We’re Here to Get Out Alive

The ten films I liked most in 2012. Many spoilers. Loosely speaking, I like them more as the list goes on. And though it’s not below, Holy Motors had the best scene.

The 1960s as a canvass have suffered from diminishing returns. Most of the smart working artists of the decade would have found our nostalgia for the era unfathomable. And the recurring impulse toward finding the right stretch of the American past with which to explain the American present usually winds up as inaccurate history in the service of skewed diagnosis.

Small and specific even for a personal film, you couldn’t accuse Not Fade Away of failing to recognize these dangers, or reaching beyond its competence, or otherwise attempting to explain America to itself. Regrettably, the end result could make anyone question what the point is of authentic recreation of a couple families’ lives forty to fifty years ago. And it’s all the more easy to ask given how few of the characters are intrinsically likable, products as they are of David Chase’s sense of human limitations. They make the same mistakes, they contradict themselves, and when they change it’s a coin flip whether it’s good or bad. The lead goes from being an impotent member of the high school social fringe, to acting just enough like an ass to earn membership in the club, to closing off the film left out of the group once more, since it’s Los Angeles and they’ve been faking it way longer than some kid from Jersey.

And these drawbacks are all true, and that would be all there is, except then people sing, or argue about singing, or talk about the drum patterns they’ve heard on the radio, and Chase’s love note to music gathers itself and breaks out. A story about a rock band that didn’t conquer the world can only argue for music as a temporary escape. But as the last, most surreal scene of Chase’s career makes clear, it’s enough for some of us.

LCD Soundsystem played its last show on April 2, 2011. At Madison Square Garden, the concert unfolds. The day after, James Murphy tries to make sense of what he’s done. And throughout, Chuck Klosterman talks with him about it.

In taking in the threads of Shut Up and Play the Hits, it’s easy to miss how Murphy has provided the entire film, there for someone to grab. It’s not autobiography, but the central figure has clearly controlled the timing and nature of the filmmakers’ scrutiny. The entire film exists because he chose to decide there was an ending, which turned out to be a canny way to create a story.

Klosterman is smart enough to realize this, but unable to make Murphy step up and admit authorship. We experience the movie as something happening to Murphy, and to us. So the movie loops back in and out of itself, a half-remove from its own cleverness, hitting its stride for long moments that you recognize almost immediately and never want to stop, connecting with you at odd moments in unexpected ways.

It reminded me of this one band.

Looper is smart in all the right ways, well-conceived and rigorously thought through, conscious both of its influences and on what new it can contribute. Despite or because of this, on a scene to scene basis it fails to wrap you up as much as it makes you admire it. The film lifts off in fits and starts, but only stays in the air for so long.

The pieces, though, those many starts—they’re incredible. A man vanishing piece by piece. A brisk walk-through of a life lived and abandoned. A Bruce Willis action film condensed into one scene. The lurking unease of the movie’s setting and its vision of the future. A character figuring it all out at just the same moment we have, and deciding he’s had enough.

These make sense in the moment, and you know, in a way, why they’re there, and you understand them even better after the fact. This doesn’t mean it was the most satisfying film to actually watch. But it’s enough. And there’s no reason to think Looper won’t be an ever-growing joy to return to, and that it won’t reveal even more to admire. For a time travel movie, this is the only promise you have to keep. And Looper is nothing if not conscious of its obligations.

The third Daniel Craig Bond film took forever to make it to theaters, and Skyfall seemed determined to make up for the character’s absence by attempting, in a very overt way, to provide absolutely everything one could ever want for a Bond film. Or really, any film. Skyfall goes out of its way to be a big, rollicking movie, and almost all of its thematic and emotional aims exist in reference to Bond and our ideas and experiences with cinema. Holy Motors and Django Unchained were the two films this year with the most palpable love of film as a medium, but Skyfall isn’t too far behind.

That the characters are fighting over the narrative of events rather than any clear set of geopolitical aims is all for the better. Silva has a particular vision for how this will play out, the product of years of thought and tinkering, which he holds onto and unfurls with glee. Bond has far less time, and winds up luring Silva in only by presenting something even more fun—a personal Alamo. And when that doesn’t quite work, he foils Silva’s final Shakesperean flourish by bringing them both down from tragic heights to baser levels, making things “one rat to another.”

There’s twenty-two Bond films and a hundred other movies in Skyfall, let alone the roads it suggests but does not take, but the compression and combination works. Shot by Roger Deakins, set-piece after precise set-piece, Skyfall does what far too few big-budget movies know how to do anymore: it leaves all its energy on-screen. I’m not quite sure how you follow this. In the franchise era, few realizations are so exciting.

Staking everything on three actors few audiences would trust anymore—Chris Tucker, Robert DeNiro, and Bradley Cooper—Silver Linings Playbook was unstable from its start. In pre-production, it swapped out and replaced leads, even as the finished film feels impossible to imagine without the people actually involved. On a story level, further, who we rely on constantly shifts. Most of the characters we interact with have significant mental problems, and the film isn’t afraid to change our minds suddenly on who the “crazy one” is in a given scene.

Dismissing its overall narrative as “safe” misses how many risks the film takes. The degree of difficulty for this kind of traditional romantic comedy is higher than other projects because the seams tend to show more often. We recognize them from other places, we question the logic, the intentions of the filmmakers, we fear the potential manipulation.

It works all the same because the film has a good heart, and because of Lawrence, who is incredible. Her character brings everyone up with her, in a desperate scheme, just long enough to have someone to catch her when she falls. Her presence provokes and highlights everything interesting about Cooper as a performer. And in a quintessentially David Russell scene, a dozen people in a room shouting at each other, she takes over just as easily. Initially presented as the wild outlier, she turns out to be the center of gravity. Like the film, she can’t afford to lose any of her bets, and like the film, she’s just crazy enough to pull it off.

Inglourious Basterds slaughters most of a Jewish family in its opening, but that’s it. There are no concentration camp scenes, no cuts to Lidice or Treblinka. The bad guys are Nazis. The audience knows what’s up.

