Films can succeed a million different ways, but when they do, each is entirely different from one another. The three best films I’ve seen all year – John Carney’s Irish alt-folk musical Once, Sean Penn’s riveting character portrait, Into the Wild, and Doug Block’s family documentary with a twist, 51 Birch Street – are alike only in the completeness of their directors’ vision. It’s not that there aren’t influences (Hard Day’s Night, for example, on Once), but that’s really all they ever seem to be. Films that don’t completely succeed, however, often feel like anthologies of homages to other, better films. Atonement, Joe Wright’s adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel, falls into this latter category. It’s not a bad film, but it doesn’t completely gel – there are moments when I felt I was watching a remake of The English Patient, followed by every Merchant-Ivory spectacle ever made. Then Saving Private Ryan showed up.

My favorite moments turned out to be the very first – 13-year-old Briony Tallis (played by Saoirse Ronan¹) finishes her play and runs throughout the manse looking to tell her mum & gather unwilling participants for an evening performance, the sounds of her typewriter fitting perfectly into the simple piano score of the scene itself along with her own shoes clattering across the parquet floors – and the very last – Vanessa Redgrave, also portraying Briony Tallis, now facing death & dementia, not in that order, giving one last interview, a pseudo-Brechtian moment in which Britain’s most famous Trotskyist gives a master class in acting just by showing with her mouth & eyes the continuity of character back to that same disturbed 13-year-old girl. The first scene is one of several moments in the film in which the sound composition is absolutely magisterial – this is one motion picture you could literally “watch” with your eyes shut.

But you would of course miss all the sumptuous visuals if you did, the camera lovingly lingering over doorways, mantels, tables, the same pleasure one takes in doing house tours of the ruling elites anywhere, and of course the costumes, in particular Keira Knightley’s green dress. There are scenes – more than a few – in which the green dress is the one instance of brilliant color anywhere on the screen. If ever a dress deserved a best supporting actor nomination, this gown is it. It almost makes you forget just how terribly underweight Keira Knightley is, dangerously so, a detail that periodically takes away from her terrific performance throughout. There is not a scene in this film in which she appears where she doesn’t own the stage, center the action, sometimes so subtly you don’t even quite catch how she does it. A lot of it actually seems to be in her spine & shoulders, which stiffen with anger or arch with arousal. Considering that she is the not the person who was wrongly accused, nor the accuser, it’s remarkable the degree to which Wright makes this a film about her. That may be just the formula for chick flick success, but it creates problems in that it’s not actually the story as given. And since Wright doesn’t make this a film about Knightley’s inner life, the narrative structure comes down like a pile of blocks in the game of Jenga. Had the movie kept the courtroom material of the original book, that might have been possible. But here it’s not.

James McAvoy, as the servant’s child who grows up to be his mistress’ lover – at least until Knightley’s younger sister intervenes – does a decent job himself, though the weakest part of the film is his traipsing through the French countryside, separated from his forces, during the earliest moments of the Second World War, working his way back the northern port city of Dunkirk in hopes of evacuation back to England.

That segment of the film – when it goes from Merchant-Ivory and the doomed romance of The English Patient to wishing it were Saving Private Ryan – leads up to a long single shot sweep of the Dunkirk beach, filled with the wounded & miserable in the ruins of an old amusement park that feels like it lasts five minutes (watch the fellow in the deep background literally hanging from the ferris wheel – it almost feels like a Kara Walker cutout in action). It’s a fabulous scene – right out of Brueghel & Bosch by way of Spielberg – but it does little if anything to advance the action. Because of what director Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton have already excised from the book, it’s a detour on the scale of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings, tho to less purpose. It ultimately undercuts everything that came before & what little remains of the film.

Which may be why Vanessa Redgrave’s appearance in the final sequence with its twist of a surprise ending doesn’t feel so out of place – by this point, you’ve given up on the idea that this is a seamless reality, and at best are watching a series of short films ostensibly about a single set of characters. This of course requires that you completely give up on them as characters. Which is why I haven’t bothered to call Knightly Cecilia or McAvoy Robbie.

So many wonderful elements, so little cohesion. One wonders how & why the director lost his way. Was it Hampton’s script? He’s a serviceable writer & his own film, Carrington, twelve years ago showed him perfectly capable of doing a far better job with this same historic period. Actually, one thing that earlier film does better is make you believe you’re in England between wars. Atonement is so interested in its museum aspects that I had to remind myself that this was the 1930s, not the 1880s, or the 1780s for that matter. It would be interesting to put the Dunkirk scene here alongside the Omaha Beach sequence from Private Ryan. I think you would realize that they don’t even feel like the same century, let alone the same war. What, one wonders, was Joe Wright thinking?

 

¹ About to become a huge star after the opening of The Lovely Bones, which Peter Jackson has been filming about three miles from my house. She’s quite good in a difficult role here.

Singing “North Country Blues,” 1963 (photo by Dave Gahr)

I see where A.O. Scott of The New York Times has listed Murray Lerner’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s performances at the Newport Folk Festival between 1963 & ’65, The Other Side of the Mirror, as one of his critic’s picks for the week, and given it a brief review here. I’ve had the DVD sitting atop my TV set since summer, when I bought it the instant it became available at the ever entrepreneurial bobdylan.com website. I’ve been planning to see I’m Not There, but the only location in Philadelphia where it’s playing is downtown, which means, given Philly traffic, leaving the house no later than 5:00 PM for a 7:10 showing. Given that Krishna works until six, that’s just not going to happen, so, pining for a broader release, I finally popped the DVD into the machine and watched it. When it was done, I immediately watched it again. Then the next night, because Krishna hadn’t seen either the 1965 portion or the Murray Lerner interview also on the DVD, I watched those sections again. It is, in fact, a great documentary, very much for the same reasons that Scott mentions. Lerner simply has put together all of Dylan’s public performances from the three years together, well-filmed and acoustically well-recorded, with very little that is extraneous to this – a brief interview with Joan Baez, Baez imitating Dylan imitating her, Johnny Cash singing “Don’t Think Twice,” a couple of comments from teenage festival goers & a brief (less than a minute) scene of Dylan half-trapped in a van by window-pounding young women. Everything else in the 83-minute film is Dylan singing.

The funny thing is, he’s as changeable here as I suspect he is with six different folks portraying him in the Todd Haynes film. That may be overstating it, but only a little. What it’s really like is that feeling you have when you see some friends maybe once a year and their kids are teenagers – one year they’re kids, the next long and gawky and infinitely awkward & the year after that they seem to be complete adults who tower over their parents. Dylan in The Other Side of the Mirror is only a little older, really, going from the age of 22 in 1963 to 24 in 1965. In the process, he’s not only transformed, but the whole of American pop and folk have as well, dragged along in the wake of his effortless density as a songwriter.

