is what movies are all about: palpable human drama, shot and edited with utter simplicity. Leigh, in his usual improvisational style, sets out to find the drama of ordinary life, and when he does, it takes your breath away. It’s a bravely sweet film – although some may find it a little too feel-good. The director may have been in that camp; he followed this with Naked, which may have been his own way of puking after eating too much candy.

3. In its own strange way, the Southern California of Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993) resembles nothing so much as William Blake’s “London” -- it isn’t the outer world that’s eating them up, but the world of other people, particularly significant others. Blake’s people are stuck in a “marriage hearse,” and so are Altman’s -- they’re in dead or dying relationships of one kind or another, full of secrets, lies and -- in a couple of cases -- mutually assured destruction. This cross-cuting series of storoies adapted from raymond Carver starts with insecticide-spraying helicopters descending like locusts on the Southern California landscape, and it ends with an earthquake; people endure both, but it’s anyone’s guess how long they can endure each other. The plague of modern life has them in its grip, and Altman captures them with bitter sympathy, irony, and a cold unblinking eye. Put this film in a time capsule: it’s America at the end of the millenium.

4. La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)– With Camille Claudel, the best film about art I’ve ever seen. As soon as I saw it, I called a sculptor friend of mine and told him he had to see it -- then i went over to his house and watched it with him again. This story of an artist and his model is four hours long and never feels like it; it’s one of those odd films that moves at an ordinary pace without ever being the least bit boring. Part of the reason is obvious, as the model is one of the most beautiful women in the world, Emmanuelle Beart, and she spends most of the movie completely naked. This is where the length of the movie works in its favor; as the artist dawdles around, adjusting this and that, gradually starting to work and finding his focus, he becomes our source of interest -- no small trick.

5. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)– I guess this is the most influential film of the decade, and certainly one of the most entertaining. It’s a work of art, and quite useless.

6. Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) -- A car hits a dog and the driver seeks out the owner, thereby bringing together a young woman and a retired judge with a voyeuristic interest in the lives of others.

7. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

8. Schindler’s List (Stephen Spielberg, 1993)

9. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

10. Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994)

Claude Brasseur, Anna Karina and Sami Frey take a crack at "The Madison" in Godard's Bande a Part

Godard, 24 fps

Saw Godard's fantastic Bande a Part for the first time. It’s a so-so story -- two guys, a girl, a robbery, some dancing -- transformed by his highly distinct style, which in this case means absorption in the doe-eyed beauty of Anna Karina, the loose, devil-may-care spontaneity of the actors Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey and the story they are in, and the casual, tossed-off quotes to literature and pop culture -- none of which I got on my own (or likely you will, whoever you are), but which the DVD helpfully points out. What do you feel in a Godard film? You feel a love of the moving image and its possibilities; a love of faces and streets and the flow of everyday life, and that is not a love you feel in what you generally see at most movies or in TV -- what you feel there is people just doing their job. You feel he is a genius and that he is one of a kind. You don’t feel a whole lot for the characters, though -- you don’t even think of them as characters so much as actors in a Godard film, and the story is too ordinary to get much of a response. You just know whoever made it is fucking marvelous, and one feels affection toward him, although I can’t say it is repaid. He’s like Kubrick; he gives off the nerdy cineaste vibe of someone who has disappeared into his own craft (and craft does seem like the right word), like Nabokov’s Luzhin disappearing into the chessboard. He’s Jean-Luc Cinema Godard alright; he is the film and the film is him. This is not all there is to say about him or the film, but it’s all I feel like saying at the moment. I really did love the movie though, and I’m sure I’ll see it again. I am particularly enamored of Karina’s distended tongue when Brasseur gives her a kiss.

