Movie break: Films about young females’ psychological odysseys

[A general note: I tend not to provide links, as if to “end-noted references,” to statements in my movie discussions, because I think a lot of the facts can be searched for online readily enough by people are about as avid about movies as I am. And I am just playing around with a sort of “hobby” area of interest with my movie discussions; no matters of national security are involved here. But where a certain point may seem to require backing up, I’ll try to present a reference when I can, either as a hyperlink or as an “old-time” end-note type reference, where a reader's seeking out the print source may be needed. For instance (see the Duel blog entry), do you puzzle over my assertion that Stanley Kubrick was the main story developer of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence? See “The Masterpiece a Master Couldn’t Get Right,” The New York Times (July 18, 1999), arts section, pp. 9, 22, where among other things, the multiple screenwriters who worked on this movie under Kubrick’s direction are noted.]

[Hitchcock section edited 2/17/12.]

Introduction

As Tolstoy famously said in Anna Karenina, and I paraphrase, all happy families are the same, but each unhappy family is different.

Meanwhile, movies can be looked at as art, entertainment, and a sort of cultural advertisement—of us to outsiders. A given movie can embody all three purposes at varying levels of success.

With movies as a sort of cultural emissary of the United States to the world, and their growth in treating complex topics over recent decades, perhaps no area is so interesting as their dealing with issues of mental illness, personality disorders, and the like, particularly among women, where the forms of the illness in the individual, and the ways others in her life relate to such a woman, can be complex, subtle, and demanding for significant others. And if foreign populations, especially those who do not accord women the social status they have in the U.S., are to understand women’s problems, how well can a movie handle them? Are we handling this issue well enough in our movies, for foreigners to understand that we know how to care for women, and that, for instance, a licentious, poison-mouthed virago isn’t someone merely to be hurriedly burned on a pyre, but is someone who, with all else, helps show us the possibility in us all?

For a two-hour movie to treat such a thing is hard enough; and then the issue arises of how much a wide swath of the paying audience can relate to such depictions. Obviously, not everyone can. It’s tough enough for these women to get understanding in their own lives; how can we expect a range of people as turn up to watch a movie will all be in accord on what this woman’s life is about, and what it means to them?

This is obviously a complex subject with many nuances. In this two-part blog entry, I hope to stimulate some thought along these lines without being definitive or exhaustive. Plus, I am at a point in my life where my sympathy for women, which I long thought was pretty good, has been tried as perhaps at no other time. So for me to be a generous fellow in this two-part entry is something of a minor miracle.

Also, though I want to be fair to each movie I deal with here, I am aiming to “bring this blog entry home” in a discussion of what probably seems most warm in moviegoers’ memories—and hence “most relevant”—the 2010 movie Black Swan, which I consider problematic.

First, what some might see as a bearishly complex look at an old Hitchcock movie.

Part 1: Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964); Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968); and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

1. Hitchcock’s last great film, though a quirky one

It’s of course debatable what position in the movie pantheon should be occupied by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), i.e., where he stands among the greatest film directors in the English language; and many people have written books on him, discussed him, etc. I have referred to his movies in my Internet comments mainly to have a frame of reference, regarding certain ways of doing art or addressing certain complex issues, that people can understand because so much of his work is so familiar, if not equally deeply understood by those who know this work.

And I certainly don’t expect to set any standards in understanding of Hitchcock in my Internet comments; if anything, I hope to conform with what could be called the received wisdom on his work, and if I say things about him sometimes that seem at variance with this, well, when any of us talk about movies that we feel worth discussing deeply, idiosyncratic interpretations, readings, etc., will come up, and if we are sane, we let these go by.

It’s been noted that Marnie (1964) is counted among what critics have assessed as the top ten Hitchcock movie in terms of quality, cultural significance, whatever. I would tend to agree with this, but it’s the sort of film that, if you assessed Hitch just on the basis of one film, and you used this film, you’d say, Why is he so honored as he is? But if you look at his best films—arguably, topping at Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest—and then threw in Marnie, you’d say yes, it belongs up there, as a sort of also-ran by a master.

(Some say Frenzy was Hitch’s last good film, but to me, Frenzy in various respects is derivative of his own past work, and while it is technically well done, it has no really likable characters and has a cold theme. Marnie is the last good film by Hitch that only he could have chosen to try to do, and get it to work when it does; Frenzy is like something a Hitchcock imitator could have done.)

Fossil of a movie still interesting

Marnie, of course, could seem old-fashioned by today’s standards—and even did, apparently, to some audiences of its time. The focus on the rich, to me, is quaint, as it holds to some age-old standard of a romanticizing eye (hero Mark Rutland runs a publishing company that apparently his father was too much of an oaf to save from imminent collapse, so Mark turned it around; yet Dad turns up like an elderly British squire, dapper with leather vest in big mansion, gushing his small talk about food and perpetual enthusiasm for horses). I personally have always found a focus on the rich in literature to be a bit much to swallow. For instance, it made reading Henry James a little trying, but James was always much better, and more edifying, in his focus on psychological, perceptual, and tried-conscience issues—something that could apply to anyone with a brain.

Perhaps today’s feminists would say the Mark Rutland character—played well by Sean Connery, who was early in his tenure as James Bond, and reading lines here as if he quite understood the script—was a “man after my own heart”: not only a publishing professional, but taking it upon himself to help a troubled young woman who combines thievery and sexual frigidity, and showing an apparent virtuosity as a psychological scholar later in the movie. Actually, I think this character, as just drawn, is one of the more preposterous ones in the movie script (Joseph Stefano, writer of the Psycho script speaking in a Marnie DVD commentary, was originally tapped to write the script of Marnie, and felt the psychiatrist, a separate character in the novel by Winston Graham, should have been kept separate from Mark; but in the final script by Jay Presson Allen, he was combined with Mark).

The movie seems rather oddly constructed in other ways (though its development started before that of the movie The Birds [1963], as if it would immediately follow Psycho). Bernard Herrmann’s score seems to shift between themes and tones abruptly as if echoing the stark shifts in the story (and his score in this movie is a bit heavy-handed or forced when it doesn’t quite work, but tasteful when it does). Some scenes are blocked and filmed rather awkwardly, such as the early scene between Marnie and her mother and a late scene where Marnie and Mark discuss the practical possibilities connected to businessman Strutt’s possibly turning her in. The movie seems to get in its own way—is not nearly as smoothly dreamlike as Vertigo—in respecting the needs of a story that admittedly is complex.

Meanwhile, Connery’s Mark Rutland, however Dutch-uncle he seems today, seems adequately decent within the premises of this movie. And Tippi Hedren acts in this movie (or gives her best shot to a difficult part); in The Birds, she is mainly window-dressing, I think.

Psychological angle keeps it alive

Some might say another old-fashioned aspect of the movie is its psychological interpretation, as it articulates the consequences of her suffering in early life; she suffered trauma as a girl in accidentally killing a sailor who’d served as a john for her mother, who was working as a prostitute to support herself and her daughter.

To me, the psychological side is the most interesting part of the movie, and most amenable to modern interpretation. We can note within his corpus other (on the surface) outmoded Hitchcockian psychological depictions—the Freudian terms of “acute melancholia with a guilt complex” for Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie in Vertigo, or the split-personality trope for Norman Bates in Psycho (which I’ve long thought is much more useful as a sort of playful mythologizing, for gothic horror-movie purposes, than as anything educational within the field of psychology).

But the old-fashionedness of these are beside the point as—showing his staying power—Hitchcock generally sets up more general, phenomenologically spelled-out issues of psychology: dramatic and language patterns that allow people to wonder about, and discuss, what X pattern means today, how it relates to their lives according to the current “orthodoxy” defined by the more modern terminology and specific means of relating psychological theories to our lives. For instance, Vertigo is a good template for seeing and discussing a tangled intersection of love and fear of death, specifically in how a suicidal woman to whom we become deeply emotionally attached can leave us emotionally shattered if she soon dies, then we are apt to see the next best candidate for such an attachment as a replication of the first woman.