In 1963, Dylan is nervous, humble, earnest, seemingly hyperconscious of the experience & expertise, not to mention talent, surrounding him as he sings “North Country Blues” while Judy Collins, Doc Watson & Clarence Ashley listen intently, merely the most famous of the large crowd attending an afternoon workshop on which they too were probably on the bill. Dylan at this point has already written “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Girl from the North Country,” and the other early masterworks that would have assured his reputation as a songwriter had he never written another word. Only the first of these is in the film, Dylan closing a concert by leading Baez, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul & Mary and The Freedom Singers in a group version (he’s at the mike, everyone else behind in a chorus, the hierarchy is unmistakable). It’s less than three weeks before Dylan will be singing the same song at a giant rally in Washington, DC, after which Martin Luther King, Jr. will deliver his “I Have a Dream,” speech. Is Dylan in way over his head? Absolutely. But his commitment to his music and to his impeccable enunciation of lyrics – something at which he’s never been equaled – are sufficient to get him through.

By 1964, Dylan is complete a star & conscious of it. The opening scene for that year is of Dylan at the topical song workshop singing – for the first time before a large audience – “Mr. Tambourine Man,” newly penned. You can see Pete Seeger sitting silently, looking down, frowning, trying somehow to fathom what is “topical” about the “jingle-jangle morning” in which “I’ll come following you.” According to Lerner in his interview, Newport had never seen a workshop with an audience this large – maybe 5,000, a quarter of what they got for the “large” evening concerts in those heady days before Woodstock.

Lerner is incredibly fortunate in that Dylan sang two songs at more than one festival, first “With God on Our Side” in 1963 and 64 – twice in 1963, both times with Joan Baez, the first at the workshop – a version that is widely known and deservedly famous for its appearance on one of the Newport anthology albums that appeared in the 1960s – then in her performance on one of the evening shows. The second is “Tambourine Man,” which Dylan sings only at the workshop in 1964, but reprises in the 1965 concert after he was persuaded to return to the stage and do a couple of acoustic numbers (the other is “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Dylan’s farewell to Newport) after the raucous crowd reaction to the intense & brilliant – but decidedly paradigm shattering – performance of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” (another song completely unfamiliar to the crowd, tho it had just been released as a single) with electric versions accompanied by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Considering its content, it may seem curious that the key element differentiating the performances of “With God on Our Side” is Dylan’s relationship to Baez. At the workshop in 1963, they’re giggly young lovers, she’s the superstar and he’s very much her project – as he was Pete Seeger’s, the two determined to let the world know how good Dylan is and make him famous (be careful what you wish for). At the 1963 evening concert, tho, Dylan & Baez are all business and it’s very straightforward – and it's not as good a performance, frankly, because of this. In 1964, Dylan & Baez have evolved into good friends – you can see his affection in his grin as he looks at her while they sing, really an extraordinary moment given Dylan’s “head down, focus on the song” performance mode that he’s made the hallmark now of a long career.

With “Tambourine Man” in 1964, it’s very much the serious get-through-the-song Dylan onstage at the workshop. (He was, in fact, still carrying the lyrics around in his pocket, as I learned when he sat next to me at a party during that festival and I asked what he was writing – he pulled a thermal photocopy of “Tambourine Man” out of his coat pocket to show me.) In 1965, after very distinct choruses of booing to his electric set, he was coaxed back onstage by Peter Yarrow and had to ask the audience for somebody to throw him an E harmonica – there’s a clatter as dozens hit the stage – and Dylan then gives what I can only describe as the most intimate performance of that song I’ve ever heard.

The politics of the Newport festival do show up from time to time, the sense that the workshops – if not the trains – have to run on time. Putting Dylan toward the middle of the evening concert in 1964 – he’s followed by Odetta & Dave Von Ronk (neither visible or audible in the documentary) – may have been attempt to keep Dylan from thinking himself too big a star, but the gesture backfires as the audience goes on & on demanding an en core until Dylan himself comes back on stage to say that the other performers have to have their time too. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t show Dylan’s return to the stage during his friend Van Ronk’s set, during which Dylan literally crawled on all fours about the back of the stage to gales of audience laughter that Von Ronk at first couldn’t figure out and didn’t seem to fit with his song.

By 1965, nobody makes any attempt to thwart the gods of audience adulation. Dylan’s workshop appearance has a vast audience and his evening concert closes the festival (as it had in 1963). The ’65 concert is legendary as the moment that folk let rock & roll through the door. In addition to the evening concert, two songs electric, then after he’s talked back onstage, two acoustic, the film also shows Dylan’s afternoon sound check with the Butterfield Blues Band (sans Paul Butterfield, who is visible in a single shot, watching from a distance). Dylan of course used Mike Bloomfield, the best rock guitarist ever not named Hendrix, on the recordings of Highway 61 Revisited, as well as Al Kooper who replaces Bloomfield organist Barry Goldberg for the evening concert (and whose sloppy playing to some degree overwhelms “Like a Rolling Stone”).

Given its controversy at the time, it’s ironic that this live version of “Maggie’s Farm” is the best arrangement & recording that song has ever had. For one thing, the Butterfield Band had a cohesiveness as a unit that The Band (nee The Hawks) never valued. Whereas Dylan’s own arrangements during the entire period up to the enforced hiatus due to the motorcycle accident the following July are effective, if sometimes ethereal, the hard-driving blues sound of the Butterfield Band has often struck me as an opportunity not taken by Dylan, and “Maggie’s Farm” is my evidence for that. It is the high point of this very great documentary not just historically, but musically as well. The one song that matches it for pure intensity is the acoustic "Chimes of Freedom" closing his performance in 1964.

The final element that holds all of this together, curiously, is Peter Yarrow, he of Paul & Mary, who serves as the emcee for all but one of the events Lerner has captured of Dylan. It is Yarrow who says, of the 22-year-old Dylan in 1963, that he has “his pulse on his generation.” It is Yarrow who has to cope with tens of thousands unhappy customers as Dylan completes his 1964 evening concert so that Odetta & Dave Van Ronk don’t get left out. It is Yarrow who beseeches Dylan to come back and do a couple of acoustic numbers in 1965, telling the audience to be patient, “Bobby has to find an acoustic guitar.” It is Yarrow who scolds Dylan & the Butterfield Band that they have to have their settings “down cold” because they won’t have a chance to fix it during the concert. He’s a funny presence, very much the figure of Before as Dylan passes through folk music – more so in this documentary than Pete Seeger, who’s only visible for the finale of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963 and the topical song workshop in ’64. Yarrow’s binding presence is, like Dylan’s repetition of “With God on Our Side” & “Mr. Tambourine Man,” another instance of Murray Lerner’s incredible luck putting together this almost perfect presentation of Dylan’s career as a folk musician. This is one of those works where everything turned out just right.

