285.
I’m writing this from the northern tip of Wisconsin, the days already growing shorter as the summer comes to an end. Simone is 13. Pearl is 11. Bernadette is 4. I’m a spirit-withering 46, feeling the ennui and existential drift. What’s it all about, the theme song from Alfie once asked. As I get older, I realize I don’t have a goddamn clue.
286.
A question I keep returning to is: Director Suschland asks in his haunting documentary, Hitler’s Hollywood: what do movies know that we don’t? And it’s a question I keep returning to, unsettling the way I view movies ever since. Catching bits of Iron Man 2 at the gym, I notice Elon Musk appears as himself, looking like the smug asshole he’s proven himself to be. He says to Stark, “I’ve got an idea for an electric jet” and Stark says, “We’ll make it work.” It’s a tiny throwaway scene, but it already shows Musk’s ambitions—to be one of the new gods, the superpowered—and the power of the mythology surrounding him (that he’s a brilliant intellect on par with Stark). It also shows how compromised a project the MCU was from the start, incorporating bits of reality into itself. The film appeared in 2010. Look at how pervasive Musk is now.
287.
Treat Williams died. I’ve never been much of a fan, but here’s my obituary for him. We lost a fixture of b-movies who throughout his career snuck into top-shelf entertainments. Treat Williams hit his highwater mark as either the lead in Sidney Lumet’s Prince in the City, about an honest cop being iced out by his colleagues due to his honesty, or in Hair, playing a singing and dancing hippie burnout. Milos Forman directed Hair, and it’s aged like rancid meat, but Williams is fun to look at, and it kick-started a long career. A buff and attractive young actor with a shock of innocence in his features, Williams was reliable in Once Upon a Time in America, one of my favorite movies, before slipping into the world of B-movies and television. He’s adept at comedy in the cops and zombies feature, Dead Heat, and has bit parts in dozens of other films, including the family weepie, The Deep End of the Ocean and the monsters and terrorist cheap-o horror, Deep Rising. He had a big part in Things To Do in Denver when You’re Dead, a bizarre movie that bewildered me when I saw it back in the ’90s. I always had the sense that he punched above his talent, before ending up exactly where he belonged, as a working actor. He didn’t offend and he never shit the bed, but he was never transcendent or ecstatic either. He lands somewhere between Keanu Reeves’s laconic underselling and Nic Cage’s blustery all-in hyperbole. In a word, he’s forgettable. He wasn’t an artist. He wasn’t a visionary. He didn’t challenge or unsettle. It’s all okay. I won’t miss him and the movies won’t either, but he has a few great scenes here and there, and it’s more than most actors ever get.
288.
We’re in a strange political atmosphere. Half of the country is genuinely terrified that a maniac narcissist with multiple criminal indictments will be re-elected, ushering in a neo-fascist state; the other half believes that a pathological liar with a terrible political track record will be re-elected, facing the headwinds of half a dozen criminal charges, including being declared guilty of rape (in a civil trial, but still) and upcoming RICO violations, which can carry lengthy prison time. Both sides can’t be right, but they can both be wrong, and I wonder if that isn’t the direction we’re heading toward.
289.
I’ve tried to keep Trump off this year’s blog, but he keeps sneaking in. It’s hard. He dominates the social and political spheres with his threats, bloviating, sexism, racism, and general nastiness. He’s entered our political bloodstream like an infection, spreading everywhere. Pundits, thinkers, lawyers, theorists, historians, writers, academics, and politicians are all grappling with his importance, symbolism, failures, and successes. What could I possibly add? Just today a writer compared him to Huey Long.
290.