Django Unchained has whippings, lynch mobs, threatened castration, beatings, a slave ripped apart by dogs, locking a woman naked in a burning-hot enclosure overnight. I’ve never been more disturbed by anything in a theater than the scene of the two slaves fighting to the death. Violence hollowing you out, like someone has started drilling down your throat and won’t stop until they’ve taken out your guts—that’s something you don’t feel all too often. The most gorgeously shot Tarantino movie, one of the most beautifully captured visual experiences in years, very clearly wants to get your blood boiling. And the tragedy is that it needs to. Something about slavery remains not viscerally intuitive to American audiences. We get it, they’re Nazis. We need to be shown they’re slaveowners.

Making you feel it is hardly the only concern of Django. And I don’t know what the movie “means,” as some kind of cultural watermark. But the characters seem to. Schultz narrating German folklore by campfire tells you everything you need to know about him, everything about why he must see this through. Django knows he must become myth to triumph over a false god, and by sheer resolve, he succeeds in doing so. Stephen understands the beginning Django represents, and thus how he foretells an ending. They get it, almost instantly. We can’t seem to, after centuries.

Tarantino has always been great at finding cinematic gold in low places, but he’s increasingly after showing us a forceful new ethics that’s been hiding there all along. Films that work their way into your bones aren’t as easy to shake. And incidentally, they’re all the more fun for it.

Even counting Django, no reaction to a film was more interesting this year than Zero Dark Thirty, which divided many writers, critics and thinkers not often at odds. It’s hard to know what audiences will make of the film, what its legacy will be. It’s foolish to think films can’t have impacts upon political opinions. But it seems equally foolish to insist you can predict them, to diagnose them as they play out. Assessing films in bad faith for political ends is a losing game.

It’s also true that on a moment to moment basis, no theater experience was more gripping. Kathryn Bigelow’s film moves along with such clear, stripped-down, methodical purpose that you’re not thinking, and often not breathing, for the full 157 minutes, just taking in and taking in. There are few pauses, few turning points. Even when the characters falter, the film rarely misses a step.

Any reading of the film’s ethics or politics is a creative reconstruction (and often a Rorschach test), which is not to say what you see is amoral. But it’s also not the point. The film, the actual film, brings you into the space of its characters and then won’t let you out. There’s no remove. Its insistence in doing so is remarkable; that it holds your attention, even more so. It trades on American interest in these subjects, it’s conscious of American rage at attacks and responses, but it’s not about American policy. It’s about gripping its audience. Art should and must be political because stories about lives and people and the societies they live in cannot succeed without recognizing politics as a facet of human existence. But a film needs to draw you in, and Zero Dark Thirty understands how if it doesn’t, everything else won’t matter. When it draws you in this well, you wind up thinking, and maybe making you get mad all over again, and who knows where you end up.

But all that is after. In the theater, it’s rapt, tense, unyielding, for longer than should be possible. You shouldn’t look away, but Zero Dark Thirty does everyone the favor of taking away the option.

As everything is falling apart around them, much too quickly, one of the members of the police team figures it out. “We’re not here to do good.” In a film where communication is mostly in silence, a succession of stares and gestures before joining battle in a frenzy of gunfire, knives, fists, legs, and knees, it’s the only memorable line.

The team’s sole mission after its opening mishaps is to get out alive. The Raid: Redemption‘s only real goal is to show you something you’ve never seen before. The clarity of intent is essential. The talent of the main actors and fight choreographers helps it along, but it’s astounding that the film sags so little in the process, how the tension stays there throughout without ever over-stimulating you on the human punishment being meted out. It’s just advancing and retreating, the whole way through, movement in and out of rooms, away from explosions, up and down hallways and staircases.

The Raid isn’t about anything other than what you see on screen, but that’s not to its detriment. It answers questions you never knew you had. It’s pure, unflinching spectacle, a drama of human bodies in motion. An action director made the best dance film of 2012.

I never read Perks of Being a Wallflower. I was certainly the right age at the right time with the right sensibility to have read it and become attached to it, and many good people I know have. But I never did. So when this film knocked me on my feet, it was something new.

The realism of the plot, as a representation of anyone’s actual lived experience, was shaky in 1999, and today there’s little left. Yet the story is never less than open about its artificiality. The film christens into life a set of very damaged characters, who continually pretend everything is okay, while no one in the audience can fail to register that they are not. They’re acting throughout, which makes every false note more poignant.

This frayed vulnerability underlies the language of the film, its dialogue and its epistolary narration, which is simple almost to the point of being infantile. The stripped-down expression is neither in the tough-guy tradition of Hemingway nor the fragile, necessary sloganeering of rehab residents. It’s self-defense. Charlie is a character who meets people, like him, who are willfully abstracting what they dare not say directly. If he ever hit specifics he would crack apart entirely.

I’m not sure if this is a film that works for anyone else. And I don’t know what it says that something keyed to the sensibilities of sophomores in high school hit me emotionally more than anything else I saw this year. But it hits a register I didn’t know was there before, and watching the film move effortlessly forward in so effortful a tone was like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

I don’t think I’ll ever read the book, or watch this again. It’s too fragile a thing to work forever. But for now, I couldn’t be more fond of it.

From the moment the plane goes down, everyone involved is dead. The filmmakers know this. For the audience, it’s a slow, excruciating realization. And it culminates in watching a scene used to sell the film, the way the movie will endure in pop culture consciousness, what played as borderline camp, a typical late period Liam Neeson movie moment: the unstoppable force gearing up for a knock-down, drag-out fight with the big bad wolf.

The marketing campaign for The Grey is in many ways a shame, but it’s a real question whether the film would work as effectively if it couldn’t trade on the assumptions of viewers that there’s a way out for the men involved. It’s not a deceitful film, either. It never provides any reason to think that they’re going to be okay. Nothing about the situation suggests hope. It only gradually dawns on you that everything you’ve brought to the theater is of no help. Only when everyone he knows is gone does Ottway wind up realizing that no one else is helping them, either.