If there was ever a film that is so funny it hurts, it is Barbet Schroeder’s fascinating 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada -- A Self-Portrait. The former butcher of Uganda, at the height of his power, allowed Schroeder near-total access, apparently in an effort to present dictatorship with a happy face. Certainly, no one could tell this story better than Amin himself, who is quite the camera-hog, and very much the star of his own life, if not the hero he imagines himself to be. Amin, who was publicly fond of Hitler, ruined the economy of his country and butchered some 300,000 of his own people, comes across like some big lumbering bully who’ll kill you if you don’t let him win. In fact, that’s exactly the impression you get watching him win a swimming meet against the country’s top athletes by crowding his way across their path. We also see him laughing helplessly at his own lame jokes, chatting away with the local wild animals as if they were his subjects, and talking with his subjects as if they were children: whether it’s to assemblies of athletes or medical professionals, there seems no one whom Amin doesn’t feel can benefit from his immense, and immensely banal, wisdom. With the same self-absorbed stupidity that led him to allow Schroeder to film him in the first place, Amin believes his people see him as a beloved, benevolent, and straight-shooting head of state; "I speak the truth," he says about a thousand times. Actually, their fear is palpable, and for good reason; in one scene, he delivers a fierce reprimand to his foreign minister, who will be found dead two weeks later. Schroeder wisely keeps his own commentary at a minimum, fully and mischievously aware that no one makes a better case against this chubby-cheeked thug than the man himself.

Pow!

Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss (1964) smacks you across the mug like an angry dame with a pocketbook -- which is also how it begins. The first thing we see is the prostitute Kelly (Constance Towers) beating the fool out of some poor sap who tried to rip her off. We watch from his point of view, a man so drunk he can barely stand, as Kelly's blows send him reeling backwards down the hall of his apartment. She swings so wildly, angrily, and literally in your face (as well as his) that you almost think she's going to break the lens, which is frantically trying to keep up with her. Her unfortunate john makes a wild grab at her hair, which turns out to be a wig, and Kelly goes apewire: a bald hooker in black bra and panties beating the son of a bitch senseless and then finishing him off by by spraying a seltzer bottle in his face. She readjusts the wig and stares into a mirror, and at us. As the opening credits appear and the music swoons, she combs her hair into shape, restoring the hard, sculpted beauty of her face. It's one of the most jarring opening scenes in American cinema.

"If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage." Such was the famous advice Fuller gave to Jim Jarmusch. Worshipped by independents, a figure of honor to in both the French and German New Wave -- he appeared in both Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou and Wim Wenders’ The State of Things -- Fuller crafted melodramas that push the border of art, and this one throbs with expectancy from the get-go. It’s a B-picture of considerable purity - the setting is worm-in-the-apple suburbia, the laughs are mean, the dialogue is lousy and the acting is wretched. It is also operatic; a hyperdrama with an impassioned sensibility and a sense of mood that is masterfully shaped by composition and lighting. Fuller puts his characters in worlds full of extremes. He doesn't peel away social camouflage to reveal the dark side. He starts with the dark side, the place where his people live, and shows the camouflage as it accumulates.


After Kelly's episode with the deadbeat john, we move ahead a few years. Her hair has grown back -- it isn't until much later that we discover how she lost it -- and she moves to the small town of Grantville to ply her trade. Posing as a champagne saleswoman, she meets Griff (Anthony Eisley), the local cop, who quickly puts his moves on her. Griff doesn't learn that the champagne lady is a hooker until she's already popped his cork, whereupon he tells her he doesn't want her type in his town. Griff is the kind of cop you might meet in a Jim Thompson novel, a hot-headed defender of public morality who sees no contradiction between his private life and his public one. He's not totally heartless; he even recommends a good bordello in the next county, where "Bon-Bon Girls" with names like Redhead, Marshmallow and Hatrack offer their sweets to the highest bidder.

Kelly isn't interested. Instead, she rather all of a sudden decides to change her life completely. She gives up champagne and whoredom, takes a room with a kindly if dotty old woman, and becomes a physical therapist for handicapped children. She rises in this line of work with lightning speed, tough-loving the youngsters into health and winning the total respect and admiration of all her fellow nurses, who trust her wise, been-around-the-block counsel on all matters.

Naturally, this rise in her fortunes doesn't sit well with Griff, who has a strong, old-fashioned belief in "once a whore, always a whore." What ticks him off even more is when his friend J. L. Grant (Michael Dante), the town's wealthy playboy as well as its leading son, takes a special liking to Kelly. When Griff learns of their upcoming marriage, he threatens to expose the newly-reformed Kelly if she doesn't scram, but Kelly beats him to the punch: she tells Grant everything about her past, he forgives her, and Griff can't do much more than sulk.

