pynchon-l-digest V2 #1259
FrodeauxB at aol.com
FrodeauxB at aol.com
Sun Jun 18 14:53:48 CDT 2000
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:
for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Genesis 2:17
(From my father's King James [King of Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender
of the Faith, &c. according to the inside address] Bible, still treasured by
this Roman Catholic boy.) The point is it is not knowledge, but knowledge of
good and evil which is our downfall. In other words free will. We learned the
difference, and we got to choose. The rest, as they say, is history. Pynchon
points out not only the choices we make, but that choices (i.e., acts of
commission or omission) have consequences, and the consequences go on ad
infinitum. Remember the biggest fear in the old University of Chicago
football stadium? The Manhattan Projectors weren't sure that once they
started the chain it would ever stop. Science is easy-it is the dominoes of
human choice that never stops.
On another topic currently arage on the list, the following review may be of
interest:
June 16, 2000
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
THE PAGE FLOATS, TRANSFORMED
By A. O. SCOTT
A part from the luster of borrowed seriousness,
what literature most often provides the movies is
access to a deep and self-replenishing reservoir
of stories. Film and the novel are cousins not
far removed, and the DNA they share is narrative.
But their narrative codes -- owing partly to
obvious differences of media, partly to their
divergent histories -- have grown further and
further apart. After several generations of
fervid experimentation, the flouting of
storytelling norms has become, among ambitious
fiction writers, a convention in itself.
While it would be a distortion to say that the
rise of the movies as a parallel and competing
art form has been the cause, the signature
effects of postmodern fiction -- recursive
language games; self-conscious, unreliable and
multiple narrative voices; Moebius-strip skeins
of allusion and parody, sincerity and irony --
seem almost flagrant in their defiance of
cinematic appropriation.
The giants of postmodernism -- William Gaddis,
Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo -- have erected
pyramids of prose so intricate in their conceits
and so saturated with references as to defy
replication altogether. Their most recognizable
progeny carry on this resistance. Can you picture
the 1,100 pages of David Foster Wallace's
"Infinite Jest," with its 400 footnotes and
uncountable subplots, on the screen?
At the same time, American movies seem, perhaps
more than ever, to languish under the tyranny of
story, a regime with its own bureaucratic jargon.
Aspiring screenwriters are schooled in the dogma
of "three-act structure," "character arcs" and
"through-lines." The average Hollywood product,
confined within iron boundaries of genre and
subjected to the killing discipline of test
marketing, arrives in theaters overstuffed with
incident, whipsawed by the need for suspense and
predictable from start to finish.
It is hardly surprising, then, that a handful of
restless and independent-minded filmmakers have
turned to contemporary fiction for relief, as
though envious of the liberties writers have
claimed for themselves -- the freedom to meander,
to proliferate loose ends, to think out loud.
Alison Maclean's "Jesus' Son," opening in New
York today, is the latest in a series of
intriguing efforts to translate the words of
particularly idiosyncratic writers into the
visual and aural idioms of film.
Like Sofia Coppola's "Virgin Suicides," Bette
Gordon's "Luminous Motion," Mary Harron's
"American Psycho" and Stephen Frears's "High
Fidelity," "Jesus' Son" is at once a tribute to
its source and a bold refashioning of it, an
attempt to preserve the author's style and to
advance the director's vision in a single
gesture.
In some ways, Ms. Maclean is doggedly faithful to
her source, a slim volume of resonant, anecdotal
stories by Denis Johnson. The book is held
together by his shuffling, soulful, absent-minded
hero, a young man adrift in a landscape of drugs,
sad women and surreal jobs. Mr. Johnson's lean,
wry prose infiltrates the film's soundtrack
through dialogue and voice-over, and some of his
descriptive passages are reproduced with
meticulous obedience, as though they were
architectural drawings.
But reading "Jesus' Son," you wonder how its
spare, half-mumbled vignettes and loopy, hipster
jokes could sustain the flesh-and-blood realism
of a movie. The supporting characters, not all of
whom are named, seem like interchangeable
apparitions from a jumbled series of acid
flashbacks, and the book as a whole is like a
long conversation with a voluble, not entirely
sane or sober companion on a cross-country bus
trip.
The book's resonance and humor seem to dwell
between the lines, in the capacity of Mr.