To me also, difficult mother-daughter relations are always interesting to observe and parse through in a movie, no matter how old-fashioned some facets of the depiction are now. This is partly because such relationships are complex and vary between families, and fitting a meaningful drama about one into a two-hour movie is hard, as one would imagine for any screenwriter and director. In this regard, we can still find interest in, and be touched by, the story of Marnie and her desiccated old mother (emotionally desiccated, that is, while Hitchcock makes allusions to others of his movies in Marnie such as Psycho, hinting at another, more literally desiccated mother, Mrs. Bates). Bernice Edgar, Marnie’s mother, generally well played by Louise Latham, looks in her dowdy way like someone who could have fit in with the Ed, Eunice, and Mama skits on the Carol Burnett Show, and sounds in her first appearance somewhat as if she is a stroke victim—with Southern accent (too heavy for Baltimore) and folksie idioms (e.g., something like “Well I just swore [?]…you take me to the limit…I can’t take all the jump-running you do”).

A “borderline personality” relationship is key

But in the early scenes with Marnie's mother, the family dynamic and mannerisms are set out clearly, and we see she and her relationship with Marnie comprise an example of what seems strikingly modern, which contributes to perhaps the most touching scenes in the movie: the emotionally repressed yet still needy old woman who can spout embittered generalizations about men and in her congealed woundedness and narcissism has built a castle (to live in) of excuses, well-worn self-justification, and control-of-others that has part of its foundations on her daughter’s heart, intruding on her daughter’s rights and emotional and even sexual life. At one point, typically, the mother reacts with explosive anger to the daughter’s acute perceptions of some aspect of their life; here, a crude parental mode of admitting reality bullyingly tries to deny the child’s more honest interpretation of this.

This set of phenomena is one way to describe a sort of “borderline personality” relationship (“BPD” = borderline personality disorder), with Marnie understood as the borderline person, and the mother as troglodytic parent: Marnie is a social deviant and sexually crippled partly because her mother is deriving her own sense of identity and security from colonizing her offspring’s life. The mother’s way of defining reality in certain stark terms, and almost hysterically reacting to the child’s ingenuous questioning of this, is part of a more general form of self-defense called “splitting.”

“Splitting” as a sort of quintessentially borderline symptom is looked at in a notable study that focused on the giftedness of borderline patients as figuring in these patients’ treatment by family members. In this following quote, splitting is not connected specifically with sexual abuse or intrusions: “The very nature of [a parent’s] pathological narcissism...includes primitive defenses [in the parent] that would be very disturbing[,] such as splitting with alternating mental states...” (Lee C. Park, John B. Imboden, Thomas J. Park, Stewart H. Hulse, and H. Thomas Unger, “Giftedness and psychological abuse in borderline personality disorder: Their relevance to genesis and treatment,” Journal of Personality Disorders 6, no. 3 [1992]: 236.)

In Marnie’s case, as we see at the end of the movie, the central value along which a kind of “splitting,” or more exactly in this case a standard by which to fight against some aspect of life, is that of being “decent,” which the mother says she wanted Marnie to grow up to be, and Marnie admits ruefully that that is the case (with “decent” being understood along the lines of “chaste”): Marnie is a thief and a liar, she says, but she is “decent.”

Granted, the movie’s depiction of Marnie and her relationships is not a classic example of a BPD sufferer; but it comes close enough that, despite its heavy-handed or old-fashioned way of conforming with it, it gives us a good example of a kind of person and especially her family nexus that we can use in assessing later examples within movies that come closer to the more typical, and clinically understood, instances of this complex and sad phenomenon. (I believe no other movie by a major director handled this kind of topic up through 1964.)

Further, how Mark Rutland is attracted to Marnie (similarly to Scottie being attracted by Madeline in Vertigo) echoes one quintessential feature of how borderline people can attract the deep sympathy/empathy of others: “[T]he most striking personality feature [of borderline patients] is...particularly their ability both to access and then to strongly influence our private emotions, [which in turn] engender[s]...classical ‘countertransference problems/“special” treatment relationships’...” (Park et al., 233). With this last quote, you can hop over the technical term of “countertransference” and probably have an intuitive understanding of “ ‘special’ treatment relationships.’”

(These patterns of interpreting such personalities will become relevant in looks at other movies in this two-part blog entry.)

In any event, the mother as someone to behold with a sort of awe, as someone both to look at askance and to want to further understand later, is established early on: after the mother has talked to Marnie who has just woken from a bad dream, and Hitchcock lingers with black humor on how the dry old woman stumps with her bad leg down a shadowed stairway, we rather laugh with him, as if you can’t help but ponder the drollness of this person. She becomes more human only at the end of the movie, when she admits to her sordid past.

A movie’s technical sides help deliver the message

Marnie also shows how a director is immeasurably aided by his production team: not just Herrmann, whose score here is more successful in its “spooky-experience” phases (how he combines instruments with exquisite taste for certain particular emotional effects, such as a wily melody for strings, woodwinds, trumpets [?], and flute for “nightmare music,” is always remarkable). But also involved are director of photography (“DP”) Robert Burks and editor George Tomasini, both of whom would be dead within a few years—and who had been central to Hitchcock’s production team through most of his most accomplished movies, starting in the 1950s. Marnie was the last movie made by this team under Hitchcock, and it gets its technically well-built quality from this.

Overall, a movie with much more to recommend it than what flaws in has in technical contrivances, story oddities, and a strange shape to the narrative in terms of its tonal shifts.

           

Marnie takeaway: dinosaur of a movie shows troubled mother-daughter emotional nexus; story mood is echoed by dramatic music and other movie techniques; the big challenge of crafting such a movie is illustrated.

2. The education of Rosemary Woodhouse

It’s hard to believe that the releases of Marnie and Rosemary’s Baby were only about four years apart. They seem from quite different eras. Moreover, Hitchcock seemed to embody the principle of requiring actors to conform to the prerogatives of where his camera was going (as Janet Leigh said he basically told her to do in Psycho) while Polanski preferred to have his camera follow the actors if they were moving dynamically, even if this required use of a hand-held camera—and of course Polanski is one of the directors (Orson Welles is another) who exemplify the beginning of more modern film-making with this by-now ubiquitous technique. Yet Polanski in his crafting a modern-day horror film, in this his first American work, was compared by critics to Hitchcock.

           

Rosemary’s Baby may seem quaint to include in my rather arbitrary thematic collection of films for a couple reasons; one is that the way she is a young woman dealing with a problem embodies this in a rather gothic/pulp sense—she has been impregnated by the Devil. I should point out that, strange as it may seem, I have never really believed in the Devil; I’ve always felt it was a superfluous concept. I believe in evil in a fundamental (if not quite theological) sense; bad motives, damagingly sick people and political systems, yes. But not a goat-eyed fellow who, as in this movie, looks like a Halloween mask….

           

This was a movie to cater to audiences including many blue-collar types, the World War II vets and their children; not only Roman Catholics, but one would presume others of a more religious stripe were addressed in this admittedly genre movie, but also in connection with a general sense of fear at what was becoming of society and the world: by early 1968, you had the Vietnam War deepening; the Cold War ongoing; recent riots in Watts and other areas; young demonstrating in the streets…and people really felt it was a genuine question, not just a pretension of Time magazine to ask on its famous cover, “Is God Dead?,” which the movie glimpses in a waiting room toward its end.

           

However its catering to a sense of a shaken, traditionalist-minded electorate seems passé now, this movie is still relatable—just as its theological, story-serving premise can be “embraced in willing suspension of disbelief”—as a story of a young, rather naïve, idealistic woman coming to grips with insidious and profound lack of credibility in her very husband and in the small, new community she is within—including two eccentric neighbors, the elderly Castevet couple, Roman and Minnie (the latter played flavoredly by Ruth Gordon).