Where can the movie go now, you wonder - half way through and the central MacGuffin already MacGuffed? Lots of places, as Fuller is just getting cranked up. The charming, Byron-quoting, good-looking Grant of Grantville proves just as prejudiced against Kelly's past as Griff, only in a much nastier way. Grant, she discovers, is a child molester who needs someone as abnormal as he is for a wife, and figured an ex-whore was as good a place to start as any. When he winds up dead, she gets charged with murder. Life turns bleak and hopeless as it only can in a film noir -- or a D.W. Griffith silent like Broken Blossoms or Way Down East. Like Griffith, Fuller is violent, achingly sincere, corny, and a true original when it comes to storytelling. He easily glides into extended poetic reveries, such as when he shows groups of children singing or playing at the hospital, without ever once making it seem extraneous. I think Fuller could have gotten in the ring with Griffith and other great silent directors -- he’s at his best when he scraps dialogue and becomes strictly visual, such as the end, when we see Kelly’s distance from a crowd of townspeople, or earlier, when Kelly discovers Grant with a little girl. Forced by the conventions of his time to be purely suggestive, Fuller lures us into the scene unawares, as Kelly is -- she comes home, hears Grant’s tape recording of the children singing at the hospital, sees a child exiting the house, sees Grant, and her slowly stunned face tells us all we need to know.

Tawdry, silly, over-the-top, totally compelling, and brilliantly photographed by Stanley Cortez (one of the greats: he also shot The Magnificent Ambersons and The Night of the Hunter) this kiss delivers a beginning-to-end knock-out punch.

Times' A.O. Scott Claws "Cat in the Hat" to pieces: "I am tempted to say that this Cat should be tied up in a sack and drowned, but I wouldn't want to condone cruelty to animals, even metaphorically. Cruelty to classic works of children's literature is bad enough."

What's the best way to generate content for your own blog? Respond to someone else's. My thoughts on Liz Penn's review of Kill Bill:

Well, it looks like I'm going to have to take the opposing opinion. I saw Kill Bill the weekend it came out and loved it so much I went back the next weekend to see it again with my seventeen-year-old daughter. All week long I had to bite my tongue to keep from talking about it; I wanted to tell her in detail about all the scenes. Shit, I wanted to tell the whole world about it.

I don't usually see movies more than once, but when I do, it's almost always for the same reason: I want those thrills to hit me all over again. There are movies of considerable depth where you need more than one viewing just to really get it, and there are movies with great stories you love seeing again, but the movies I'm referring to here are roller-coaster rides -- once it's over you just want to climb back on and do it again. Once, for me, simply was not enough to see Indiana Jones chased by the boulder, or to see the ghosts in Poltergeist, or the fantastic opening sequence of Blow Out (and everything that came after as well, nutty as it sometimes was.) And once was not enough to experience the bloody menace of the mace-wielding Go-Go Yubari, or that blood-drenched anime sequence, or the tremendously theatrical slaughter of the Crazy 88's in Kill Bill. At times, it kind of reminded me of the blood in Kurosawa's Ran; I'm thinking of one scene where a guy is on the ground profusely bleeding, and all the blood around him forms a very deliberate, artistic pattern -- hyper-realistic, hyper-aesthetic violence.

Part of the movie's pull is that it is almost a kind of anti-movie; not in the purely Godardian sense, but not all that far from it, either. This became especially clear to me over the weekend, a good month after I saw it, when I was watching that Martin Scorsese documentary about American movies. It included a clip from Vincente Minnelli's film about Hollywood, The Bad and the Beautiful, where Kirk Douglas, as a film producer, is reading the riot act to a director for the way he had handled a particular scene. The director replies: “I could make the scene a climax.  I could make every scene a climax.  If I did, I would be a bad director.  A picture of all climaxes is like a necklace without a string.  It falls apart.”