This way to Hogwarts

Not having read Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass is, I suspect, an advantage in watching the film by that same name, which I did on its opening night last Friday. One of my kids, a moderately serious Pullman aficionado, used the word “irritating” within ten seconds of the credit roll at film’s end. Which is to say that his problems with this film were different from my own. The film he saw, I gather, was a badly cut stew of moments from the book – minus its dénouement. The film I saw was an enjoyable enough couple of hours in the theater, a mishmash of every kids’ epic that’s been made over the past few years, with the most recent Bond flick, Casino Royale, tossed in for good measure. Addressing some of my son’s issues with the film – at 113 minutes it tries to tell a story that really deserves a full three hours – might have helped some of mine, tho hardly all.

The primary failure of this film is the director’s inability to envision a complete world in which all of these different actions should take place. A good part of what makes Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter franchises work literally is their unmistakable distinctness as realities. You know you’re in Middle Earth instantly & completely, and you can stay there for three films running roughly nine hours total. The Potter series isn’t nearly so well done – different directors for different films is a real problem – but you know when you’re at Hogwarts or Diagon Alley. The Golden Compass, on the other hand, gives you its own version of Hogwarts, only much blander, and leads you to a battle on the ice that is lacking only in Orcs, led, by of all things, a bear out of a Coke commercial. There are even a couple of moments right out of Lemony Snicket & Stuart Little. Woe is the media-literate child who tries to make a world out of this collage.

To make it worse, much worse, director Chris Weitz has cast veterans of Lord of the Rings into a couple of important roles – Ian McKellen is the voice of Iorek (pronounced Yorick), the dethroned prince of the ice bears who enters into a contract with Lyra, the girl who seeks to rescue her uncle in the North, and Christopher Lee, Saruman in Lord of the Rings, has a cameo as a key member of the Majesterium, the faux Catholic Church that functions here much the way the Empire does in Star Wars. It would have been far better had Weitz chosen to reverse their roles, giving the Bear the resonating timbre of Lee & not reminding us, every time one or the other speaks, how much better the Ring trilogy is. Eva Green, fresh from Casino Royale, does a turn playing Cate Blanchett/Liv Tyler from LOTR and wouldn’t you know that James Bond (Daniel Craig) is good Lord Asriel himself. Fortunately, Nicole Kidman chews the scenery in her Cruella De Vil imitation – not quite as wicked as Glenn Close, but not bad. Also fortunately, Sam Elliott seems only capable of playing himself, the friendly cowpoke who gives good moustache, so you don’t even notice, almost, that he’s really Han Solo.

Is it any wonder these parts never gel?

Not having read Pullman’s book, I can’t tell you if the inspiration for this is such a compendium of clichés as the film. But the film is almost a guessing game of where did the director get this, where did he steal that? Which is quite a shame really. Dakota Blue Richards, the thirteen-year-old actress at the heart of all this silliness, is quite decent. She may not light up the screen the way Emma Watson does in the Harry Potter series, but that may have as much to do with the quality of direction here as it does her actual skills. I found myself rooting for the actress & not so much the character as this film went on.

Much has been made in the media about Compass’ abstention from using the word Church to describe The Authority that is trying to stamp out free will. Frankly, a nomad off the tundra in Tuva could recognize the Majesterium as Catholicism in, oh, maybe eight seconds. Pullman’s take on the church may be no more nuanced than Dan Brown’s in The Da Vinci Code, but as an argument it has the advantage of some history. The problem here is that, in such a carnival of second-hand film effects, who would take such an argument seriously?

When I last reviewed a film here (Michael Clayton), somebody identified only as Vance wrote in the comments stream,:

Are you ever struck, Ron, by the difference between your movie reviews and your writing on poetry? From my perspective, they might as well be written by different people. The movies you watch are mostly the same ones I read about in the Times, and the kinds of things you focus on (plot, stars) are not so far from that genre either. The same can't be said for the poetry reviews!

I used to be struck by this too when Michael Bérubé was still blogging. Without knowing in advance, you'd never guess the comments on music and on books came from the same mind. (Similar prose facility, I suppose, but radically different notions of what's worth talking about, what counts as evidence or a reference point, what the goal might be.)

The answer is Yes. And also No. It’s really a cogent point & one I’ve thought about a good deal since he first made it, but drafting my note on Lust, Caution brought it back front & center. So maybe I ought to venture a response.

There are really two kinds of points being made here about me – Michael Bérubé has to fend for himself, which he does perfectly well – one about my discussion of “stars,” the other about my discussion of “plot” in cinema. They’re really different points.

Cinema, like theater & much music, is a collaborative art form. It’s entirely possible to be uninterested in every other element of an event, but to be entranced by how well (or even how badly) a performer does his or her thing. Like John Latta writing about how Kit Robinson or Tom Mandel works in The Grand Piano without necessarily – at least in the same note – presiding over a presentation of the whole project. Most poetry – tho not all – is a profoundly individual endeavor. Emily Dickinson being the iconic instance thereof. Tho in fact I have written about books noting only what is written blurbwise on the jacket – that got a bunch of angry responses – or talking about the editing of an issue of a magazine, rather than the work therein.

I agree with Pierre Bayard that literature – he goes further & says culture – is a “system” before it is individual books, individual poets, individual poems. Which is what I mean when I say that there is no such thing as a poet, there are only kinds of poets. It’s not about what you write – it’s about location, location, location. What you write is what gets you into (or out of) a particular location. I know it’s not how it feels when you or I write a poem, but that is the overarching social dynamic that takes place. One of the reasons I keep putting in links about English-language poetry stories from such diverse places as Nigeria & Pakistan is because I want to understand now what the world of my poetry is going to look like just a few decades hence, when such poetries are as much a presence in the then-equivalent of Jacket as Australian verse is now.

Cinema is a system also, and occasionally I will touch on that. But it is also a formal language – more than one, in fact – and the role of narrative there is inescapable. Cinema is not separate from narrative, except under explicit and exceptional conditions. In fact, I respond totally to the work of Nathaniel Dorsky, Abigail Child, Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, Warren Sonbert, Henry Hills & others who work under those exceptional conditions. But, like Warren Sonbert, I can bathe in the light of an Alfred Hitchcock for hours.