This movie is also exquisitely well crafted, situating its supernatural shenanigans within a credible and well-portrayed domestic environment and lifestyle. Polanski himself tried to fashion the movie so that people could read it as suggesting Rosemary Woodhouse was merely becoming mentally ill (as a function of pregnancy, not unlike such more recently established medical conditions as postpartum depression and the like), rather than having really been impregnated by the Devil, though her increasing paranoia is for the Castevets’ and their witches’ coven taking her baby for a ritual use, before she finds the baby itself in its black-draped crib.

In this regard the movie is quite like Kubrick’s The Shining, making a supernatural “wormhole” of horrors spill its “treasure” amid the most placid of domestic settings; I think Rosemary’s Baby is better for its quiet, competent craft, while The Shining, as much as I like re-viewing it, is, as one critic has recently said, “engineered.” Rosemary’s Baby movie could also be considered the first real movie of the seventies, before Five Easy Pieces and its ilk; it deals with how we can’t trust any of the infrastructure of middle-class (or local-society) life that we’ve long relied on without complaint. It could be considered an East Coast companion of Polanski’s other great paranoia movie, the West Coast Chinatown (1974), perhaps one of the very greatest movies on the subject of (putative) almost-bottomless American sleaze, which is all the worse for the moral perversion of the character of Noah Cross.

           

Not to be superfluous in discussion of a movie that is probably familiar to most movie lovers, I should point out that Mia Farrow is really what makes this movie, both as an engrossing story and as a testament to cinematic craft, interesting still after all these years. Only about 22 at time of shooting, which was during the fall of 1967 and early winter of 1967-68 (amid which her husband more than twice her age, Frank Sinatra, served her with divorce papers, and before she went briefly to Rishikesh, more or less in league with The Beatles and others in February 1968), she seems almost otherworldly as a redheaded waif of sorts, at least half Irish (her father, I understand, was from Australia, perhaps explaining her odd accent here).

Her performance is pitch-perfect at almost every turn. We all manage to relate to such an elf, because her story is really one of what to me is the real payoff: not the point of seeing her child in her crib, making her widen her eyes in horror; but being brought to progress inexorably to a sort of adult stand from a lingeringly pious young woman who in a hypnagogic dream (half awake and half dreaming), shaken by the recent suicide of a new neighbor, recalls a time of being apologetic to a nun or such regarding a Catholic-school mishap. Where she progresses to is steely resolve to get to the bottom of finding what was done with her baby, and ending up spitting in the face of her husband (the sometimes disingenuous-lizard Guy, played earthily by John Cassavettes) when he preposterously reminds her, “We’re getting so much in return, Ro.” In short, the unexpected goal of her education, as she is seemingly childlike in a nightie, is to stand up to the appalling perfidy of her husband.

(Which of course is only one component of the predicament she ends up in; the other might end up being, what kind of school to send a child who is half devil?)

I personally enjoy the movie because it seems to give me a window of memory into a past; such things as the New Year’s party remind me of something vaguely similar I was at as a child in about late 1967. And testifying to Polanski’s important focus on details, my seeing Guy taking his phone call about fellow actor Donald Baumgart’s going blind, while he is holding a can of what looks like turpentine, reminds me that, at one time, artists and white-collar types once (without embarrassment) used hand tools and do home fix-up and remodeling, as my father certainly did. (Well, some still do, but you hardly, if ever, see it in movies today, styled as if it were admirable.)

Also to be noted is that this movie escapes being a piece of schlock in an interesting way: longtime director and producer William Castle, who was noted for making second-rate horror movies like House on Haunted Hill, complete with cheesy promotional gimmicks like “Emergo” and so on, produced Rosemary’s Baby. He is glimpsed in a cameo as the old man with a cigar outside the phone booth toward the movie’s end. He may have wanted to direct the movie, but legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans had Roman Polanski direct—a key move, for history (not just of this movie)—with Castle producing.

In light of this, the only hokey scene is when the movie’s underlying premise of the Devil fathering the child comes to the fore, with the christening party or whatever it is at the end. Appropriately punctured by moments of humor, this scene still seems preposterous enough (except, again, for Farrow’s keen performance) that you’re left feeling that Vincent Price, an old hand in Castle’s previous movies, might come sauntering in, with an epicene bisexual mince, in a lime-green sport jacket that would allow him to vie with Sidney Blackmer (Roman Castevet) for king of the tacky bon vivant suit. Fortunately for us all, this doesn’t happen.

The movie might strike today’s young as a quaint snapshot of old times with boxy cars and glimpses of hippie-ish values at a party, but Mia Farrow’s Rosemary is still an artist’s model of young-female moral growth.

Rosemary’s Baby takeaway: a waif of a woman can be the true hero within a domestic context, as she descends into paranoia while pregnant, and ends up justified by the movie’s facts. Craft depicts a solid domestic scene that makes a hidden abomination all the more startling.

3. A seminal modern psych film, with a misogynist element: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

This movie can be called the granddad of the modern psychiatric-treatment film, and of related films that can be grouped under the rubric “critical personal-problem films.” These two groups can be said to encompass some of the films in Part 2 of this set of reviews. Since Cuckoo’s Nest is so famous, and many people seem to have an opinion on it, any “explication for the uninitiated” is superfluous, so I thought I’d offer a few select opinions on it, some of which address what I think are misunderstandings about the film, and this largely to orient my comments on later films in Part 2.

It’s good that people are led to understand the issues and concepts of psychology and psychiatry as life leads them there, either because of developing their own problems or because they have a family member who has problems. But along with the helpful enlightenment of spread knowledge, there also is an increased likelihood of misconceptions, some of which square with the observation (mine) that says, “Give people a little science, and they go to hell with it.”

For instance, some people today, well-meaning in want to hew to the “straight and narrow” in treating their loved one who has a psychological problem to the point of long-term disability, will harshly criticize this film because of how it depicts ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, or as it’s commonly called, “shock therapy.” To me, this is one of the least of the problems with the film; actually, Randle Patrick McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, is subjected to a lobotomy by the end of the film, and it’s amazing that I hear no one among the film’s detractors comments about that.

Of course, in the film, the ECT is applied bilaterally (which I think is not typically done today), and the portrayal of its effect on Randle, played well within the dramatic objectives of the film, makes it seem as if he was subjected to some Nazi or Soviet torture. For one thing, modern ECT is applied with general anesthesia, so there is no convulsing or the sense of extreme pain conveyed by Nicholson. And, as the movie takes place in about 1961 (note the radio-news item about, I believe, the Berlin Crisis in one scene), was ECT applied so barbarically then? I don’t know, but in any event the movie was taking an artistic liberty in making it seem, first, that ECT was not much better than today’s water-boarding, and second, that it could be used as if it was punishment (which typically, of course, it isn’t).

I figure, you can remove the ECT scene from the movie, and you can still have a powerful movie that has an impact, and conveys something still useful today, yet has a tendentious quality to it.

The movie (1975) was based on a novel, published in 1963, that I would suggest today is more notable for its misogyny than anything else. The mental hospital in which we, and McMurphy, find ourselves is where men in drab hospital patient-costumes and in drab surroundings are treated to therapy that seems to drill in on men’s sex lives, in close to if not exactly a demeaning way. The group therapy, such as it is, is led by a Nurse Mildred Ratched (note the phonetic similarity to “rat shit”), who is most distinguished for her coldness and bureaucratic firmness.

The story combines this with having a sort of fun-loving sociopath, McMurphy, trying to show these poor souls how to live more, even if (as he later finds) he has been involuntarily committed (for his own good, of course) while most of the others are not (they are voluntarily admitted). Thus you have an allegory of what society has become: men in an admittedly sick condition, humiliated by women in a squalid facility, where only the free-spirit sociopath (with the dirty-picture playing cards) can show them some way out. I am not making fun of this, really; I am summing it with the pitched satirical quality it has. Further, McMurphy doesn’t just teach the others how to be more epicurean, but how to have a little more courage in standing for themselves against the system, so to speak.