Well, I thought: that's it. That's what Kill Bill is -- a film that is all climaxes, and it works. I think that's what makes it such a jarring film, besides the violence; it's a little disorienting that we aren't given much build-up; hell, the movie begins the way most movies end, and it keeps, well, climaxing and climaxing. It's a brilliantly choreographed, multi-orgasmic bloodfeast.

P.S. I am fascinated by your comments on Salo. I hated it -- I thought the movie was an act of cruelty on the audience. Pasolini was in a position a bit like Bunuel's with Un Chien Andalou: he wanted to provoke and offend the audience's liberal sensibilities. Pasolini didn't like the people who watched his movies, I don't think, and he wanted to rub their nose in this one, and he went way, way, way past overkill. I think if you're going to find a point in that movie, that's where you have to start, with Pasolini's hostility to the audience, with how much they are willing to take; nothing about the story itself really justifies the way he filmed it, because whatever point he wanted to make about the connection between de Sade and Naziism could have been made in far less time. I think he wanted, rather, to say the audience was somehow culpable in the horrors that allowed the Holocaust to happen, that he wanted to indict them, to punish them for watching all this shit-eating and eye-gouging. It's an awful picture, a horrible picture, an unwatchable picture -- but so were Warhol's, weren't they? Like his, it's an unwatchable film about the act of watching. It's an essay, a cruel essay, on the viewer.

Maybe I'm just getting older, but I have no great quarrel with Rolling Stone's Top 500 list.. Any such list is bound to failure unless you wrote it yourself. If anything, I wish it had been more irritating, more upsetting -- the titles we see in the Top 50 are the same ones. more or less, w've seen for years. It's like the Sight and Sound poll of great films: Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Rules of the Game are there, and you couldn't move them with a blowtorch.

Some notes:

*I admit with some shame I've never heard Pet Sounds and that I don't own Rubber Soul.

*I read the little article about Highway 61 Revisited. Not sure I've ever heard that Edie Sedgwick was the inspiration for "Like a Rolling Stone," and I don't recall the Stein-Plimpton bio, Edie, making a case for it. It makes sense lyrically, but that song came out in 1965, when Edie was still riding high in the Warhol world. She hadn't reached the point of having to get used to living on the street, so to speak -- with her dough, of course, she never did, really, just one rehab center after the next.

* I'm fully aware of the influence of What's Going On, but I've never really dug the record that much.

* I completely wore out my last copy of Exile on Main Street, but I still would put Beggars Banquet over it anyday.

*Is Blood on the Tracks Dylan's greatest 1970s album? I prefer Desire.

*Out of place in the Top 50: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Hotel California.

Molestation.Murder.

Hail, hail, rock and roll.

I don't know why, but I find myself liking this guy.

Must-Have Recordings? That's their opinion, anyway, and surely to some degree they (whoever made up this list) are surely right. But what oddities are the following:

*David Bowie, Hunky Dory
*Elvis Costello, Get Happy!
*Blondie, Plastic Letters
*Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo
*Tom Waits, Swordfish Trombones
*Bruce Springsteen, Greetings From Asbury Park or Darkness at the Edge of Town.

Not real sure Devo deserves a rank at all -- the others are generally less-than-stellar work by major artists.

I wrote a paragraph or so about that crazy Samuel Fuller movie The Naked Kiss, but I left it at home. I need to say something about that movie, but I'll have to do it later. For now -- all I can think of is shadow and light, Fassbinder and Sirk. Very much in the mood of all that. High, heavy, rub-your-nose-in-it melodrama, and the dialogue is pretty awful at times, but there's no denying the visual impact, the visual mastery. Fuller could have directed silents; that's how good I think he was. Maybe he was born too late and wound up lasting forever. Anyway, later, later.

I bought the CD of Another Side of Bob Dylan, one of those early discs of which I've heard much (on various compilations) but not all.

Best surprise so far: I Shall Be Free No.10, one of Dylan's typically hilarious and thoroughly surreal raps:

Well, I set my monkey on the log
And ordered him to do the Dog
He wagged his tail and shook his head
And he went and did the Cat instead
He's a weird monkey, very funky.