As I’ve argued before – and no doubt will be forced to again – poetry’s role as a carrier of narrative declined markedly with the rise of the novel. An alternative had come along that handled narrative far more efficiently. The form of the novel was explicitly designed to do so. And the history of the novel is that it too has struggled once cinema arrived because the novel's social necessity was then taken over by the flickering screen. To what degree today are novels (& especially short stories) simply plot ideas for screenplays? Quite a bit more than we might be willing to admit. This is why the “traditional” novel has declined markedly, to be replaced instead by its own School of Quietude (Bellow, Cheever, Updike, Roth) on the one hand, and a series of genre alternatives, each of which is driven by the needs of its specific genre. In addition to the usual genre alternatives, sci-fi, romance¹, porn, such fields as “experimental” and even “Oprah” (aka “book club “) fiction all thrive – it is only the “serious, traditional” novel that is in its death throes.

This is why poetry today that still tries to conceive itself as straightforward narrative looks as awkward as somebody in a football uniform performing classic ballet (on ice). The social necessity has not been there for over 150 years, meaning that it is arguing – whatever else it may be about – for a certain world, one every bit as pathological as the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle some born-again Christians emulate, ignorant of its historical parameters and limitations. It’s not the only aspect of the School of Quietude that needs to be looked at in a psychiatric framework, but it is one of the most obvious.

But what is true for poetry is not necessarily true to the same degree for fiction, even less so for cinema and television. To write about them on equivalent terms would in fact falsify their social as well as formal dynamics. The rise of reality TV, for example, needs to be viewed as a formal divergence between narrative and fictive (tho, in fact, it is far more fictive than it likes to let on). Which is why looking at Project Runway can actually tell you things about Robert Pinsky. Or Charles Bernstein. But you won’t see them if you don’t actually look at what they’re doing.

So, yes, it does make sense that I would focus on different aspects with regards to cinema and television than with poetry. But it is because I take each of them equally seriously.

 

¹ Read Pam Rosenthal if you want the best in romance literature. And read her “Molly Weatherfield” novels to see what a theory-savvy second-wave feminist can do with S/M porn.

Quite by accident, I happened to see the final season of The Sopranos on the same week as Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, the follow-up film, if you listen to critics, to Brokeback Mountain. This means that I happened to see Tony Leung playing a character with more than a few parallels to James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano. Leung, one of the finest actors alive, plays the role of a Chinese comprador, collaborating with the occupying Japanese administration, with lethal understatement. The narrative of the film entails what happens when Leung’s character, Mr. Yee, gets involved with a friend of his wife, Mrs. Mak, who is not what she seems.

That is one way you could tell and see this story. Here’s another. A gaggle of students in Hong Kong in 1938 gang together to raise funds for the war against Japan by putting on a patriotic play. One young girl who is coaxed into joining the production ends up with the lead role because she is far more intense as an actress than any of the rest. When the students decide to carry their resistance to Japan to the next level by becoming an underground cell, this same student is again coaxed into participating, only to discover once again that her sense of commitment and engagement far exceeds that of the others. She is so good at what she does that she frightens the rest. But they pin their hopes on her as the mechanism to bring them close to their target, an official who is secretly helping Japan, and in so doing persuade her to do things about which she does not feel good. She succeeds at what she’s asked, but the rest of the group are such amateurs that the plot goes awry, the target escapes (tho a second collaborator is indeed killed, collectively, with different students taking turns stabbing him), and the group scatters to escape. Three years later, Japan has won the war with China but is now engaged in a larger, more difficult battle against the United States. This same female student is contacted by members of her old cell, still actively a part of the resistance, and asked to help again set up this same target, who now has become the head of the secret police for the regime the Japanese have installed. Again she is asked to do things that profoundly impact her sense of self, but succeeds in putting him into position where the cell can attack. At this moment, she makes a decision that calls into question everything she has done up to that moment. This has profound consequences.

Here is a third perspective. Nothing the young woman does impacts the outcome of this narrative at all. The secret police have been tracking this ragtag group of conspirators all along and simply sweep in and pick them up. Indeed, they have been watching the official as well. They take documents from his inner office and let him know that he too has been an object of surveillance. He knows that it doesn’t matter. “All our days are numbered now that America has entered the war.” As indeed, in real life, they would have been.

Eileen Chang, the Taiwanese novelist who penned the story from which James Schamus (Ice Storm; Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger; The Hulk; Tortilla Soup) adapted the screenplay, was herself roughly the same age as Wei Tang, the young directing student who plays Mrs. Mak, when, during World War II, she married an already married official of the collaborative regime, following him to the port city of Wenzhou after the defeat of the Japanese & collapse of the puppet regime. He, however, abandoned her for another woman and fled to Japan. If Chang’s biography echoes aspects of the student who impersonates Mrs. Mak, it’s no accident. Indeed, like the student, one of Chang’s parents abandoned her by moving to England. When, after Mr. Yee has disappeared for a few days, leaving the conspirators to wonder where their target has gone, it is the former student who thinks out loud, “Maybe he has another woman.” In that line, one finds the author speaking directly to the audience, or to herself.

This may explain, I think, why – maybe even how – Ang Lee has made a film of this sort thoroughly from the woman’s point of view. In spite of having one of the two or three most famous Chinese actors in the world in the key role of Mr. Yee, this is a tale of how a young girl is transformed, from student to revolutionary to something altogether different, which doesn’t really have a name and which cannot be saved.

You will notice that I’ve gotten over 750 words into this note without once using the word sex. In spite of all the reviews, obsessed with the idea that an Oscar-winning director would immediately follow up with a film rated NC-17, this is not a movie about sex. This is a film about how people react to sex. Sex changes everything. It transforms every character in this narrative, regardless of how distant from it they are. For example, the too-handsome-for-words young director of the theater troupe (played by Rochester-born Taiwanese rock star Lee-Hom Wang), with whom the young women of the group are all hopelessly in love, goes from being a hot-headed dynamic young artist – how the student thinks of him at first – to being a bumbling, lethally stupid amateur spy whose one lame advance on the one-time student, towards the end of the second plot to get Mr. Yee, she brushes aside with “Why didn’t you do that three years ago?” Three years ago, she still might have been the young woman thrilled to be kissed by this romantic lost puppy. But not now.

Some of the really dumb reviews have noticed that the sex scenes in this film aren’t especially erotic, even though a couple of them are fairly gymnastic. But they’re not about eros, not in the slightest. If anything, they’re ideological, almost in the Althusserian sense.