           

All this conforms with the 1960s-70s idea of the “allegedly insane person being more sane than society (which has become inherently sick),” which is a theme of the celebrated novel Catch-22 (one of my favorite novels) and an idea promulgated, but in a different setting and with a different professional intent, by Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing.

Cuckoo’s Nest is very much an allegory of its time. It’s still interesting as a cultural artifact showing what, in a movie, could be done (or what some tried to do) to convey an idea of deriving meaning in life while plagued by a hideously declined society, by means of a sad story with men treated unfairly in a psychiatric hospital. Those who are familiar with today’s professional psychiatric standards can probably play a dangerous party game of taking a gulp of beer every time they see in this movie a lapse in professional standards. Expect to get sick-drunk.

(By the way, the man who plays the dark-suited doctor who interviews McMurphy was a real psychiatrist at Oregon State Mental Hospital [whatever its title was], who was still alive, in his eighties, in 2005 when I last researched this movie online. He didn’t have a problem with much of what was done in the movie, though he did object to one portrayal of something. Also, William Redfield, who plays the stuffy Harding, was supposedly diagnosed with cancer during filming of the movie, and died shortly after; the movie is dedicated to his memory, I believe.)

If there’s a primary lesson I would want to convey with this, it’s that, as I feel with all of my own writing as well as in educational lectures I’ve arranged locally, cultural works about mental illness should be about more than just that. And I think all the best such art is. Hamlet isn’t just about melancholy (depression). Lolita isn’t just about (as people would find especially horrifying today) a middle-aged man’s rhapsodizing sexual interest in a minor. And so on.

Cuckoo’s Nest, at its best, and put in the most banal terms, is about finding healthy meaning wherever you can; and that even an apparent wildman like McMurphy can help his putatively healthier (or more average), but benighted, fellows in this regard.

Cuckoo’s Nest takeaway: story of antihero with gusto amid men in psych hospital, in fable-like nightmare situation of humiliation by women functionaries, may reflect its angry-1970s times, but can still harbor a theme of edifying optimism.

[Hopefully to come:] 

Part 2: Stories of immersion in personal instability or growth

[this list will probably change]

Thirteen (2003), Girl, Interrupted (1999), White Oleander (2002), Rachel Getting Married (2008), Black Swan (2010)

Update on projects in flux or “garaged”

[This entry is subject to editing, as my plans change and/or if there are errors below. See important update in May 31, 2012, entry.]

Within the past several days, I see, Google Books has changed info in its page for The Folder Hunt to reflect that the latest publication date (which I entered into BowkerLink) is June 2012. That would seem to be good news (for you), but this is in a qualified fashion, as far as I am concerned.

I have been in the process of seeing what kind of production format I can best put this book into, to make it most suitable to readers and to my conception of how I wanted to present it. I am within the home stretch of having a workable format, different from what I’d originally wanted (and definitely not amenable to ebook formatting). (Also, its new format may conform well with what I need to register the book with the Copyright Office.) And ironically, this new format may actually be better for readers, to allow for a less cluttered reading experience.

Big price of Folder Hunt?

But it turns out this new format dictates a likely price (which would also include state tax and mailing costs) that some, who want an E-Z ebook at $0.99 or similar bargain-basement price, might find appalling: $40-45 per copy. I wish it could be less; and believe me, this price doesn’t leave a lot of room for profit. Note that the novel per se is about 62,240 words. The format of the whole thing can be described in a sort of brochure that I would request prospective buyers to ask for before deciding on buying the book. This conforms with my idea of about 2009-10 that no one could buy the book who heard details about it only on the Internet. “Prospectus” information would inform buyers and allow them to make a better choice. I would request that you send a #10 SASE, and I would mail you the info. If you’re agreeable, you can then buy the book.

(By the way, part of the reason for the price involves number of pages. The actual number of pages of the most essential part of the book is 161, which almost exactly squares with the Google Books info of 160 pages. But another ~120 pages accounts for the unexpected way I had to deal with one aspect of the production. But don’t worry—for $40, you wouldn’t be paying merely for added paper; value comes with what added copy is on those additional ~120 pages. But what I might be able to do is offer two editions, in an informal way; there’s the primary one, the ~281-page whole, to which the original ISBN would apply; but I could offer the 160 “torso” for less money as an alternative. Stay tuned.)

However, I feel that the package might best be sweetened with one or two “extras”— which actually some might find more intriguing than the old Folder Hunt.

A moment for defense: Why would you pay $40-45 for a self-published tome of an old novel that was, essentially, left in a drawer for about 25 years? Well, this is not merely some genre slag coughed up by a yokel into amateurish ebook form, with it making some high-seller list on Amazon a week later. This edition (1) shows how some of us who aimed to write some kind of literary work back in the more analog/vinyl-LP days of about 1985 tried to do work; (2) the contrast of me a generation older commenting on my work as a 23-year-old may seem interesting, not least for my having decades of experience in the publishing world since then; (3) various features of personal life (which include types of spectacles of being at a big college, such as many of us can relate to), which inspire facets of the work, are noted in annotations, which show how we draw from life in doing creative writing, and a quarter-century later, the memories of that old life may seem at least as intriguing as the creative writing from that time. So you actually get more than a young man’s work; you get a work reflecting changes that come with life and historical accident, a sort of nostalgic and elegiac collection of “feathers” added to the droll “Mardi Gras costume” of an old, self-conscious work. PLUS, if all that doesn’t tickle you, the extras might be what really makes the whole mess worthwhile for some people, provided I can produce them economically within a palatable price range (my inner editorial Neanderthal and my marketing ape are going to be at loggerheads).

Possible extra: ‘agents, then and now’

One type of extra may be a mini-essay that reflects on the business angles of getting a trade book published—“then and now.” In fact, the already-drafted preface of The Folder Hunt includes a story about a disappointing literary agent I dealt with in 1986-87. But some more general remarks can be made, drawing on a wider range of experiences and making broader inferences. For instance, I grant that the world of literary agents has changed in the past 25 or so years. I hear all the “smart-money” tips and warnings—fine. That world has changed. But some things I hear just show me how things have not changed for the better. For instance, you hear about a “slush pile” that literary agents are now expected or assumed to have. A literary-agent slush pile? This makes me laugh. It used to be, around 1985, that not everyone needed an agent to get a trade book published. Agents were selective; they took only some of the writers of trade books (and they may have defined the writers they would take in different ways, as to their artistic value or likely business success). You may have considered yourself lucky to get an agent, and may have done better in starting your career for getting one. But it wasn’t essential for all writers of trade books. Who had the slush piles? Editorial offices of the trade publishers. That’s where the beginning writers, the amateurs, and plenty of others sent their queries and samples that may have ended up in slush piles. Since agents were selective, the idea that they had slush piles would have seemed ludicrous. Editors at the trade houses—the poor editorial assistants—were the hands-on gatekeepers weeding through the stuff that came in the mail. No longer. Agents do that now. And if beginning writers think that that’s all the worse for agents seeming inherently too oriented just to the money side of things, well, that has been an inherent part of being a literary agent all along anyway. And today, it can be said that the center of gravity for beginners feeling they’ve arrived as an author is the book deal, after landing an agent; it isn’t actually writing a good story worth crafting, as it used to be (in part because you worked with this story for some time before you actually landed any sort of publishing prospect).

Add to these general observations the fact that The Folder Hunt, which I’ve felt for many years is a second-rate (at best) work of mine, actually got a response—more than one communication, actually—from an editor at Doubleday when I entered it in a contest Doubleday held in 1985, and you have an old “side story” worth telling. Having an editor respond as she did (even if, before long, you could see she was being nice) was encouraging stuff for a beginning author in those days.