No film this year had more empathy for its characters and no film was more merciless toward them. This wrenching combination is sometimes sad, sometimes miserable. When you’re left knowing that what you’ve watched is nothing more and nothing less than doomed men picked apart in excruciating detail, you might wonder why. The characters aren’t instruments. They aren’t for anything. None of it is. Sacrificing these men to Liam Neeson’s character growth would be one thing. Here they’re just food.

There’s no argument being made. The Grey doesn’t offer a takeaway, and in a film with many brave choices this absence is its highest courage. But in a long year, this surprisingly small movie, this darkest of dark tales played out amid bright-white snow, has hung in there relentlessly. It’s not something I can easily forget. It carves out a space no one else thought to occupy and took it over so thoroughly that any other film would be scared to come near it. You can’t ask for much more.

As for 2013… we’ll see. Been a hell of a year.

Memory Lane

Two attempts at music criticism. Two pieces of television criticism, two longer looks at television as a medium. Two collections of paired observations. One outlier piece of comics criticism, phrased as an apology for not being able to read comics well. Two interviews. One long-form preemptive eulogy. Two reviews of non-fiction works on national security. Two pieces on national security news, prefaced by an apology post. One odd, too-quickly written reply to writers I don’t know. One post announcing I was taking the blog public, two posts announcing I was busy with finals, and a post announcing I had been picked up by another website. One post on being done with law school finals. One piece on the economics and aesthetics of franchising. One on ideas in film. One post on a dead writer and a life-affirming book. One long-form essay on the how filmic storytelling relates to structure. Four pieces looking at the ethics of individual violent films. Five direct comparisons of elements from two works, (of which one of the violence pieces might also be one), a sixth comparing three, and a seventh comparing four. Three short odes to good journalism. One post on May 17, 2012.

- Output to date

In early 2011 I was living at home with my parents and without a job. I had graduated college and was likely to start law school the upcoming fall, so things weren’t rough, but I was broke, bored, and badly in need of something to do. I discovered Internet comics criticism around the beginning of March, and it made me excited about art in a way I hadn’t felt for quite some time. I wondered if I might have anything to add. I watched Faster as an in-flight movie after heading back from a poorly-planned trip to California, and put my first real post up for this blog a little over a year ago, on April 13, 2011.

Happily, the site served its key purpose: I made it through to school. Having somewhere to write gave me some structure during a very boring, altogether depressing eight months at home, and I have something to show for the trouble. I’m pleased with much, if not most, of what I’ve written; there’s some stuff in here I think will stand up pretty well.

Tallying up what I’ve written, I can see stops and starts, recurring themes, and some clear indications of what I’ve felt most drawn to talk about. I find most interesting, however, how many of the key essays came in the first four months of writing. This place has lost a certain amount of momentum since, and its current glacial pace feels altogether out of place with the experimentation and almost existential urgency of its beginnings.

I’ve hoped to find at the end of this first law school year a respite, and the possibility of returning to a normal schedule for what I write here. I’ve thought of this year as a unique drain upon my time, not to be repeated, with the site now set to return to its proper level of commitment and attention. It’s an appealing story, especially because second and third-year classes, while taxing and time-consuming, don’t have the same pressure as the first year. Professional and extracurricular commitments outside of class are only going to grow, though. And more tellingly, I’m now done with finals and have little free time to show for it. I’m working two jobs this summer, and even on my nominal “break” now there’s a writing competition hanging over my head.

No, truth be told, it’s far more accurate to view last spring and summer as the aberration. I wrote while I had a 9-to-5 job as my only commitment. My life was about to have a reset button hit by entering law school and moving to New York. I had a luxurious amount of time to spend on anything I wanted. This is simply not going to happen again, even for a week, for the indefinite future. This site was born in unique circumstances, and they aren’t going to come around again.

This is a constraining and simplistic way to look at the problem, however. I may be busy, but time can be found, when one wants to, especially for what’s important. It’s a wild exaggeration to say I lack any time to write, even to write semi-regularly. “Time” frames the problem wrong, or at least not quite right, because law school isn’t a “distraction” from this site. For the better, a legal career is the path I’m on. Even if I were to drop everything right now—which I emphatically do not want to do—I’m not going to become a professional critic. Writing about art isn’t going to be more than a hobby or an off-shoot, and that’s going to hold true for my whole life.

There are opportunity costs, too. Every minute I spend writing about art here, I’m not learning more about subjects relevant to what I’m actually doing. I’m not working on the things that are going to mean a great deal for my career and for what I hope to accomplish. The part of my conscience that speaks in the voice of Cal Newport and urges a clarity of mission and purpose takes a look at this blog and goes crazy. Sinking time into this website, from this view, is an ongoing illusion. Each foray on display represents a way of writing and understanding that isn’t going to be important to my career in the short-, medium, or long-term.

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This would be all beside the point if the Cal Newport part of my brain were in control, or if I fully believed what it recommended. It’s safe to say if it were, this site wouldn’t exist, because I’d be a very different person. No matter how much I’m committed to what I want to do, I’m inclined to think art is the most important thing in the entire world, and so long as I can meet it with the respect it deserves then I’m happy spending time here. Distraction or not, there’s more to life than what’s sensible.

When my answer to “why write here” is “I think it’s important,” however, then my words need to read like I actually think this is the case. If what I write feels as if I’m treating this space as a random outlet, then it really is a waste of time. While I would like nothing more than for this to be a distraction to readers, I’ve kept up the time to post because I want this to be more than that for me.

It’s this that worries me far more, for not being able to keep up a sustained commitment, and the secondary focus I’ve placed on what I write about, is immediately apparent in what I’ve written since school began. It’s far more scattershot, reaching a bit too far in places, unsure of what I’m after at all in others, or retreating into safe territory, such as “I like this.” Too much feels unmoored and dashed-off, even what represents several drafts. It feels like pushing against a door that no longer opens.