The student is supposed to seduce Mr. Yee and her cover story presupposes her to be married. To maintain her cover, she shouldn’t be a virgin if and when Mr. Yee makes his move. The group as a whole has already decided, before they even ask her, that she has to have sexual experience, but the only member of the organization who is not a virgin, and therefore theoretically able to teach her, is the rich kid who’s financing all their Baader-Meinnhof / Symbionese Liberation Army fantasies, and that only in brothels. He’s pathetic and she’s irritated, but she goes along with this only to walk out into a roomful of stares from her comrades – if they already sensed her level of intensity transcended their own, she’s now crossed an invisible border. She’s the one adult in the organization.

This is still true three years later when she confronts the director and his superior in the resistance, Old Wu, explaining in painful detail (and at the top of her lungs) exactly what goes on in her head when having sex with this literal sadist. By now, she has crossed over into a place where she has no real counterparts or peers. She can’t be open with Mr. Yee – he would kill her as surely as Tony Soprano ordered the hit on Chris’ fiancé Adrianna, and for the same reasons – yet nobody “on her side” has even a clue what it feels like to do what she does. Her one other friend in the household, Mrs. Yee (played by Joan Chen), is in denial of everything, from her husband’s infidelities to the coming consequences of the Second World War. She just sits in the compound, playing mah jong, or goes shopping. When Mr. Yee rapes Mrs. Mak, it’s exhausting and painful to watch. (It also ensures that none of the later sex scenes can be perceived as driven by desire.) My wife swears that when, at the scene’s end, Mr. Yee throws Mrs. Mak’s coat at her half-naked form, rolled up into a fetal position on the bed, she’s half-smiling because she knows she’s got him. Who here is the hunter & who is the bait?

If this film has a direct antecedent, it’s not Brokeback Mountain or films like Last Tango in Paris or Realm of the Senses, but Ang Lee’s own The Ice Storm, still his best feature, in how it strips each character of every pretense until we get down to drives & contradictions. What are we supposed to think of a woman who uses sex for anything but love? What is she herself supposed to think? Or Mr. Yee, for that matter? When he takes Mrs. Mak to a Japanese geisha house, she says to him “You want me to be your whore.” “No,” he replies, “I’m the whore here.” These are lines, of course, that apply every bit as much to actors & directors, and a more Brechtian director would have shown a boom mike or cameraman reflected in a window to underscore the point. Lee is centuries beyond the nonsense that equates fucking with love or commitment, and yet he’s fascinated with the undeniable psychic power it wields on everyone who enters into its orbit. And, on some level, that’s all of us.

Hollywood is a bizarre work environment simply because a few people become very rich & famous, while many others eke out livings that make you wonder about why a human would choose that profession. The short-term nature of most projects – ‘tis the rare TV series that lasts ten years, Saturday Night Live is one of the few to be older as a place of employment than Dell – is the antithesis of the academy, where some schools predate the republic. Film reportedly is a director’s medium, television that of a producer’s. The writer’s medium? If you want one, you’d better stick to poetry. And writers in the television & film arts become far less marketable once they advance in years beyond that beloved age demographic of the advertisers’ target audience, which is what – 18 to 34? Why, if you were thinking of getting into the film arts, would you even do so as a writer? It’s not an accident, perhaps, that so many poets who have worked in film have been in front of the camera, from Harry Northrop to Michael Lally. Or morphed into directors as quickly as possible, a la Paul Auster, regardless of how ill-suited they might be to the task.

Most of the screen writers I’ve known came out of theater, worked like dogs for no money for decades & hoped for the rare occasional big payday, meanwhile gradually making a living through script doctoring – basically rendering the bland marginally more intelligible. When it comes to security and benefits, it’s just like adjunct teaching, save for the fact that screen writing is more sporadic, less certain.

Meanwhile the same corporate forces that try to control all media do everything in their power to keep writers (also actors, stage hands, etc.) in roughly the same relationship that the old record companies used to have with blues musicians who could neither read nor write. It would seem that these corporate forces have a bit of a potential windfall from the newer interactive modes of distribution if they can but monetize the web, raking in profits that should, in all fairness, have been the wages of writers. So the writers are out on the picket line & the longer they stay out, the longer it will be before I can see the final season of Battlestar Gallactica next year. But compared to the sacrifices the screen writers & other workers in Hollywood are making, let’s face it, I can wait. And if the screen writers would like to put together a list of companies not to buy from – hello Sony – until this is all settled, I’d be only too happy to oblige.

Tom Wilkinson has been a professional actor for over thirty years, tho it’s only been in the last decade that he’s been rightfully acknowledged as one of the best character actors of his generation. Often he plays fairly buttoned-down types, so it’s a special pleasure to see him cut loose in Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy’s film of corporate suspense, in a role fit for a somewhat older Philip Seymour Hoffman. Wilkinson is a top trial lawyer for a firm that specializes in defending sleazeball corporations, this time a food-processing conglomerate called uFront. It’s a class action that has been dragging on for years because it involves the death of many a Midwestern farmer, and, in a deposition in Milwaukee, Wilkinson’s character, who is bipolar in addition to being a “killer” litigator, has gone off his meds & goes over the edge, stripping naked in front of the teenage girl he’s in the process of deposing, as well as two teams of astonished attorneys. Almost lost in the chaos that ensues is the little detail that Wilkinson’s planning to give the plaintiffs the smoking gun memo that will seal the fate of his client.

Wilkinson’s bread scene – you’ll know which it is instantly – is an actor’s master’s class, given here by one of the greats. Wilkinson’s isn’t the only outstanding performance in this film, which comes oh so close to actually working, the other being Tilda Swinton channeling Carly Fiorina as the corporate counsel for uNorth, overwhelmed at trying to contain the damage created by Wilkinson, trying too hard to be ruthless in a job for which she doesn’t feel qualified. I would say that this is one of Swinton’s best quirky acting roles ever, except for the fact that I’d probably say that about almost all of her characters over her career – she is one of the very best actors alive and is completely brilliant here. Watching her face half-hide a million rapid-fire emotions is one of the very best things about Michael Clayton, which as I said comes oh so close to working.

Michael Clayton is Tony Gilroy’s first directorial credit, having made a successful career writing thriller screenplays – the Bourne trilogy most notably – and he does a decent job with his own script, or at least with his actors, as the story gets away from him. The first thirty minutes of the film are simply terrific as it spins out so many narrative threads without picking them up in any predictable fashion that the viewer’s head feels ready to burst just keeping track. That’s my kind of fun and, at this point, I was completely taken with this film. What follows over the next 89 minutes doesn’t entirely fulfill the promise of this opening sequence, and that really is the tale of Michael Clayton.