Anyway, that’s a taste of what one “extra” might be.

And all this I try to shape up—pending my ironing out some personal affairs that may make this the last product of its kind I can offer for some time.

So, this is to say the book seems to be definitely on its way (I have about four months to see if this prospect is truly workable, before the “pub date”), but don’t bet the ranch on it. I will inform you if it gets canceled or not. (All this was potentiated, you might say, by the Folder Hunt bibliographic info turning up on Google Books last October. So—we try to be pragmatically constructive while realistic within personal-brushfire limitations.)

As for other titles:

First Love, which is mentioned on my LinkedIn page, remains unready for release. It is meant only to be about small-time publishing as I knew it through about 2000. I think it would definitely be more interesting than Professional Help, but there are a few key sections that need work, and in any event I am satisfied with not working on it at this point.

I have said in the past that it would be good if First Love reflected an area of the media I became more involved with from 2001 through recently, medical advertising, but that is best addressed in a separate work (or other forum).

Second Thoughts (or the edition The Representative) is not slated to be finished very soon; the version available online now (viewable via my LinkedIn page, with link at the first blog entry below) seems sufficient for people to see.

Duel (1971-72), Spielberg’s grubby road/fear movie & journeyman work

It’s important for serious movie critics, amateur and professional alike, to come to terms with Steven Spielberg, because of his success in financial terms, influence, and esteem in certain quarters. He has been discussed voluminously by many more qualified to do so than I, and in any event there’s no space here for me to cover a lot of his oeuvre.

One reason I do this entry now, in addition to the merits of the movie in question, is that I am one admirer of his who has to express disappointment in some of his recent cinematic works. War Horse and, of less interest (to me), The Adventures of Tintin—neither of which I’ve seen (the reviews told me enough)—show his catering to family audiences—i.e., to a sort of almost willfully naïve mentality. This sort of directorial aim is especially noticeable (in the longer view of his career) in the watershed (and likable) E.T. (1982), the Indiana Jones stuff (1981 and after), and the forgotten likes of Hook (about 1991), among other works. This quality, along with whatever other beefs, leaves some movie lovers regarding him as something of a hopeless lightweight, a sort of Paul McCartney among major movie directors.

Spielberg’s illustrious career leads to a recent swerve to sentimentality

I quickly point out that he is the only director who can attract the breadth of audiences he does who also has creditably treated the Holocaust (Schindler’s List, 1993), the American slave trade (the less effective Amistad, 1997), and World War II (Saving Private Ryan, 1998) and made other intelligently adult films like the dense, dystopian Minority Report (2002), the relatively earthy Catch Me If You Can (2002), and the underappreciated A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). Sure, his cinematic technique can be glib, but he can also be elegant, and generally he does a good job to, when he wants, shape difficult subjects for middle-class audiences willing to grapple, on occasion, with more serious fare.

A.I. was really Stanley Kubrick’s final film, because its general treatment (plot outline and many conceptual and design features) was developed by Kubrick; only the final details-setting script was written by Spielberg. Hence it is another occasion to note that, in 2001, a couple years after Kubrick’s death, when Spielberg (figuratively speaking) joined forces with the formidably existentialist and some-would-say-bleak Kubrick, he showed what an adult (if mixed-tones) film he could make.

But what a difference 10 years and all the past decade’s shocks to the U.S. financial, social, and cultural system make, along with other reasons to assess the marketplace. When in 2010, Spielberg executive-produced the remake of True Grit, a film by Kubrick’s arguable heirs as a Jewish, sophisticated, dry-eyed, and prolific directorial force, the Coen brothers, I found this film (based on a generally funny story) to be interesting and admirable in some ways but still lacking, in part due to the Spielberg influence: this latter includes a sort of sentimental repetition of close-ups of a cutie-face (teen star Hallee Steinfeld), as if the producer/marketing thinking was that a cool, droll western is best digested by the masses with a doll-like face repeatedly posed amid the tumbleweeds like a religious icon or comfort food. Another pandering feature was the unobtrusive but still noticeable computer processing of the photography (such as in the early, prologue glimpse of Chaney riding away, and later panoramic scenes—the first broad use of photo conditioning used by the Coens since O Brother, Where Art Thou? [2000]).

In short, this movie had something of a general smoothing over, though the Coens’ characteristic crisp editing and mischievous humor, and cinematographer Roger Deakins’ trademark clinically high-fidelity photography, remain. Another compromise is versatile composer/musical director Carter Burwell’s score; his taste for the Coens’ work is usually so good that it surprises me that the True Grit score is his most bland and forgettable for the Coens that I am aware of.

The movie as an overall result is a sort of meal that was like the kind of puts-hair-on-your-chest satiric “roughage” that you expect from the Coens adulterated by a sweet, heavy cream (the Spielberg touch) put on top. I much more liked the Coens’ previous film, the smaller-scope, funny, and vivid A Serious Man (2009), which, as a good ethnically centered story does, clearly shows the universal relevance beyond the parochial.

In short, however you want to criticize these cultural times, it seems Spielberg hasn’t done a good adult film since at least the flawed but interesting Munich (2005), and I can lightly nod my head if people were to respond to War Horse with another, “There again goes Spielberg, squandering his talents on being a family-friendly Peter Pan.” His Lincoln (forthcoming), which I understand will star the excellent actor Daniel Day Lewis, could turn out to be a glib catechism, unless Day Lewis tears it up, but in nice-guy Lincoln style, with somewhat the virtuosity of his Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York or Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood.

Yet Spielberg had his young-greaseball days

One might ask, Did Spielberg ever do a low-budget, gritty, somewhat pessimistic film, like an dirtbag budding auteur, as did such directors as Coppola, Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and others who did dues-paying apprentice work with the cinematic chop-shop owner Roger Corman? Did Spielberg ever do basic ’70s paranoiac, genre stuff, made on a wing and a prayer, that nevertheless stays in a viewer’s memory? Yes, he did—and it’s an interesting film.

Duel was first made as a TV film (produced by Universal, and of course not associated with Corman--making Spielberg unusual among his generation of movie directors) and was shown on, I think, “ABC Friday Night at the Movies” or some such thing, in 1971. Later it was added to for theatrical release in Europe (1972). It might seem to the uninitiated, who are yet familiar with some stills from it, like The Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour—worth one watch, and then (unless you’re a true fan) you don’t care to see it again.

But I think Duel holds up over multiple viewings pretty well. Sure, it’s TV movie fare, but made when TV movies were built like some old GM cars—pretty sturdy, well-crafted, and serviceable as a product aimed at a solidly demotic market. This one is better than some of those Friday night horror movies made for TV that creeped us kids out at the end of a school week, but which today we can barely remember.

You might recall that Universal, a studio started in about the 1920s that carved out its niche as the home to monster movies like the ~1931 Frankenstein, by the 1950s was solidly regarded as a second- or third-rate studio (a sort of a “Chrysler” to the “Ford” and “GM” of Paramount and, arguably, Warner Brothers), yet it was still a place an actor could get respectable enough work. It was bought in about 1959 (here I’m probably muffing the story a bit) by agent Lew Wasserman and his company MCA, and then MCA tried to steer it toward its better fortunes through a mix of strategies like being the new home for Wasserman's client Alfred Hitchcock (until his death, it turned out) and yet, in selected ways, aimed to young audiences. At the same time, television movies could be a focus for a movie studio and not be mere dabbling in complete dreck.