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I read a beautiful essay called “Cart-Drawn Horses” last month about the obligations of Internet criticism, and the need to show “humility before art.” I’m pleased to say most of this site holds up pretty well to its standards, though little of what I’ve done since last summer.

And it’s this essay which really brings home to me the need to address the constraints here.

For the time of writing—the patience necessary to put down something which reflects what you’re actually trying to say, and which fully engages with what you’re talking about—includes the time to take in art. It’s no accident that film, with its brief runtimes, is the most represented medium on the site. Video games take forever to play, and books are endless. Really hearing an album is the work of many nights, and taking in even a single season of a television series means setting aside a major block of time. Worse, I can really enjoy something but be unable to find enough to say, or read a comic I think is gorgeous but lack the vocabulary to describe. The pool can run dry in this way quite quickly; and it goes doubly for the few books I do find the time to read.

Less time means less ability to select. It also means fewer potential options for connection and juxtaposition, which is by far my favorite and most recurring structural move in what I’ve written here. There’s always writing about something on its own, if you have the time to try to take it apart, but this is just as much effort, especially when you want to be thorough.

This can tempt either a lack of discipline, or a slow retrenchment to the tried and true. In some cases, I’ve attempted to take expansive ideas and moor them onto material where it can’t quite work, since I don’t have a better path at hand. Other times, I’ve sat back and waited for connections to present themselves. They can still emerge, and I’m fairly happy with the results. Hewing closely to the second path, however, can run the risk of diminishing returns. If I wanted to fully commit to a two-work, compare-and-contrast model of essay-writing, then I might be able to keep this up for a long time yet. But as I noted after this post, this poses real dangers in tackling other subjects, and if art (and writing about art) can only illuminate its kindred, then perhaps its importance diminishes.

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Pessimism toward well-traveled roads aside, however, the approaches I’ve taken at least have the value of uniqueness. No one else is out there comparing Half-Life 2 and mumblecore, or Point Blank with The Antlers. Novelty makes for an amusing contribution. Keeping this up with any integrity, however, depends so much on a wide range of inputs that is no longer possible in the same way.

There’s always another kind of retreat, into shorter posts or away from substantive or structural ambition. Yet “Cart-Drawn Horses” hammers home how little the Internet needs more bad culture writing. One of the few reliable methods I have to make what I have to say valuable is taking a likely unique approach; even if the observations I have to share aren’t more valuable than other, better writers, they at least come at you in a different way.

It’s for this reason that I’ve made a real effort to not write what could be easily found elsewhere. Yet while I’ve found this necessary to justify adding one more WordPress blog to the world, the ways to accomplish this on display so far on this site aren’t going to be able, on their own, to justify keeping this place open. At least not when the best thing I’ve written was a year ago today. There needs to be more to what’s done here, or there needs to be no more to this.

And I’ve come to think this not only because I worry about the reading experience. I worry about what a reliance upon tricks I’ve already learned means going forward. Taking odd angles and approaches, I suspect, reflects my anxiety that, short of clever complications, I don’t have much of anything else to contribute. And if I truly believe that the only valuable purpose served by what I write is the way it’s done, and when my prose has never been my strong suit, then it’s unclear what’s being accomplished.

Repeatedly leaning upon a crutch isn’t a helpful way to learn to stand up for things. And it’s all the more difficult to find your feet without one when you’re only taking a step once every month or two.

–

What all this tells me is that I need to find a way to write more, and about something that isn’t art. I don’t want to leave culture behind entirely, but it will need to play in the margins, informing and proving relevant where necessary, but no longer the main concern. Yet while I know the answer (even stopping new posts entirely) will require doing something different, I’m not sure I know quite how to proceed.

Certainly, the most obvious option is to begin writing more about what I am spending time on, namely legal concepts. Especially as I build toward writing a second-year note, I may be reading and learning enough about constitutional law, the executive branch, and a few related subjects to be able to deploy relatively smart writing here on those subjects. Perhaps not. But if the site turns over to being that, then it may as well stop or become something new. “Notes toward a Note” may be a great little project, but if that’s all I was doing it wouldn’t be this site, and it would be silly to stay in the old house.

Nor do I want this to be a site where posts are short and simple, or excessively timely. If I’m writing things I can no longer look back on months later and be pleased to have written… well, I already have Twitter.

I have some glimmers of how I may be able to bridge the gap. If these ideas prove not to be worthwhile, and this place is to become another dead little corner of the Internet, I’ll put a sign up to make that clear. Until then, I at least know what I can’t keep doing. So one way or another, from here on out, it’s not going to be the same.

The stray phrase I misremembered which is the title for the site is from a volume of Sandman called “Brief Lives.” It’s the story focusing on his sister, Delirium, that sets up a choice for Dream: he must change or die, but he must choose. The truth is, the former option is very often going to mean the latter. This may be the case for this site; perhaps it will not.

For now, thanks for your continuing patience. I’ll see you from somewhere different.

Back May 17

Finals are upon me, so no new posts until then. Will be trying my best to get back to a more steady schedule at that point.

Makin’ Moves

An online journal called Intellectual Refuge picked up an essay I’d written on 13 Assassins, called “Total Massacre.” Very cool feeling. I encourage you to head on over there and read it; lots of great content to check out there as well.

The Dinner Table

Friends with Kids (2012)

We’d put an awful lot of money into the season opener. So I was asked to write a show with no locations, no guest cast, no new sets and minimal extras. So I wrote a play.

- Aaron Sorkin on “17 People“

Party hosts know well how adding more people to the mix can breed complications. Fiction works no differently, and Orson Scott Card explains in his introduction to Speaker for the Dead how two characters have one relationship between them, three characters have three, four have six, five have ten, et cetera. Keeping this straight beyond a certain point takes a steady focus.