The title role of course belongs to George Clooney, who knows that a movie star’s first task is to be himself regardless of his character, which function he performs admirably in somewhat difficult circumstances. What George Clooney does best is smile – his grin has made him very wealthy & very famous – but Michael Clayton is a character with very little to smile about & Clooney dutifully tones it down a notch. Clayton is a fixer for the law firm employed by uNorth, something of a protégé to Tom Wilkinson’s character, the person dispatched to handle “messy” personal situations that can get in the way of client relations. Indeed, the first part of the film has him being dispatched up to Westchester to aide a client who has just committed a hit-&-run of a midnight jogger out there in the ‘burbs. His job is to hold the customer’s hand and get the best possible local criminal defense lawyer there before the police show up at the front door. In this case, the customer is a jerk with serious anger management issues who wants to blame the victim. Clooney is having none of this and lets the customer know it. On his way back, he stops to look at a trio of horses under a tree on a hill. As he stands staring at the horses, his car explodes.

That’s the basic set-up and a lot to handle right there. On top of this, we have a plot about a failed restaurant, Clooney’s gambling addiction – seventeen years with a top law firm & he’s at risk to being jacked up by loan sharks over a relatively small debt – his relationship with his brothers (one a cop, the other a druggie) and his son Henry, whom he drives to school tho he doesn’t live with the mother. Add to this the corporate plot lines & you have far more than Gilroy can control. The scenes with the family – without fail – are sodden & sentimental, yet they turn out to be crucial in setting up what will become the final plot-twisting finale. On the one hand, major plot lines never get resolved – remember the guy with the hit-&-run – while others tie off so neatly that you can see the big narrative bow: ne’er-do-well lawyer succeeds by relying on family / family values trump murderous corporate prerogatives. Yeesh.

Clooney actually does a decent job here, but it’s an impossible circumstance. He’s never quite desperate enough for his circumstances because desperate isn’t something George Clooney does. His awkwardness in the family scenes is only half because of the narrative context being presented. The result is a picture that leaps into another dimension whenever Wilkinson comes on screen during its first half, whenever Swinton is on screen mostly in the second. The other notably good role here belongs to Sydney Pollack of all people, as the head of Clooney’s law firm. Pollack is invariably irritating whenever he acts, but here Gilroy milks it for dramatic effect. It’s another of those little touches that make this film a fine time to watch actors as the narrative heads south.

If Polis is This: Charles Olson and The Persistence of Place isn’t the best motion picture ever made about an American poet – a claim attributed to Bill Corbett on the film’s website – it’s mostly because What Happened to Kerouac? the 1986 documentary made by Richard Lerner & Lewis Mac Adams (with major post-production editorial work from co-producer Nathaniel Dorsky) set the bar so very high. But perhaps because Kerouac in death as in life has long been an icon in the American popular imagination, while Olson remains primarily of interest to other poets, the task of these two films is fundamentally different.

In fact, one of the best sequences in Polis comes early on with the filmmaker wandering around Gloucester, Massachusetts, asking the locals what they recall of Olson, who died, mind you, more than three decades before. A surprising number remember “the big guy,” a reasonable way to characterize a poet 6’8” tall – one of them is able to cite the passage where he and his buddies can be found in Maximus. This film is full of such small, fine touches, while offering a narrative of Olson’s life and an exposition of his main ideas, particularly his appropriation of Robert Creeley’s “form is never more than an extension of content” (explained here by Creeley himself with assistance from NFL film footage!). Another absolutely amazing moment is Pete Seeger’s explanation of how Charles Olson caused Woody Guthrie to write Bound for Glory. That by itself is worth the price of admission.

Most of the limits of the film are the consequence of attempting to pack so much into a one-hour time slot. Polis hardly touches the last decade of Olson’s life – particularly odd given his status as a late-starter & his death at 59 – which also means that the question of alcohol is never addressed. Nor the ways in which the death of his wife Betty in an auto accident in 1964 set him emotionally adrift. And there are themes within his work, places literally, that the film could have detailed far better for the reader who has not (yet) wandered the streets of Gloucester with Maximus as their map. The Cut, for one, Dogtown for another. Dogtown once was a town itself, an alternate Gloucester that sprang up before residents understood just how dependent on the proximity of the sea the community would become. As people moved east to the shore, the houses left behind were given to the inevitable widows left by shipwrecks, etc. Finally the neighborhood was abandoned & reverted to the brambles of “open space,” tho you can still find the foundations of the old houses there. It’s so overgrown today that visitors are warned to take compasses and let friends know they’ve gone in. To be “from Dogtown,” like Olson’s alter ego, is to be from the wild, abandoned, tragic past. This is not Russell Crowe’s Maximus, but the Creature from the Black Lagoon as oversized, absent-minded professor. If this be persona, it is the most complex, fascinating example of such in American literature.

Perhaps the film’s main weakness, tho, is one that it shares with What Happened to Kerouac? The scarcity of women & women’s voices. There are just a handful, notably Susan Thackery, Anne Waldman & Diane DiPrima. The most glaring omission turns out to be Frances Boldereff, Olson’s mistress during the period in which he formulated “Projective Verse” and Maximus both. Even if it’s overblown to set Boldereff up as Olson’s muse, the “secret sauce” that makes possible these epoch-changing projects, her impact was nonetheless profound. Her absence, even if it was a condition of the family’s cooperation, doesn’t serve Olson well.

But the larger problem isn’t so much the erasure of Boldereff – whose existence wasn’t widely known even to Olson’s friends at the time – as it is the whole question of the New American Poetry’s way of relating to women. The Allen anthology includes just four females among its 44 contributors: Denise Levertov, Barbara Guest, Madeline Gleason and Helen Adam. Only Levertov, who died in 1997, would have made sense in the context of this film, tho she never was a student at Black Mountain and largely abandoned her New American roots after 1970. (Three of the four, it’s worth noting, were personal friends of Robert Duncan’s, who did teach briefly at the North Carolina college, but whose relationship to women as a gay male differed from Olson’s machismo.) One wonders if future conferences & panels concerning male New American poets generally won’t end up having the same unspoken requirement that conferences do today regarding Ezra Pound’s politics, where either a panel or, at the least, a speaker is compelled to address the problems of fascism & anti-semitism. We may just need an extended series of “Olson & Women,” “Creeley & Women,” “O’Hara & Women,” “Blackburn & Women,” “Duncan & Women,” "Eigner & Women," “Baraka & Women” events.

A quick recommendation here to catch Sean Penn’s magnificent Into the Wild while it’s still in the theaters unless you already have one of those new humongous screens at home. Some of the visuals – not just of the Alaskan wilderness, but of the Anza Borrego desert in California & wheat fields in the Dakotas – are breath taking. This is not a film that is going to do big box office, but I personally will be surprised if, come December, it doesn’t get redistributed, this time with a fat handful of Oscar nominations – for Penn both as director and writer, for Emile Hirsch as best actor, for Catherine Keener & Hal Holbrook as supporting actors. Just for starters.

