rather have the blues

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

    There is a motif, in the Coens’ A Serious Man (2009), which greatly helps clear the way toward engaging the sensualist factors of Teshigahara’s enigmatic and important film, Woman in the Dunes. A physics professor has a family that rears up and bites him very hard. But there is one family member, namely, his adolescent daughter, Sarah, whose disturbance of the peace reaches us in a particularly pronounced way. Due to her younger brother’s stealing, in order to buy drugs, her money (obtained by stealing from her generally inattentive father), she proceeds to assail him on many occasions—amidst other complaints—ripping into a narrative flow not really about her. Invariably, she bursts through a doorway, gets into his face and discharges streams of insults and threats on the order of salty longshoremen, not suburban Minnesota schoolgirls. “You owe me twenty bucks, you little fucker! You fucking shit! Brat-Fucker!” is for her just a warm-up for kicks and haymakers and blood-curdling shrieks we soon find to derive from her cagily homicidal mother. Along the way we discover that this extreme heatedness stems from her quite murderous resolve to obtain funding for a nose job. Combined with those startling outbursts, that business with rhinoplasty casts light upon a register of sensibility being pursued by that puzzling movie. We’re carried into the Absurdist territory of Eugene Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros (with its characteristic inclusion of a less than stellar academic, the Logician). Absurdist theatre being a latter-day instalment of the avant-garde agitation known as Dada, and Dadaism being an important precursor of Surrealism (with its project of evoking the “more real” in the form of the more sensual), we can take a bead upon the Coens’ (only) apparent descent (in A Serious Man) into breathtakingly cutting anti-Semitism, along lines of Surrealist filmmaking, particularly that of Louis Bunuel and a film of his so closely allied to Sarah et al, namely, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

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Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

 Cleaving to the studious determinism of a novel by think tank player, Cormac McCarthy, the Coen brothers, in producing the film, No Country for Old Men (2007), give us a splendid—if difficult—taste of the libertarian vintages coming out of their own, less bruited, think tank.

    The West Texas locale (and it’s 1980), bristles with Vietnam War veterans, signing on and off to each other, and a law-component lamenting the apparently unprecedented hardness of sensibility that package has sent screaming through its erstwhile fetching, wide-open and quiet spaces. Shuffling through its midst, the worst bad-ass of them all (if statistics are to be honored), namely, “Chigurh,” provisioner of whole military cemeteries by himself, puts out a bit of thought-provoking give-and-take with a soft-spoken little guy running a convenience store in the middle of nowhere. Trying to make pleasant small-talk with the invasively sloe-eyed stranger, the quiet grandpa asks about the weather in Dallas (he having inferred that place from the customer’s plates [on a car that had in fact been stolen, from a driver losing much more than that]).The wispy-voiced crime wave hardens those eyes a shade, and asks with a soupçon of belligerence, “What business is that of yours? Is there something wrong with anything?” The low-critter on the food chain pauses with some malaise, but, appreciative of conversational flow, explains that he’s “just passin’ the time.” We notice with some surprise a bit of a pleasant smile coming across the face of a figure who has already—just minutes into the history—shown himself to be quite dazzlingly unpleasant. He rallies his new acquaintance (whom he had, at the outset, referred to as “Friendo,” during the friction over Dallas), all the while patiently chewing on newly-purchased confections, one-by-one, by asking, “Have you lived here all your life?”/ “Only four years… This store belonged to my wife’s family…”/ Now definitely having some taciturn fun over and above a baseline of the macabre, the stranger, having nearly choked on his gum-drop, asks, “You mean you married into it?”/ Pausing to think about this, the old man smiles and drones out, “You could say that.” As if feeling the ice has been broken, he gently comes back with (a “listen carefully to this one” twist in his voice) in terms of, “What hour do you close?”/ “At dusk.” Definitely emanating tingles of illuminative concentration where, till now, there seemed to be nothing but a black hole, it is the buyer who shifts into a seller’s mode. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you? … What time do you go to bed?”/ “Um…about 9:30…”/ “I could come back then…”/ “But no one would be here…” With a game face not without a sprinkling of camaraderie, Chigurh, like a game-show host at getting-to-know-you time, asks, “What’s the most you ever lost in a coin toss?”/ “What do you mean…?”/ “This coin has been travelling twenty-two years to get here…”/ “What could I win?”/ “You stand to win everything… Just call it”/ “I didn’t put nothin’ up.”/ “You been puttin’ it up your whole life, you just didn’t know it… You need to call it.”/ “Heads…”/ “Well done!… Don’t put it in your pocket! It could get lost among the other coins…It’s your lucky quarter!”