The number of characters involved will have a necessary relation to how a creator structures a story. It’s easy to notice this in how we refer to filmed entertainment with a small set of characters as more “theatrical,” or in the association of genre fantasy and science fiction with a wider cast. World-building as an end in itself involves introducing more information, often in the form of more people. Fiction which puts a premium on level of detail can achieve this scale by bringing long lists of characters along for the ride.

–

The timeframe for a story also has a clear impact upon the structure of a story. The first tier of American epics—films like Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and Raging Bull—have no stronger unifying thread then the wideness of their gaze. Years and decades pass by within two, maybe three hours, making for a decisively different tenor than a more compact dramatic scope.

The limits on the length of a film constrain the medium’s ability to stage the passage of time, and this has an inevitable effect upon the way in which these stories feel. Unlike a novel, a comic strip, or even a miniseries, there’s no way to fill in the sweep of a wide expanse of time with anything approaching thorough detail. So in precisely the opposite way from a one-day film, where the mundane, through its accumulation, becomes profound, nearly everything we see in these films feels significant—a milestone along an important path.

These two axes—the number of characters, and the temporal scope of the story—so deeply fix the contours of a story as to be almost inseparable from the story a work chooses to tell. No matter the process and the sequence in which the creative hands fix these elements, they set down the shape of what the viewer will experience. You may be able to know more about a film in advance from knowing the number of major characters and the length of its story than from where it takes place and what it will be about.

–

I’m not familiar enough with romantic comedies as a genre to know whether Friends with Kids makes a decisive break from its governing conceptions. People who know better seem to say no. I can’t help but suspect, however, that its eight major characters and its six-year timeframe aren’t the normal approach. Few romantic comedies seem willing to push forward on both fronts. The all-hands-on-deck entries tend to organize themselves around a specific time of the year or event, as in Valentine’s Day or Love Actually. The stories of love over a lifetime narrow the cast lists appropriately. And the run-of-the-mill romantic comedy typically has a contained cast and a few months of events. Thus, even if Friends with Kids is simply expanding the scope and scale of the same old undertaking, it’s a modification with a significant impact upon the experience of the film, and a fascinating demonstration of what axes of time and breadth mean for a narrative.

There’s an energetic air to this film which is difficult to find these days, and the spring in the step has everything to do with its ambitions and with the ways in chooses to address them. The time-scale, the number of characters and the level of attention the film wants to provide to what’s happening on a macro level necessitate something very basic: short scenes. There’s simply no way to travel through an eight-character film and a complicated romantic arc within two hours without industrious efficiency, and the film takes every effort to elide details it deems unimportant and to exit scenes early on a punchline. Scenes are there for illustrative detail with an eye toward narrative economy.

The film makes the most of what it’s doing, too, and it’s compelling to take in the fortunes of the character’s lives. The changes within the group as people fall apart and grow close together feels remarkably true to the real-life experience of how sets of friends and partners interact over time. And even if its actual narrative makes no moves outside of what’s expected for the genre company it keeps, these moves feel far different when taking place amid a wider and more filled-in backdrop.

Whether or not its depiction of real adult relationships feels true to life, which will affect whether you can take from the film anything of significance beyond the novelty of its storytelling form, the film also features one terrific scene. The eight characters are together in a room only once, for a dinner at a cabin retreat. The meal feels like a riff on “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” with alcohol gradually turning ruminative monologues into directed assaults. There’s a playful deployment of as many interactive pairs as possible among the damn near thirty relationships around the table, and Chris O’Dowd, Adam Scott, and Jon Hamm get a chance to run wild with Jennifer Westfeltdt’s script. It all coheres into an arresting, riveting scene, one simply not possible without the accrued character history and expanded cast afforded by the film’s approach.

The film can only bring about this scene because of the expanse of the story it tells, and that’s meaningful. Friends with Kids may be no greater in the scale of its ambitions than its cohorts in the modern romantic comedy, but its scale is ambitious, and to tell its story well is no small achievement.

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A year from now when I think about the movie, what I’m most likely to remember is that scene. Works great and minor compress themselves into easier reference points. There’s something curious about this, and the way that scenes introduce themselves to first-time audiences, relative to the way they live on in the memories of fans. There’s almost no way to know heading into a unit of fictional storytelling that what you’re about to encounter is or is not “iconic,” is or is not a setpiece, is or is not a part of the story worth talking about after. It’s antithetical to art (though unavoidable) to decide that such-and-such scene is the work, midway through, but it’s an almost-inevitable shorthand.

There’s an aspect to this which doesn’t do violence to a work, though, for scenes in films bear the unmistakable mark of their surroundings. They carry with them a great deal of embedded information. In films, with their limited run times, long scenes must justify their existence. Film’s intrinsic compression makes the obligations of a scene to the wider aims of the story of paramount importance. And their nature, the significance we take from them, bears the indelible shape of the narrative structure. The constraints or the freedom of the scale and scope are there for all to see.

Films, unlike less constrained mediums, have only so much time to achieve what they’ve set out to do. It’s no accident that the cabin dinner in Friends with Kids is the longest scene in a film marked mostly by short episodes, as depicting the level of detail the film wishes to go into about the characters’ lives would not be possible if every scene were five minutes long.

One consequence of the sweep of the American epics I mentioned earlier, or any work with aspirations toward playing a broader canvass, is the inevitable need to achieve something different with each scene. The demands of providing information and exposition are greater, and a scene can’t simply tell a pleasing short story. What the viewer sees must not only have an immediate narrative stakes, it must also evoke and suggest a larger transition. It must stand for what’s occurring outside the frame, or at least catch you up on what else has occurred. Each unit of the drama must focus on illustration, sometimes to the detriment of immediate emotional impact. While this may not be the case for a pivotal or climactic event, where the import is up close and evident, key transitions by their nature are rarer by their nature than the events that clear the way for them.

The greater the temporal scope, the greater the tendency toward the inclusion of more scenes in the same amount of running time, and the same appears to be true for characters. Where there are more people in the mix, there is more of a need to stage their individual stories. The average scene length for a sequel will go down as the need to balance familiar faces with new introductions takes hold, and keeping tabs on an entire house party will need more nimble steps than staging a dinner between friends.