The book provides as memorable a portrait of a young writer's apprenticeship as the one William Styron gave us in Sophie's Choice ... -- Michiko Kautani on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale. Hope to God it's a LOT better than that. Memorable, my ass -- Sophie's Choice is one of the laughably bad novels of the 1970s. You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel if that's your idea of memorable.

I turned 45 today. Family party at the Olive Garden earned me pants, underwear, socks, a Gamecock sweatshirt, a gorgeously framed copy of a review I wrote for the Post, and a White Stripes CD.

Spent some hours staring at the short story that won't move; pondered whether there's any truth to that saw of Bunuel's about how the imagination must be trained, and considered writing a furious response to Martin Amis's latest valentine in the Atlantic Monthly to that flaming bag of gas Saul Bellow. It put me in what might be called a Peckish mood: "'Saul Bellow is the worst writer of his generation -- and if you don't agree, you're part of the problem."

American Beauty is a film I never tire of hating; I can fall out of bed and discuss how shitty it is.

Mere praise of the movie is enough to get me going, as I did today at Blogcritics.org:

American Beauty was terrible: a hollow yammering fake of a movie that had nothing to say about life in suburbia, and an extremely snide, smug way of not saying it. It was nothing but a collection of platitudes. It was the kind of movie educated liberals could look at and find confirmation for every muddle-headed notion they ever had about the middle class. It was dishonest, too; when the blonde girl at the end announces she's a virgin I felt like throwing up my hands. At times it was just stupid, such as that wet dream of Kevin Spacey's with the girl in a tub of rose petals -- only art directors have dreams like that. And don't get me started on the performances, especially Annette Bening's, which was a case study in histrionics.

Today's inspiration

Franz Kafka's Letter To His Father was the topic at last Tuesday's Great Books discussion, and the group was in general agreement that Franz was a whiny little wuss. This is inevitable. Anyone who writes a forty-page letter to his dad blaming him (although he insisted over and over he wasn't blaming him) for all of his problems isn't going to gain much sympathy with most of us. A number of people began siding with the father, about whom they knew nothing except what Kafka had told them. They disliked the writer and his yammering voice. He put them on the defensive.

My take on it was this: Kafka seemed to think his father was a lion who had spawned a zebra; that is, a natural enemy, which is why he says repeatedly that his father is not to blame for being the overbearing, autocratic, hypocritical fin de siecle shithead that he basically is. It was only natural for his father to try to force Franz into being something he wasn't -- it is what fathers do. Franz lives inside his father's disapproval; it defines him, shapes him, gives him identity. His father is the God of his universe, and Franz is a bit like Job -- the Joban characteristic was pointed out by Zadie Smith in her ferociously smart New Republic essay of a couple weeks back -- a Job who is totally befuddled by a mysterious God who will grant him no relief whatsoever. this is not merely unique to Kafka, though; I think it is true of a lot of parents and children. Children are often raised with a basic sense, a basic residual understanding, that parents are right; or perhaps, not always right, but still the boss, which basically means they have a freedom to be wrong that children are simply not afforded.

Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right. It did sometimes happen that you had no opinions whatsoever about a matter and as a result every conceivable opinion with respect to the matter was necessarily wrong, without exception. You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left except yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason. At least so it seemed to me.

It follows that a child who challenges a parent often feels wrong, simply because the parent has said otherwise. So in a sense what I think Kafka is dealing with as regards the old man is one where as an adult he knows his father is a crass, cruel vulgarian, but he still regards him much as he did as a child -- he quakes before him. Kafka's father can, in the immortal words of David Keith to Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman , "shit all over people and still sleep like a baby at night." Franz has no suck luxury.

What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power. I too, I am sure, often hurt you with what I said, but then I always knew, and it pained me, but I could not control myself, could not keep the words back, I was sorry even while I was saying them. But you struck out with your words without much ado, you weren't sorry for anyone, either during or afterward, one was utterly defenseless against you.

This is a painful and wearying read, and it is not really likeable; the person who wrote it is pathetic, but his pathos is so intense and flamboyant, so rigorously anti-Dr. Phil, anti-John Rosemond that it gains a certain intellectual momentum, as well as digging out a lot of wormy, uncomfortable truths.