A film made from a popular book based on real events, in this case Jon Krakauer’s account of the transformation of Emory University graduate Christopher McCandless into Alexander Supertramp, sort of the ultimate post-hippy Thoreau wannabe who hitches all around the west before heading to Alaska, his great dream, to get away from it all, and who does – so well in fact that when he decides to head south again, he finds himself trapped, the game he’s lived off of for months having itself fled, then poisons himself by misidentifying the wrong potato root, and as a result starves to death at the age of 24 – Into the Wild’s challenge is to make Supertramp’s solitary ways interesting as narrative. Penn does this by making it two stories: the first that of his surprisingly brief time, less than four full months, in the Alaskan wilderness, camping out for the most part in an abandoned bus; the second the tale of the journey that took McCandless from graduation in Atlanta to the road north on his final venture. It is the second tale, which is that of human relationships, that holds up this film. We witness McCandless’ gradual transformation into Supertramp, told in terms that don’t make him seem at all the extremophile it would be easy enough to dismiss him as, while at the same time setting up a final transformation at the end of the other tale in Alaska that serves as the film’s true denouement. A third story – that of McCandless’ family – is principally a backdrop, suggesting why & how somebody could grow up so distrustful of all human interaction.

His parents, played by William Hurt & Marcia Gay Harden, undergo a transformation of their own in losing their son, who simply disappears after graduation, sending all of his savings to Oxfam, abandoning his car in New Mexico after stripping it of plates. Their presence principally serves to set up both Keener, as the “wheel tramp” hippy who gives Christopher/Alexander a ride & bonds with him in ways that are more motherly than anything else. She and her “old man” (played by the film’s marine coordinator, Brian Dierker, not a professional actor) take the kid to the coast, give him some life clues & tell him about fabled hippy hangouts like Slab City (which Supertramp eventually reaches, complete with a visit to Leonard Knight’s nearby Salvation Mountain, a fabulous little set piece within the film).

If Keener proves to be a surrogate mother to Alexander Supertramp, Hal Holbrook’s portrayal of Ron Franz, a retired military man making a modest living as a leather worker in the Imperial Valley, functions as an even more explicit surrogate father. Not having read Krakauer’s book, it’s not clear how much of this portion is fiction, how much these characters might be predicated on actual people. Both Keener & Holbrook’s characters have good reasons to see this bookish outdoorsman as a child, and their relationships with him are the actual heart of the film, followed in turn by a friendship with his boss on the wheat farm in the Dakotas (played by Vince Vaughan) who gets hauled off by the feds as a 1990s phone phreak, selling illegal black boxes (a terrific tiny detail in this film), and by Kristen Stewart as a teenage girl being raised by parents who live in a tiny trailer at the Slabs who tries unsuccessfully to seduce Alexander – he’s too committed to commitment for that.

This is a world off the grid – sort of upper limit Burning Man, lower limit the gypsy audiences of the Grateful Dead. It’s radically different from, say, the life of the urban homeless, as Alexander learns when he tries to spend a night at a mission in Los Angeles – he has nothing in common with urban squatters, save perhaps his sense of resourcefulness. This is a tale of a man who never even wants to see a city. More than once, Alexander is off in the wilderness, whether Alaska, the Salton Sea or the Pacific Crest Trail in the California Sierras, only to look up and see jet trails threading the sky.

Penn does a great job handling this material without judgment. Unlike, say, Motorcycle Diaries, where you can see the rigidities in its lead character, a college-age Che Guevara, that will lead him to become Castro’s Trotsky, I don’t think you can come out of Into the Wild with any sense of diagnosis beyond the notion that kids in violently dysfunctional families are apt to react strongly to the emotional abuse. Penn is much more interested in the books Supertramp reads: Jack London, Tolstoy, Dr. Zhivago. An even more delicate proposition is giving a sense of Alexander’s inexperience as an outdoorsman – the driver of his last ride in gives him his boots and tells the kid to call him “if you survive” – without making him look like a fool who could have found emergency supplies and a way out within a quarter mile of the bus where he died. Penn shows Alexander hunting for edible plants with his guide book in hand. He manages to kill a moose, but since all he knows about what to do with game that size comes from notes he took back on the wheat farm, he has to go back & read them, which takes too long so that flies lay eggs in the carcass.

McCandless/Supertramp has become something of a folk hero since his death, the abandoned bus turning into the closest thing Alaska has to Jim Morrison’s gravestone. According to an interview I heard of Krakauer talking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air last week, much of McCandless’ stuff is still on the bus. Still, the world is encroaching. He burned his i.d. and the money in his wallet, changed his name, never contacted his family. Now he’s a major motion picture. Those boots he was given as he hiked in through the snow were briefly available on Ebay last fall.

At two points in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, the Russian desk of Scotland Yard puts in an appearance. The first of these functions to provide context, one detective explaining to another, and thus to the viewers, the role of tattoos within what we call the Russian mafia. The second time, however, it so transforms one of the film’s main characters that we feel as if the air is being taken out of this dark drama. Which seems particularly odd, given just how much this film wants to be devastating to its audience. And doubly so insofar as it also undercuts the themes of good within evil that lie at the heart of this otherwise excellent film.

My friend Michael Rosenthal, who warned me that I would find a punch being pulled, also reminds me that Cronenberg has said publicly that both Eastern Promises and its immediate predecessor, A History of Violence, are “works for hire,” even tho it is clear also that Cronenberg is perfectly capable these days of dictating the terms of just such employment. Still, it is that second scene and its tacit redemption of one of the film’s most brutal characters that I think Cronenberg is pointing to when he says this. As if to say that, without this moment, an audience might find this film irredeemable, all darkness with no sense of relief. Yet it is the promise of just that pit, some last rung of Hell, that Cronenberg wants us to glimpse. He very nearly succeeds.

A lot of this film depends on the skills of its two leading actors, Viggo Mortensen in his finest role ever, well beyond even his work in A History of Violence, and Naomi Watts, who continues to be one of the two or three finest actresses of our time. Mortensen had become typecast as a villain in films – see, for example, his role oppose Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder – before Lord of the Rings (he was a last-minute addition to the cast once Peter Jackson determined that his first choice lacked the necessary gravitas, or perhaps just undercurrent of menace, that Mortensen brings to every role) transformed him overnight into a leading man. It is Cronenberg’s genius to recognize that it is these two sides of Mortensen’s potential as an actor that positions him perfectly to be a Cronenberg leading man. Mortensen is hardly the first actor to join these two aspects of his personality – Ed Harris, Willem DeFoe, Christopher Walken, Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, all the way back to Broderick Crawford, Robert Mitchum & Humphrey Bogart, Hollywood seems to love the leading man who offers the threat of violence barely controlled behind a smile. With Eastern Promises, Mortensen goes right up there alongside De Niro & Bogie at the head of this list. It is precisely the absence of this subterranean rage that keeps, say, a John Wayne off it altogether.