These proportional relationships are at work in television, as well, though more often due to financial constraints. The smallest ensemble and most focused vision on television, Breaking Bad, has a marked tendency toward lengthy, prolonged scenes. And perhaps the most thoroughly built-up and filled in world, on The Wire, made for a series where anything past two minutes counted as noteworthy.

There are, of course, ways to counter these inclinations, which don’t have the status of iron laws. A work could make its longer scenes always include more characters, and accomplish the work of bringing forward many individual stories in one go. Editing can allow for cross-cutting between one long scene and smaller illustrative episodes in a way that preserves the ability to tell a short story with some heft yet keeps the narrative moving. Yet where both aspects are in place, many characters and a longer view, the force pushing toward a greater number of scenes is strong, and the length of any given scene will trend downward.

The scale and scope of a work has a relation to its narrative, then, not only in the larger sense of story structure but in setting a baseline rhythm. The tenor and the default purpose of a scene changes, what a scene has room to do and what it must achieve in that time.

The idea of constraints on the basic unit of a work of storytelling is not unique to film, and in many ways it’s far less circumscribed in its possibilities than other mediums. No method of storytelling has a more exact restriction on its basic tempo than the comic strip, for instance—a certain width, a certain height, forever and for always, with no one strip failing to land a punchline. It’s no accident that Calvin & Hobbes trades have a tangible exuberance on the Sunday pages, the one time in the week where Bill Watterson could trade off the restrictive tempo of the six-weekly one-and-done. Television, too, as rich and varied as its forms have become, remains dependent on creating episodes with their own smaller stories and subdivisions for commercial breaks, HBO aside.

Film is free from the medium-dictated necessity of doing things in a certain way, and short of franchise-starters they’re not in the service of long-term narrative obligations. They can slide into a separate register of scene length far more readily, and more unexpectedly, even if the structure will limit how often it can let loose.

As a consequence, you don’t quite know heading into a given situation whether something will last for a short time or a long time, and an hour or so of a film isn’t often enough to establish any kind of rigorous rule to how the work will choose to depict events. We can encounter something truly unexpected. If poetry remains film’s closest kin, then cinema speaks in blank verse, unconstrained by meter.

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The potential for an air of unpredictability, however, depends in part on what kind of story a film is telling. The way extended scenes feel in a story of heightened temporal scope and with more lives depicted, as in the epics above, is noticeably different. Their function intertwines more tightly with the needs of the wider of the wider narrative. They must exist as illustrations, photographs of a longer life, something meant to evoke an inflection point and give the sense of a wider transition.

That these scenes serve a more explicitly narrative-driven purpose, rather than the possibility for something genuinely tangential or revelatory, often contributes to the ability to recognize certain scenes, before they fully come to fruition, as something demanding the utmost attention. We can sense, often because we are more or less told, that something important is upon us. Boogie Nights makes for a magnificent example, unsurprisingly given P.T. Anderson’s clear understanding of the tradition of the American epic and the film’s unabashed aspirations to become their peer. Prefacing a scene with a “Long Way Down (One Last Thing)” title card—an uncannily appealing phrase which works well in the strangest places—the drug deal cues you into its status as something to watch even before Alfred Molina appears in all his scenery-chewing glory.

That’s not to sell the scene short as a standalone narrative in its own right, a short story with razor-edge tension and a magnificent use of music. It’s no small feat to make some idiots sitting on a couch watching a lunatic expound on pop music carry such visceral intensity. If only by explicitly making clear that the scene is an inflection point, the expositional and illustrative purpose of the scene within a longer epic is out of the way, and PTA is free to let loose with a compressed mini-narrative. We know this is an ending, imbued with significance, and he pitches the storytelling to the meet the import of the moment.

The chops of a filmmaker like PTA, however, can distract from how his scene-by-scene talents acquire a radically different feeling depending on the context of the narrative; and his mature work bears out the importance of the two basic axes of scope and scale with surprising clarity. It also helps to make sense of how out-of-nowhere There Will Be Blood appeared when it first came on the scene, for from the right perspective it’s simply a novel assortment of constituent arrangements PTA had already mastered. Combine the uncomfortable character focus of Punch-Drunk Love and the temporal sweep of Boogie Nights, and you’re got a head-start on the skewed weirdness of Daniel Plainview’s life on the screen. Maybe the most unrecognized stylistic difference between Boogie NIghts and Magnolia, two ensemble films often treated as a pair, emerges from the former’s lack of temporal diffusion.

PTA’s four major films neatly represent the four available configurations of few/many characters and short/long timeframe, in the order of many/long, many/short, few/short, and few/long, a lockstep progression between fundamental narrative confines. Simply focusing on these two axes provides as much a guide to the differing feels of the various films as their differences in style, subject and presentation. And it clues the viewer in to how the feel of the scenes changes along the way, how the hand of a master can bring to bear the same capacities to any given staging and yet use the overall context to create differences.

The scope of the characters under examination and the scale of the time depicted appear to be deep in the bones of narratives, perhaps the defining way to sort between them. How the film is set up can affect how we take even a straightforward scene, shorn of the immediate visceral and sensory impact of something from a younger director. Eyes Wide Shut, has precisely one scene where there’s a direct confrontation between the malevolent forces behind the drama and the perpetually baffled protagonist. With the typical Kubrick flattening, it plays out in a subdued key. Yet because of the compression of its narrative, the conversation between Bill and Ziegler has a far more bracing and fear-inducing force than if it were embedded within a wider scope, or if there were far more characters whom we knew. Among a small cast, Ziegler’s knowledge becomes a near-mathematical certainty, and what he will reveal to Bill is a foregone conclusion. Yet knowing something will happen, and knowing, almost from the outset, that it must happen, only heightens the fascination with the manner in which it unfolds. Where we know in Boogie Nights what would happen on the level of narrative structure, we know in Eyes Wide Shut what plot detail is on its way; and knowing one but not the other is more than enough to keep our interest. What form our interest will take depends on factors beyond what actually unfolds in the scene.