By about 1971, you had a situation where an old esteemed director like Hitchcock, past his glory years yet still depended on by Universal to bring some profit and prestige to the company, could produce the interesting but not-tops political thriller Topaz (1969) on a big budget, which today seems in a way like a glorified TV movie; and the cold bit of Psycho-redux of Frenzy (1972). Meanwhile, other directors started in TV—Spielberg, in his early twenties, did one or more episodes of the show Columbo—and got their break doing something like Duel, which apparently impressed the Universal suits enough that Spielberg was allowed to film extra scenes to flesh the movie out into feature length, with which it got distributed in Europe. Duel, today, is regarded as the first notable film of the, of course, now legendary and influential Spielberg.

One could remark, or not, on what kind of baton was being passed, in a sense, when Universal served as a sort of crossroads for the “lion in winter” of Hitchcock and the young, promising Spielberg.

A simple story is given flesh by directorial technique

Based on a short story, and not containing much plot, the film concerns a sort of Everyman, David Mann, played by Dennis Weaver, a TV actor remembered mainly for the weekly Western McCloud but having played in two memorable films by notable directors—this one and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. He seems to combine a sturdy, unthreatening Western quality with the capacity to portray emotional distress without seeming effeminate. In Duel, Weaver is solid and relatable as Mann who is someone just trying to mind his business in an ugly red Plymouth Basic Crate (a Valiant [not a Reliant, as I first said]), driving soberly in desert locations to a distant business meeting. Then Mann’s routinely passing a grimy tanker truck, twice, apparently spurs the truck driver to start stalking, tailgating, and otherwise terrorizing him for the bulk of the rest of the movie. (Given the philosophic tenor of the times, “Mann” may have reminded some watchers of the existential idea of Man being “thrown” into his circumstances, and—I think Nietzsche said—needing to be like the camel in the desert who takes his burden and….)

The movie isn’t all road scenes with dust, exhaust, and sagebrush; one finely wrought sequence (by the movie’s own standards) is an extended scene in its middle, at a roadside diner/bar with several hicks as customers, regarding whom Mann fearfully wonders if one is the dreaded truck driver, whose truck he has suddenly noticed parked outside. The emotional turmoil of his character is handled in ’70s TV fashion, with voiceover representation of thinking to himself. But the absurdity of plotting out in nervous mental rehearsal how you want to apologetically, yet with bravado, approach someone who is trying to murder you as if you owe the person something is still gripping, even if it is part and parcel of a genre form of art.

(By the way, though this movie may leave some with a new fear of the big truck they see looming in their rearview the next time they’re on the interstate, I should point out that as a group, truck drivers are safer and more capable than passenger-vehicle drivers. They are responsible cowboys who know how to drive a stick-shift and are aware of what to try to do if air breaks fail.  The movie is mere whimsy, but a break from reality like glomming down a big bag of popcorn even if you know it isn’t healthy to do regularly.)

This storyline may seem insubstantial, but in its technique, this movie shows what a good director can do to keep an audience’s attention through feature film length: emotional connection—one of Spielberg’s trademarks, an everyday man with glimpses of his homely family early on; and suspense managed with careful editing, along with Spielberg’s more notable way of creating a mythology about something that otherwise might seem a bit mundane: here, a truck and its unseen but obviously menacing driver.

The truck (I have read) has a 1955 Peterbilt tractor; and obviously the tractor hauls a somewhat short fuel tanker; and overall, it looks like it was parked in a filthy deep-frier, and it appallingly spews out pre-pollution-controls exhaust like a Third World smelting plant gone haywire. Camera angles, even looking up at the truck’s undercarriage (a fact I appreciate as a fan of trucks when I was a kid), help make this machine impress as a sort of monster, a dinosaur without CGI (computer-generated imagery) tarting it up.

Duel suggests a prodigious career to come

Editing, camera placement, pacing, and even sound (though the sound editing tends to be rather sloppy in this movie), plus a soundtrack with figures alluding to Psycho and including other early-1970s but not too trite horror-type techniques—all help propel the story. In fact, not only does this movie show how much Spielberg could do with little on dusty roads, but his way of developing a mythology out of accident and grime show in his DVD commentary to Jaws, when he alludes to the useful example that Duel set. Here, he says that film producers originally envisioned Jaws as a sort of second Duel, a chase horror film, but with a shark as the “leviathan” instead of the truck.

The sheer occasional accidental nature of making a movie is shown in a couple ways here. When scenes were added for the 1972 release, one was what gave a vivid still or short-slip useful for promotion: the truck trying to push Mann’s car into the way of a train passing at a railroad crossing. For many years, I remembered this scene since first seeing a glimpse of it (from a commercial, in the 1970s, I think)—it was one thing that intrigued me to want to watch this creeper of a movie; but I was never able to see Duel until 2010, believe it or not (and that on a 1980s video). But I wasn’t too old to enjoy it.

Among other later additions was a somewhat lengthy scene featuring the world’s most blockheaded school-bus driver, who buttonholes Mann into giving his stalled (admittedly small) school bus a push (with the Plymouth Basic Crate!) to start it. The scene seems as if it was written on the spot. The truck, which had passed through a while before (unseen by the bus driver), returns like a good monster (with headlights flicked on in a dark tunnel as it comes into sight)—and, what do you know, as Mann hurries fearfully away in a cloud of dust, the truck does a U-y and gives the needed push to the bus, causing Mann, parked ahead, to pause quizzically. Which shows how Spielberg felt that a story was given a little more social redemption, and/or more characterization to the monster, if we saw the monster could be altruistic sometimes.

Which somewhat foreshadows Schindler’s List, showing the mixed motives (or cannily disguised goodwill of a Schindler) that could go on behind enemy lines.

But as an above-average thriller to kill a Friday or Saturday night, Duel may both fill the bill and surprise you with how it does it with little money and no CGI (though enough fuel and motor oil, given rare locations for fill-ups).

Briefer reviews to come of: Thirteen (2003), Girl, Interrupted (1999), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and perhaps Black Swan (2010), and other apropos movies, all in a combined set.

[Page edited 2/7/12; 2/17/12.]

Movie break: Making a stop to appreciate The Station Agent (2003)

[This may seem a little long, but it is carefully made. If it is still too long for you, as Jim Carrey's character Ace Ventura said in Ace's first movie, “Why don’t you cry about it, Saddlebags.”]

The independent movie The Station Agent (2003) merits a few observations, not simply because part of it (at a picturesque railroad depot) was filmed about 25 minutes from my home.

Isn’t New Jersey just a small state geographically, loaded with more than its fair share of pompous loudmouths than any other U.S. state? Isn’t New Jersey more of an urban or semi-urban area (and tract housing) than anything else, with little in terms of natural wonders, or history, culture, or tradition tied to geological resources? Isn’t it a lifeboat of sorts overloaded with too many of the more banal versions of de Tocqueville’s assessment of Americans as “eager, anxious men of small property”?

In more recent years, when considering leaving the state for good, I have thought of New Jersey and its negatives as being like a rather unhealthily lumpy bed: you need to get into something else lest it do you harm after a while, but you’re too used to it to think of living anywhere else.

New Jersey may seem a hard place to appreciate in the sense that one’s home “province” is an evocative environment that can appeal to a broad array of outsiders, insofar as it can mean a lot in terms of the world of culture and values that we carry around with us no matter where we live after we leave our hometown or home state. If we’re from England or Greece, or Chile, we carry some of the culture in which we grew up as well as some of the long colorful histories of those places, wherever we live later. And whatever the New Jersey environment with its “immanent” culture and values is, how do we depict it in art?

A film limns a novel association of strangers

The Station Agent is a quietly realistic and comic film released in 2003, made in 2002-03, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, previously (and still?) an actor, whose parents (as far as I know) live in Union County, N.J. The film’s locations are towns mostly in Morris County and nearby locations—picturesque locations that suggest a rural area with remnants of old-time railroad business. The main focal setting is an old train depot that, per the movie’s obviously fictional story, is inherited, and moved into, by a young man named Finbar McBride, played by Peter Dinklage, an actor with (today) various films on his resume and who is originally from Mendham, in Morris County.