Eastern Promises is, in some ways, David Cronenberg’s Pillow Book, a film in which both violence & intimacy are literally inscribed on the body. This he accomplishes without Watts once removing an article of clothing, sharing indeed just one brief kiss. This film isn’t about heterosexual eros nearly so much as it is the homosocial dimension of male organizations. The mob boss’ son demands that Mortensen’s character have sex in front of him so that he can tell his father that the new lieutenant is “not a queer.” It is self-consciously the least sexy fucking you will ever see, the hooker’s dispirited face devastated by the act.

The role of the body as something inscribed is effectively carried through in two other scenes as well, one of them an interview through which Mortensen becomes the Russian equivalent of a made guy – his resume is his body. The other is the already famous attack in the steam baths, the single most violent fight sequence I have ever seen on film, one that had literally everyone in the theater I was in gasping, screaming & groaning out loud, the guys at least as loudly as the gals. It’s worth noting that this is a very violent gangster movie in general in which guns appear not to exist – not only are straight razors and box cutters bloodier instruments, they require you to be up close and personal with your opponent. The steam bath sequence is, ultimately, the true sex scene in this film, not just because Mortensen is entirely naked throughout – his assailants are dressed in black – but because of the intimacy of the assault. It becomes evident immediately that deep cuts in Mortensen’s abdomen & back are themselves a form of writing upon the body, just like the tattoos. Penetration here is defined as a box cutter in the eye socket, ideally suited to twist and twist and twist.

A day later, I keep wondering about the film this could have been. Cronenberg has always been a director with an open channel to the dark side, unflinching in his willingness to follow his logic to its extreme – viz Dead Ringers or The Fly.  So it feels odd here to see him step back at such a key moment. If, in fact, he wanted it to make a statement about his character, that opportunity was abandoned precisely because of the way in which it occurs. But what would it mean for a perfectly evil being to do something nice? Isn’t this, in fact, the same gesture that Russell Crowe makes in 3:10 to Yuma when he submits into boarding the prison car of the train? Tho Crowe seems hardly more lethal than Hopalong Cassady compared to the boys of Siberia & Chechnya in Cronenberg’s vision. Crowe’s body count may be much higher, but killing on the road to Yuma is clean & casual by comparison (indeed, that film’s one moment tuned to the squeamish impulses of an audience is medical in nature). 

And why, at this moment, are filmmakers making this statement? It’s as though we’ve arrived at a recognition that we ourselves are the monsters – ask any Iraqi – but still want to believe that a thread of redemption remains.

While the little tempest in a comments stream over the use of source materials was raging, or at least microraging, in reaction to David Giannini’s redeployment of other poet’s first lines, I went to see a film that raised some of the same issues, Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, a musical tale of love in the 1960s set entirely to songs written (but not here performed) by the Beatles. As an attempt to reinvent the musical for our time, it’s basically Hair with better music as one droll critic put it, a shadow of a film alongside John Carney’s brilliant Once. It certainly is the most political film I ever saw where the audience was required to check its left brain at the door. If you can do that, it’s a visually stunning & often quite wry music video that trots through its paint-by-numbers narrative of the love between Jude & Lucy, Maxwell’s unfortunate adventure in Vietnam, Prudence’s arrival through the bathroom window & Sadie’s reunion with her guitarist Jo-Jo. There is a lot of historical revisionism that is just slightly askew for the purposes of avoiding trademark & libel laws – Strawberry records, Dr. Geary instead of Leary, Café Huh? instead of Café Wha, Students for a Democratic Revolution (SDR), that sort of thing. There is even a scene at Columbia when the 1968 student strikers are being busted & hustled out of the administration building where one student with giant thick glasses is (or at least wants to be) a fair copy of then-Columbia student leader David Shapiro. Bono’s turn as Ken Kesey (whom he plays more akin to a Stewart Brand) under the name of Dr. Robert is funny, as is one song in particular where Joe Cocker plays multiple characters. Some of the performances are terrific but somewhere along the line you realize that you could do this to just about any set of songs, Dylan for example, the Doors, My Chemical Romance, Tony Bennett, it doesn’t have to be the Beatles – it’s basically David Giannini for cinema, or more accurately a pop application of Oulipo constraints.

By pinning so much of its narrative to actual events of the period – Kerouac is mentioned by name, Jo-Jo is propelled to leave Detroit after the riots there & the student radicals blow themselves up in a New York brownstone turned bomb factory a la the Weather Underground, before the final triumph of the heroes’ performance atop a New York City roof – Across the Universe (the title of a Beatles song that has grown in importance in its role in their canon, thanks largely to Rufus Wainwright) seems almost anxious about its sources. Source anxiety is, I think, an interesting, if curious, phenomenon. Giannini criticized my review in part because I omitted quoting his two-paragraph prefatory note with its obligatory

All quotations used in this work fall under the ‘fair use’ convention, but remain the copyright of the individual authors…. A specific intention is to honor individual poets in new community. (Ital. in the original)

Lately, I’ve been seeing source commentary in a lot of books of poems & not always where I would think to find it – Jean Day’s Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium is one such, Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets is another. Giannini lists all of his sources & one of the games you can play with his book is “guess where that came from.” And, at the behest of my editors, even The Alphabet will include a few terse notes, albeit mostly having to do with the dates of composition. Still, I had to track down in Paris the woman I had dinner with at Emeril’s in New Orleans in the early 1990s to verify a date.

But asking for source data on a 900 page manuscript like The Alphabet is not so far from inviting a 2,000 page response. I suppose some day some enterprising grad student is going to comb through Ketjak and identify just how many sentences there were lifted directly from Quine – it could be done. But I’m not in the slightest inclined to think that doing so would tell you any more about the poem. In that same vein, the various annotations for works like Ulysses, The Cantos or Finnegans Wake always strike me as telling me a little about what the author may have been thinking about around the time of composition, but they are almost mute on what the works themselves actually say. Annotating, reading & interpreting are, after all, three different acts. Everyone who has ever written about 2197 has done so with a sense of a science fiction framework & what that might mean to those texts. I can’t think of anyone who has as yet noticed that the number is 13 cubed, which means that it represents the total of sentences in the work. From the perspective of reading, does that matter? I suspect not.