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It’s an open question which of these configurations most closely conforms to our lived experiences. The formative moments of people’s real lives can have different shapes. An unexpected death or an endlessly planned wedding are both a part of life, no more or less true than the other. We can’t know what’s in store for us some of the time, while other times we know all too well; we can anticipate turns in the road but not the view beyond the bend.

The only constant is that something will happen, and then something else will happen, and perhaps this gives us a need for this variety of arrangements. We can recognize the weight of anticipation and the weightlessness of excitement in our own lives, at different moments. And for this reason, whether we take in the story of a few people or many, depicting a day or a lifetime, there will be no mistaking the signature of what occurs.

To Listen Longer

 Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney (2011)

I’ve easily read more writing about David Foster Wallace than prose he actually composed. Truth be told, I don’t feel guilty about that, for in these time-strapped days, it’s a good replacement for tearing into Infinite Jest. Besides, why ruin the magic of reading others write about him. Something about Wallace as a unifying touchstone for literary-minded people in the 2000s lends itself to great work. Even Jonathan Franzen seems to be at his best in talking about his late friend.

A gem of Wallace-focused literature arrived in early 2011 when Maria Bustillos published an essay in reaction to her trip through David Foster Wallace’s papers at UT-Austin, called “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library.” Its very existence confirms the rapid transfiguration of Wallace from a brilliant author to something like an existential symbol. Bustillos, however, to her credit, doesn’t scour through the papers of a dead man as a pilgrimage. She instead seeks to reconstruct, and she takes on Wallace as a person and a subject with a critical eye.

Doing so requires leaving Wallace’s perspective be, refusing to take the all-too-easy step of co-opting a symbol for your own argument. She praises and chastises in equal measure, and makes many a perceptive observation about the ways in which intelligence, arrogance, self-awareness and depression worked so readily hand-in-hand in Wallace’s life.

The Wallace whom Bustillos depicts obsessively fixates on how the strengths perceived by others were what he perceived as his flaws. Wallace, Bustillos writes, “wanted most of all to escape from that genius.” This is curious to his readers, for whom his immense talent and perception were the reason why so many admired and continue to admire him.

There’s a flip side to this, however, in that to the mind of a person living within themselves, one’s personal flaws can also become seen as who you actually are. (And, self-regarding creatures as humans are apt to be, as a defining strength.)

It’s common to observe that for many people perceived flaws and perceived strengths go hand in hand. It’s at the root of most self-justifications for bad behavior, and the core of most empathy toward others’ misdeeds. Yet while others will tend to place the emphasis on one’s strengths, and find one’s flaws to be something forgivable or able to be looked past, things look different from an internal perspective. For many, and clearly for Wallace, there’s a sense in which one’s personal flaws come to be seen as a part of thse self—not something to be explained away or ignored, but rather a central part of one’s own story.

Perceived flaws may be inextricable from perceived strengths—or, as Wallace seems to have felt, strengths perceived by others may be what you perceive as flaws. If Wallace wanted “to be an ordinary person who could own his own faults,” then, he was after something slightly different than normal. For he must have felt alienated from his talents, rather than in search of more of them.

What exactly was he up to?

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From the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin

Self-help, as a genre and a societal fixation, veers very quickly into an ethic of self-improvement. Rid of flaws, or counseled through failings, a person will inevitably gain in their overall stature, even when accompanied by no other positive project. One need only believe that a well-adjusted person who doesn’t exercise remains better off than a depressed person who doesn’t exercise.

There is something intrinsically off-putting about this, however, from the perspective of someone who believes themselves flawed. And it appears this was the case for Wallace, where the strengths of his empathy, observation, and intelligence appear to have haunted him deeply indeed.

When you view flaws as a part of your self, any decision to mend those flaws, exorcise those demons, or otherwise move past beyond something dragging you down means giving up a degree of what makes you you. Self-improvement detracts from personal, idiosyncratic, uniqueness.

One way to respond to this is believing that the choice to improve, or to mitigate, involves conscious agency—that you, the autonomous you, has chosen to make this step. The transformation into something different than your current self has your preemptive endorsement.

This idea can founder, however, when confronting the nature of the transition. The solutions offered for self-improvement are typically not individually customized. Rather, the self-help literature—whether pitched at the popular level, guised in the form of a business book, or presented under any other garb—will inevitably be providing one solution to many people. Therefore, any implementation of a self-help strategy, any giving in to an external guide so as to steer you toward a brighter future, involves becoming more like other people.

The need for such solutions implies a lack of being able to arrive at one’s own answers independently. This can make the argument that self-improvement is something you choose to engage in ring false. ”Take control of your life!”, it is exclaimed, and yet in order to do so, one must implement solutions supplied by someone else.

This is likely to encourage a natural resistance, perhaps nowhere more than in our individualistic country. Even fully buying into the idea that you’re flawed, even fully buying into the desirability of an “improved” life, the path from A to B will and must always involve giving up deciding for yourself. You are told you will get your self back, but there’s no actual reason to believe this, and no reason to think that the “you” on the other side will be anything but unrecognizable. Improvement may render you someone else entirely. And it’s almost impossible to make someone want to be someone else.

In light of this objection, one of the few good cases for entering into that middle period of surrender is to realize that the exercise of self-control over your life and your decisions can increase autonomy, by allowing you to align the actions you take more capably with the priorities you purport to have (and perhaps with a little less crankiness along the way.) This story offers some appeal: the real you is struggling under some mess of problems, flaws, failings and miscues, and provided the right tools you can charge forward toward what you really want to be doing, who you really want to be.

You just have to let go, and the Wallace Bustillos describes in a treatment center, willing himself toward surrender, seems intent on doing so.