Dinklage’s being a dwarf provides a dimension to Finbar’s story that seems almost tastelessly obvious from a certain sensationalistic aspect, which is exploited a bit in the story (such as how passersby crassly joke about him on the street). On the other hand, this feature provides a launching pad for more subtle observations that serve the story’s more sincere purpose, which centers on how newly dislocating life circumstances, which give cause for grief, impel us to both new positives and new negatives, according to the circumstances and to our character.

The story is not so much about a dwarf from a city area—Hoboken—where he didn’t quite fit in either, who moves to a romantically railroad-featuring rural area where he makes do while still seeming like a fish out of water. It is, rather, about the balance of a need for solitude on the one hand and social engagement on the other (even if this latter happens accidentally and with mixed results), or about the two-edged sword that intertwining suffering and solitude is. And this happens with two, or possibly all three, of the main characters. Early in the story, Fin is both grieving the loss of his friend and employer Henry, who runs the hobby shop in which Fin works and dies early on; Henry is who willed the train depot to Fin.

Then, Fin meets Olivia Harris (played by Patricia Clarkson), this by happenstance (one of the few hokey points in the story, featuring Olivia’s comically careless driving). She is a middle-aged woman who is still grieving the loss of her young child, two years after his death, while enduring a strained relationship with her husband, from whom she is separated. Olivia “self-medicates” with alcohol and prescription drugs while seemingly dilettantish in working on art in her lakeside getaway home, and Fin makes the rounds of his new hometown, in the way someone newly grieving can go through mundane motions even while trying to become acquainted with a new home. His preference is to have his solitude in the depot to which he seems somewhat exiled.

These two grieving people, challenged to balance the salving value of solitude with the value of social involvement that happens along, are complemented by the third major character, Joe Oramas (I’m unsure if this is the correct spelling; played by Bobby Cannavale, recently the focus of noted stage work in the New York metro area). Joe is a complement to these two despite his seeming joie de vivre that is consonant with his extraverted Cuban nature and insistently ingratiating urban-flavored bonhomie (he is from Manhattan). Joe is himself in exile because of having to man his father’s hotdog-vending truck, parked as it happens a short distance away from Fin’s depot.

Not quite as much as Fin or Olivia, he is grieving in his own way, dealing with the vexations of caring when he can for his father, who has some unnamed serious illness. By being in physical proximity to Fin and being the street vendor who serves “café con leche” to such random patrons as Olivia who freely stops by him, Joe is in a good position by virtue of observation and his more sociable manner to become an enabler of spontaneous, ad hoc, how-can-it-hurt social relations between the three characters.

This leads to all of them enjoying the best each has to offer in passing mutual support—the type that newly acquainted strangers can give each other when recognizing a new sense of bereftness in each other—as well as to them eventually rubbing each other the wrong way, due to their respective different styles and inclinations in suffering what each is suffering. Things climax in relation to Olivia’s making a suicide attempt in response to the news of her husband’s opting to have another baby, at which Fin, after being persistent about trying to maintain his social connection with a newly withholding Olivia, plays a key role in getting her help.

The story has a range of supporting players, notably a young local librarian, Emily, played by Michelle Williams and a black schoolgirl, Cleo, played by Raven Goodwin (herself from Washington, D.C., and an actor with only one other film under her belt at the time), who has her own naïve but supportive way with Fin.

A movie’s mythical distortions? New Jersey as a melting pot, and the real Newfoundland

Those who don’t live in New Jersey and who look at the scenery of the film in its railroad-related settings and occasional early-twentieth-century housing, and think this milieu seems more like the Midwest or West than New Jersey, might think it is rather implausible that a motley crew of a dwarf, a city type like Joe, a black girl like Cleo, and miscellaneous others could be jumbled together in one local community. But this isn’t a bad symbol of what New Jersey is like.

Actually, the real Newfoundland is a mere hour’s drive from New York City, which amount of time is a good commute for some people in this town and surrounding areas, and there certainly is a variety of people in terms of backgrounds in an area like this: (1) people who grew up here, (2) transplants from the city or more developed suburbs, (3) some who dress like what city denizens might call hicks, and (4) so on. And as what some might regard as a sort of resort, places not far from Newfoundland fit the bill: areas of Jefferson Township and large parts of nearby Sussex County all started as, or were near to, resorts or developments for summer housing for people whose main homes were nearer to, or in, the city.

Even today, the picturesque countryside in northwestern New Jersey still serves as a “Western-like” getaway for city dwellers, for whatever purpose, whether an invigorating snowboarding afternoon in January at the small-bore ski resorts in Vernon Township, or a water-park day trip in the summer. Or (longer-term) it can contain a new home for whatever real-life correlates of Fin there may be, or more average middle-class types who move to the area from more expensive areas closer to the city, hoping to gain from the perceived lesser expense,

Director McCarthy’s films feature odd setup, with fine payoff; and grand improvisation

The first two films McCarthy has directed contain a setup that is a bit implausible—The Station Agent isn’t too bad in this regard. Meanwhile, The Visitor (2008) has an odder setup, though I hasten to say that like The Station Agent, it is a film that is quietly dramatic to the point of a tone poem, while it gives a good flavor of the walkabout texture of white-collar people’s life in New York and was an occasion for lead actor Richard Jenkins’ deserved Oscar nomination. In The Visitor, the ultimately appealing illegal-alien characters are (plot-wise) artificially brought into Jenkins’ professor’s life by having been fraudulently rented his unused city apartment. But this set-up is a springboard for a more credible and a creditable look at human relations, in terms of how, in The Visitor’s world, character traits and consequential choices coupled with socioeconomic standing tend to condition and engender, as in the world of The Station Agent, more creative and supportive moves, and emotional enrichment, during an accidental association combined with mutual aid, especially in (again) a time of grief.

But The Station Agent makes even more of its rather bucolic setting, which not only contains the somewhat totemic railroad motifs that are associated with Fin’s avocation/love but also background greenery, lush late-summer cricket song, and the deep black of country summer nights. The general rural setting seems to trumpet that it is inevitably more of a palliative (and a sort of stimulating occasion for spontaneous social development) than an accidental home of insufferable hicks and suburban brick-heads.

What especially draws me to re-view The Station Agent isn’t simply how a well-made small-budget film can do so much with a promising story, and limited resources but a lot of production imagination and heart, but how it tries to make an evocative story “about the heart” out of local places in what some of us (even myself, at times) may consider the seemingly cold-hearted state of New Jersey.

For one thing, as movies so often do, this one “constructs” its fictional Newfoundland out of several actual New Jersey towns: the celebrated depot is actually in the small municipality of Newfoundland, and is viewable from the much-traveled State Route 23 (whose traffic can be glimpsed a bit in some shots in the movie), but other locations are in other towns. The library, which McCarthy mistakenly says in the DVD commentary is in Newfoundland, is in the small (also quaint) town of Hibernia, several miles away, down Green Pond Road, which is in real life the road that the depot is on (and is more viewable in the movie than is Route 23), not, per Joe Oramas’ fictional reference to it, up the road and where Olivia lives.

Some scenes were filmed in Rockaway Township and in Dover; Olivia’s house is in Lake Hopatcong. And other locations were used, one or more not in New Jersey (according to an Internet source and to the DVD commentary). The grade school that Cleo attends (and gets Fin to speak at) is located down

Green Pond Road

, in Rockaway Township. So the Newfoundland of the film may seem like a grander, more sprawling, more old-infrastructure-containing “town that time forgot” than it really is. (Also, there is no one railroad track on which you could walk directly from Hoboken to Newfoundland, as Fin seems to do early in the movie, to say nothing of how long it would take if such a  track existed.)