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       The Coen brothers have produced an extensive series of extremely provocative films. That the works emit a jaundiced sense of predominant rationality would seem to be a given. Far less manageable is the specific point of contention, as presumably providing nuance to the mayhem and devastation that ensue. The jammed acceleration that plunges into various horrors of simplistic insistence broaches a dynamic with far more flexibility, if we can only locate the steering impulse. Their hastily assembled classic of malaise, namely, Barton Fink (1991) (having, therefore, an inception in the same vein as Wong Kar Wai’s breakaway from out of  a former, unforthcoming project, namely, Chungking Express [1994]), offers a particularly transparent sightline into that overdrive.

    The titular protagonist leads off with a strain of self-confident perversity which, in itself, could be equivocal. His journey through the narrative confirms the bleakest of dead ends. Moreover, and most importantly for our special task of fathoming this starkly upsetting saga, he encounters someone decidedly transcending the peculiar lostness, and in such a way as to endow the film with a topspin of reflective struggle as against sensational outrage.

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Copyright © 2011  by James Clark

With its signature whiteout desolation and intriguingly wide-faced protagonist making difficult headway in its midst, Fargo (1996) seems to invite us to engage its ice-hard slipperiness in a carry –through including Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). Though both films do indeed share a peculiar agitation, their wealth of strange complexities and beauties dictates separate investigations. Not that it wouldn’t be fun mixing a cocktail comprising cosmopolitan chic and a ripple where a kid decorates his bedroom with a poster for “The Accordion King.” But, along that very sightline we are snapped out of complacency, when the boy’s mom addresses the decadence of his report card in this way: “Do you know what “disparity” means? You’re not a D student [that is to say, a mediocrity; hold that thought]…That’s why you’re not going out [for the hockey squad].” His evincing a great difference between a potential and an actual outcome is a condition that takes us by the throat as emergent in the School of Hard Knocks which this movie puts us through (its copious blood and gore being only a relatively light foretaste of the real horror lurking within its square-dance patter).

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Screen Cap from ‘True Grit’

 Copyright © 2011 by James Clark

    Since completing the film, Inland Empire in 2006, David Lynch has devoted his impressive and lugubrious energies to the production, in France, of a number of series of lithographs. Many have noted that, when he was an art college student in Philadelphia, Lynch was conversant with productions along those lines, though not specifically rendered in the technically difficult mode of stone lithography. Few, if any, as far as I know, have wondered why he has returned to college pursuits that had been superseded by film work.

    There are two superb facsimiles in book form displaying this new/old output (namely, David Lynch Lithos and David Lynch Dark Splendor [both presented in 2010 by the German publisher, Hatje Cantz]), the art world commentators of which gloss over this turnaround as a return to a far better fold than the rude marketplace of movies. The latter work documents the Hollywood maverick’s coming within the embrace of institutional Surrealism in the form of the Max Ernst Museum. (At the outset of that book the reincarnated exhibition star is quoted as follows: “ ‘And so, even though I’m from Missoula, Montana, which is not the surrealistic capital of the world, you could be anywhere and see a kind of strangeness in how the world is these days, or have a certain way of looking at things.’” Although its pedantic efforts to entangle Lynch’s output, including the films, in the extremity of Continental Angst fall short of accounting for the delights tucked away in its darkness, the Germanic comprehensiveness of this reckoning does come to a symptom exposing the putative free spirit’s susceptibility to eclipsing his mature lightness with a darkness bordering on the formulaic. Before specifying this pitfall, let’s see a bit more of the revisionist manoeuvring.

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