From the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin

His search for a way out of an indescribably unique set of gifts involved, in Butillos’ telling, an effort to cut down to size, to embrace the ordinary and to find comfort in the mundane. This can’t help but come to mind in reading Willpower, one of the latest installments in another burgeoning movement. Like many other recent popular nonfiction books, Willpower combines lessons from psychology, economics, and neuroscience with the goal of creating modern people, conscious of their cognitive biases, and armed with the tools to trick, cajole, circumvent, and otherwise escape the limitations of their monkey brains and emerge disciplined, rational, happy and whole individuals. Their argument, ever and always, is that we are far less complicated than we might choose to think.

These books are great to read, and full of sensible advice. Yet there’s a crushing banality  in their attempt to universalize the problems which people face. In writing to everyone in possession of human faculties, the writers of these books have to go broad, so the same problems recur over and over again: losing weight, quitting smoking, drinking less, being more kind to one’s partner. The faceless, genderless, race-less audience of these books are brought into the same universal identity, of someone trying to be better in a more complicated world. The ritual repetition of the same set of experiments, the endless problems of choosing jams and resisting marshmallows, starts to sound like an incantation. In reciting the same limited (though doggedly empirical) corpus, the authors propose a new canon for the modern monkey.

“Who wouldn’t want to be better?”, they ask, and the answer is provided for the reader. From one perspective, this isn’t crazy, as anyone willing to shell out the money to read a book like this has at least some interest in applying what they read in real life. There might be some worth in actually providing an answer to this first question, however, especially when the answers on offer complicate an easy “yes.”

For there are real consequences to internalizing the notion that you are, at root, a mammal whose choices are mostly dictated by fluctuations in blood glucose levels, and that the relative weight you give to ideas, choices, moods and values can well depend on what you had for breakfast. It may be true, rigorously so, calculated to a certainty, but the sheer sterility and reductiveness of the answers research has arrived at can’t help but seem to rob life of a certain magic.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable, in that vein, for anyone to react to a scientific understanding of their personality with a brazen retreat into their own flaws. Better a frail person than a programmed homo sapiens. And this isn’t a minority view in the world lately, either; people seek out antiheroes in fiction for the same reason, preferring people who seem “real” over those who act in more rational and life-affirming ways but strike us as false, or, worse, boring. If authentic living is much harder when you view yourself as a statistic amid a data set, and living authentically is important to you, then it might well be worth it to incur the costs of conducting yourself in less healthy and well-adjusted a fashion.

Against this, Bustillos unearths in Wallace something quite unexpected. She makes a convincing case that the way he reacted to the intuitive aesthetic and emotional appeal of personal autonomy may be one of his most profound achievements. One of the most singular figures in recent memory took every possible effort to not distinguish himself from others. What Wallace seems to have understood, interacting with an earlier, and no less potent strain of research literature, is that the ordinariness of the problems we face and the flaws we have may well provide a path toward nobility in modern life.

There may in fact be nothing special about the unhappiness in our hearts, even when it can feel like the most unique part of yourself. Tolstoy, one might argue, had it precisely backward. Unhappy people are a featureless mass of those helpless in the midst of fluctuating glucose levels and inevitable cognitive biases. The enlightened person, by contrast—conscious of their limitations, in touch with their ordinariness, in love with the simple dignity of the task of being human in spite of full consciousness of their condition—may well hold out more gifts than we ever previously could have imagined.

This humility, if it leads to empathy, could be our finest ethical accomplishment.

And it might mean we have no more need for anti-heroes.

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Postscript: I’d be remiss in not noting William Deresiewicz’s review of DFW’s body of work, recently shown to me, which has some overlap with and difference from Bustillos’ take. I’ve also revised a sentence in the last full paragraph of the above essay.

A Cautionary Tale

The Umbrella Man by Errol Morris (2011)

Archaeologists are called on to reconstruct whole worlds from fragments of pottery. Scholars of ancient texts rely on nothing more than frayed pieces of old parchment.

Five years, five hours, a few steps away from an event in time, there’s far less data available than at that moment. Evidence remains helpful and powerful, but it’s inevitably impoverished relative to lived experience, which, thanks to the curiosities of our brains, never quite conforms to what we think occurred.

Making sense of what happened, dealing with this decay, makes for mundane work in many ways. Yet it’s also a fascinating project. One piece of information, and especially the right piece of information, can tell you an enormous amount.

Rarely, however, do we encounter just one piece of information. And in taking a look at something new that we learn, everything points us in the direction of fitting it into our prior experiences and slotting it into a worldview. Human beings are wired that way, set to construct narratives out of a mass of data, so as to not have all our cognitive brainpower set onto the taxing task of explaining. And while we may seek out stories for reasons behind the conservation of energy, there should be no illusions that more reasons are necessary. We are made to make sense of things, if for no other reason than our survival. Living in a world of uncertainty would make us more honest and also ensure we could never move forward.

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Errol Morris has a six minute short that is about none of and all of these things, called ”The Umbrella Man.” It aired in late 2011, and it’s about the JFK assassination, and about what a piece of information can tell us and how it can lead us astray.

It’s also a welcome riff on a familiar line of thinking. Socrates, of course, was the wisest of the Greeks because he knew what he didn’t know. The height of wisdom, it’s often repeated, is to understand the vast expanses where one remains ignorant.

“The Umbrella Man” complements this cry for humility by reminding us to be modest in the face of what we do know. Human beings, one and all, possess an amazing set of sensory and deductive tools. Even those of without fedoras and pipes are detectives by nature. A person can notice what’s new and what’s different in any number of settings, and spin the slightest piece of information so as to make leaps or inferences yielding amazing insights. We encounter the novel and do a damn fine job of making use of it.

Our unerring ability to explain, however, has consequences. For while we’re in great shape in the face of what’s unknown, and while we can take a few stray bits of information and do incredible things with it, we grow less and less perceptive as we take in more and more. New information begins to reveal less about the world, and more about the story we’ve already set down.

Knowing makes us increasingly confident that we recognize what we’ve seen. We’re usually wrong.