People from the real Newfoundland would understand this, knowing how movies construct realities, while they are probably flattered and tickled to see their township immortalized in a nationally distributed movie. It is interesting to me that the localities the movie uses, which I readily admit are picturesque, are synthetically sewn into a larger fictional entity. For my own purposes, fiction should have an important mimetic aspect; since I did my boldest work in 1986, the rare times I do fiction, I try to hew to reality as closely as possible, partly because I feel this gravitates the most to beauty that art should contain and also, from a more moral angle, is most apt to capture the reality, the beauty, complexity, and ambiguity, of human relations. The more you make your art follow the color and intricacies of real situations (some of which you can have a devil of a time piecing out), the better your art, and I think the better you are for it, both as an artist and as a person apart from your art.

Sumptuousness in a tiny-budget film

And do you think the movie makes New Jersey seem like, in its natural features, closer to the Philippines than it really is? I think The Station Agent, perhaps despite what Tom McCarthy wanted to capture, gets this aspect of the state, or this element of an esthetic strategy, down well. In sum, if I were to set a movie in New Jersey and make a point of depicting “place” in this state, I would have my own idea how to exercise fidelity to the real layout of things here. But I still overlook McCarthy’s not quite doing this, and I salute him for what he does do with place in this film on his own terms. I would say, “Yes, outsiders, you can accept as not far from valid a depiction of New Jersey as a riot of summer greenery and cricket song along with Western-like railroads; just don’t think, for instance, that there is a Newfoundland library a walk away from the real-life depot that is fictional Fin’s home, with Michelle Williams sitting for a cigarette break on the front steps.”

There was a lot more I said in a piece that was originally conceived as a print article, but I think I’ve said enough to recommend this film. Also, if you can get the DVD version, watch it not only without actor commentary, but then with. The three main actors (Dinklage, Cannavale, and Clarkson) are joined by director McCarthy in a fun and friendly burbling of comments that’s like having a group of cool friends over for a rousing movie night.

[Edited 2/22/12.]

Movie break: The Wicker Man (1973), a horror movie about values

[This is the first of occasional reviews of old movies that I’ll do, to take a break from the heavy breathing of such other stuff as you see on this blog. Such reviews will vary in length and editorial quality, but are all placed here to stir thought among the young about what makes older movies of value, not least among quirkier movies.]

There are two ways to look at how you might anticipate enjoying, or putting into perspective, this movie.

A personal angle (pardon me)

One is a sort of parochial way (which I describe not as the most orthodox of Christians). Say you, like me, look at Easter as the more profound of the most major Christian holidays. Christmas seems to have its profundity, sure, but Easter is really about what in the life story of Christ contains the most meaning. After all, if you read the Passion sections of the Gospels, you might agree this conveys far more about Christ than the birth in Bethlehem, the Three Wise Men, etc.

If you grant this point a minute, then what might you, like me, object to about how Easter is celebrated? To be sure, celebration of both Christmas and Easter is encrusted with pagan traditions and usages. Christmas has the tree, Santa, the elves, mistletoe—all tshotshkes [sp?] that are not mentioned in the Bible at all and that, of course, have their provenance in European pagan, or pre-Christian, rituals or beliefs.

But in my adult years, I find the pagan traditions still encrusted on Easter celebration to be more offensive. Christmas has long been a more polyglot, gone-to-excess holiday: it’s the end of the year, balance sheets are being totaled, the boss leaves special candy and other treats in the office kitchen, tacky music rubs you the wrong way at supermarkets, and decorations litter the malls: there’s always something like a vastly overdone, rather tasteless wedding about the American celebration of Christmas, and somehow we live with it (or at least suffer through it).

But Easter comes after often-tough winter, and bright growth of plants and flowers has started. It seems like a holiday where the events and décor can, or should, always be more focused and sensibly “on message."

But what do we find, which may turn us off in connection with the holiday after we have stopped being kids? Easter eggs. Chocolate bunnies. More gauche to me, Easter-egg trees (whose idea was that?). I don’t like it.

What movie can help us parse the pagan usages from the truly Christian side of Easter, to help us maybe disaffiliate ourselves from the pagan stuff forever, when it comes to appreciate of and celebration of Easter? (Not that this is why the movie was made.)

This may seem like a weird way to judge what a movie is about. But it does provide one way that this movie may seem relevant and “culturally salutary” despite what might strike modern audiences as its many offbeat, or quaint, or just weird features.

Exoticism by many people’s standards—but so hard to swallow?

But now check out this next way of assessing a movie, in terms of what might strike the average middle-class American moviegoer of today, especially the sniggering young.

Suppose a movie starts with a plane making a trip over rugged Scottish coastline, and the music starts as the one-chord, drone-appropriate type we associate with bagpipes, but this is played alienatingly on a synthesizer, and a female Scottish voice intones some age-old folksong. Then this “pious” Celtic “recital” segues rather abruptly, like a sudden gust of liberating warm wind, into a more modern folk-like music, finger-picking on an acoustic guitar with smooth male voice, which reminds us of the acoustic side of the rock group Jethro Tull, while visually we’re flying over a more lush, rich-crops-laden area (again, supposed to be on an island in chilly Scotland).

The movie then takes us into a weird investigation into a missing girl, the complaint about which came from this isolated island, conducted by a sincerely righteous fellow (if a martinet and a prig) of a Scottish police officer, played by the agreeable British actor Edward Woodward. He starts his probe right off a seaplane, among elderly Scottish men at a dock, some of whom sport the world’s worst teeth (not a point the movie meant to make, I think).

Later, as the police sergeant makes his way amid the infrastructure and somewhat inscrutable citizens of this cult-like society, we see the young actress Britt Ekland, playing a sexually licentious “landlord’s daughter,” singing a sort of mildly melancholy serenade while topless. And throughout the movie, we witness a host of pagan usages and icons turning up in increasingly unsettling fashion.

We are watching The Wicker Man, the 1973 version produced, anomalously, by the Hammer company, the British maker of horror films that not infrequently starred Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt, who both indeed turn up in this movie. Here, Lee sports longish hair, urbane manner, and now-ugly ’70s duds. (The reconstituted Hammer company was, by January 31 this year, covered in a New York Times Sunday edition. Meanwhile, Lee, in his eighties, had a role in the recently released American film Hugo.)

The descriptions I’ve made of a singing, bare-chested Ekland, etc., do not mean you are having a bad dream: this is a sort of horror movie of values, and I recommend it not only for its atmosphere, which might strike today’s young viewers as quaintly dated, but for the simple intellectual idea that it articulates as its main theme.

A film that almost disappeared, today alive and accessible, with relevance

This was a film whose distribution in the U.S., because of its non-general-audience aim, was considered by (let’s not underestimate him) Roger Corman, the low-budget indie-film director and producer. Corman later saved the day by possessing the only print of the long version that Wicker Man restorers needed after the original negatives had all been bizarrely discarded as fill for a highway project years before. If you can find a DVD of this movie, check out the “extra” documentary that details the fraught production, distribution, and afterlife of this movie (which includes a genteel set of comments by Mr. Corman, among many others)—putting this movie in a league with Apocalypse Now in terms of its colorful behind-the-scenes saga.

I’ve only seen the shorter version of The Wicker Man, which true fans lament as not the right one to view (indeed, in the short, initial-release version, the editing--demanded by producers who took over its finishing amid a change in company ownership in 1973--seems occasionally choppy within the first 25 minutes or so). But in either version, I think you would enjoy it if you wanted something different, and maybe memorable for its exoticism (both esthetic and thematic).

And not that it’s simply didactic, nor need you be concerned with any lesson about Christianity per se, when it comes to deciding on seeing it. Also, despite all I’ve revealed, there’s still a final emotional punch it packs that I’m not spoiling for you. Not that all art need have a social purpose, but this film helps you put into perspective not only, incidentally, what is pagan amid the springtime rituals of our celebration of Easter. But its own aim appears to be to ask, what makes a religion truly genuine: for instance, does it include trickery and murder?

This turns out to be a modern concern, for reasons I needn’t belabor.