William Friedkin died. Here’s my obituary for him. William Friedkin, one of the major directors of the new American cinema from the 1970s, died. Friedkin achieved major critical and commercial success with two of his early films, ushering in the cinematic 1970s with The French Connection and a new era of classy, bigger budget horror with The Exorcist. He elevated the latter with an obsessive attention to moody detail; the story goes he spent three days filming bacon sizzling in a pan. Connection was a different matter; he captured the gritty and glorious chaos of New York by following people doing things action movies often elided, entering offices and night clubs, sifting through evidence, running, fleeing, driving. The movie remains combustible and tough, glittering with forlorn urban beauty. His career capsized with his expensive remake of The Wages of Fear, following a group of mercenaries hired to transport nitroglycerin over dangerous South American terrain. It’s a good and serious film—weirdly misnamed Sorcerer—that flopped in the ascendancy of Star Wars, but has since picked up a cult audience. He filmed on location all over South and Central America, and the film is tense and compelling. Contrary to popular notions, Friedkin had plenty more to say. Cruising follows Al Pacino as a sexually confused undercover cop looking for a gay serial killer in early 1980s New York, a movie that retains its icky and unsettling power as it submerses you in the rough trade counterculture. To Live and Die in L.A., a very hard movie to find, is a rock-solid thriller with great set pieces and its own subterranean energy. In the 1990s, he directed Blue Chips, a very fine basketball movie about the perils of big money in college sports, followed by Jade. Reviled on its release, Jade has superb action sequences, marred by a bad lead performance from Linda Fiorintino and a ridiculous sex-is-murder screenplay by ’90s fuck-o Joe Eszterhas. But the film works anyway. In the 2000s, he directed Bug and Killer Joe, intriguing genre arthouse mashups; Joe was the beginning of the McConaissance, with Matthew McConaughey playing a hitman with his own ethical code. Critics compare Friedkin’s rise and fall to other troubled directors like Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles, but these comparisons miss a crucial piece: Friedkin was never an artist. He was a craftsman who liked to work, closer to John Frankenheimer than anyone else. The Exorcist remains a high water mark for horror, classy and complex but also nasty and visceral. The French Connection remains a classic of the genre. Artists do weird shit and often screw up genre films. Friedkin knew better, and spent his career in service to the audience. I doubt we would have enjoyed each other’s company—my gut tells me Friedkin was a bit of an asshole—but as much as anyone he delighted my younger self with the joy and terror of movies.
291.
Beth and I watch Disclosure and Showgirls. I know, it’s weird. Disclosure is a oddball movie about allegations of workplace sexual harassment, only flipping the script; Michael Douglas plays a middle-management employee who (sort of) rebuffs the sexual advances of his superior, played by Demi Moore. The movie is fascinating, speaking to the right now. It’s filled with virtual reality and #metoo reverberations. It even has a bit about Barbie! It’s kind of bad and kind of great, dove-tailing with House of Gucci and Road House; if it were any better, it would be a lot worse. I love movies like this, where major shortcomings become chief virtues.
292.
Showgirls. Wow. It’s a bizarre movie, much stranger than I remember. Sex-obsessed Joe Eszterhas wrote the script, filling it with imagery of the goddess as avatar of sex/death. Elizabeth Berkely, known for her role as Jessie on Saved by the Bell, plays the role of Nomi, a luckless drifter looking for her big break, in a high-wire hysterical mode, discomfiting to watch. She segues out of a job as a stripper to become a Vegas showgirl, falling into a bizarre love/hate/dominance thing with the lead dancer, Crystal (played by Gina Gershon, who is also in Killer Joe). Meanwhile, in a plotline that goes nowhere, a local roustabout promises her a role in his self-financed dance performance. Throughout, Berkeley gyrates, screams, tantrums, and is naked for most of the movie, but how anyone found this grindhouse trash sexy is beyond me. Over the years, it’s become a cult classic, famous for making one bad plot decision after another. Meet it on its own terms, and it is superb in its wretched delights. Showgirls makes so many terrible choices, and is filled with so many histrionic performances disconnected from the story, that it now reads like some deranged arthouse masterpiece.
293.
As summer ends, I always drift into a melancholic state of mind. Reminds me of my childhood, the feeling that the time for joy is over, with the grind of real life re-asserting itself. It’s beautiful up here in northern Wisconsin, the stripped paper birch, white oak and sycamore, the soft breezes moving the woods in a gentle poetry, while deer trot across the two-lane roads and dragonflies hover in shimmery psychedelic. Bernadette eats a s’more, the melty marshmallow sticking to her hands. Simone is reading. Pearl flitters in and out of the living room. The sun is setting, casting long shadows against the many-hued green. On night like this, I wonder, why write at all?
294.
Isn’t life enough?
simoneandthesilversurfer 