Johnson's artful prose -- and prose in general --
to be at once more abstract and more sensual than
film, however ingenious, can ever hope to be.
Language is able to track the stutterings of
consciousness, the bleeding together of thought
and sensation, the dislocated experience of time,
by the simplest and most efficient of means.
Poetry, Robert Frost said, is what gets lost in
translation, and a corollary might be that prose
is what disappears before your eyes.
Consider a typical passage from "Jesus' Son": "Or
maybe that wasn't the time it snowed. Maybe it
was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled
over on the bunnies and flattened them. It
doesn't matter. What's important for me to
remember now is that early the next morning the
snow was melted off the windshield and the
daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything
and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow
sharp and strange. The bunnies weren't a problem
yet, or they'd already been a problem and were
already forgotten, and there was nothing on my
mind. I felt the beauty of the morning."
In a hundred words, Mr. Johnson evokes several
distinct states of feeling, jumps backward,
forward and sideways in time, and leaps with
careless grace from the narrator's inner world to
the world outside. The camera may be able to
approximate some of these effects, or convey,
through the alchemical interactions of light on
the landscape and the human face, a faint
equivalent of them. But never with this kind of
effortless, off-the-cuff efficiency.
Or consider another passage, a kiss from Jeffrey
Eugenides's "Virgin Suicides" that is stranger,
truer, and far more vividly icky than even the
most splendidly backlighted classic-Hollywood
smooch:
"He could sense her whole being through the kiss,
he said, as though her soul escaped through her
lips, as the Renaissance believed. He tasted
first the grease of her Chap Stick, then the sad
Brussels-sprout flavor of her last meal, and past
that the dust of lost afternoons and the salt of
tear ducts. The peach schnapps faded away as he
sampled the juices of her inner organs, all
slightly acidic with woe."
If this seems overdone, it's purposely so, since
Mr. Eugenides's theme is obsessive longing, to
the point, precisely, of this kind of lunacy,
which teenage boys are capable of when confronted
with the unfathomable reality of teenage girls.
"The Virgin Suicides," published in 1993, is a
lyrical meditation on death, loss and the
suburbs, filtered through the collective
consciousness of an anonymous group of young men.
Its central event is signaled by the title and
spelled out in the first sentence, so that its
story plays out to the melancholic rhythms of
longing. The sense of mystery that pervades the
book is sustained by its lush, obsessive style.
As in "Jesus' Son," its most striking feature is
its voice.
The same might be said of Scott Bradfield's
"History of Luminous Motion," Nick Hornby's "High
Fidelity," and even Bret Easton Ellis's
aggressively styleless, brutally misunderstood
"American Psycho." This is not just a matter of
style, which all good writers possess, but of the
sometimes excessive application of style to the
creation of a seamless subjective reality. The
way the narrators address the reader -- intimate,
formal, conversational, but above all palpably
artificial -- is also, in each case, a way of
making the world strange, of rendering the
familiar, forgettable details of childhood,
family life, popular culture and urban consumer
capitalism outlandish and disturbing.
In "The History of Luminous Motion" Phillip -- an
8-year-old boy who accompanies his mother from
town to town and man to man in a beat-up car
crammed with textbooks, stolen credit cards and
strange mementos -- has the vocabulary and
philosophical acuity of a graduate student, as
well as an ability to interpret his own life with
curious detachment.
"In order to grow and learn," he observes, "we
must permit the world to betray itself." The
voice we hear in the novel, of course, is not the
voice of an actual child, any more than the "we"
who relates the doom of the Lisbon sisters in
"The Virgin Suicides" is a literal chorus of
wishful Michigan schoolboys. These voices are
rather representations of consciousness: what the
characters might say if they could.
But in movies, what we hear is what people do
say, even if only to us, out of earshot of the
other characters. The shortest, roughest route
from the page to the screen is the voice-over, a
device that has gone from rarity to
near-ubiquity.
"The Virgin Suicides" distills the mournful voice
of the novel's collective narrator into the
unseen person of Giovanni Ribisi. Phillip's
prickly, precocious thoughts in "Luminous Motion"
are channeled through the squeaky voice of Eric
Lloyd, the cute, pudgy-faced actor enlisted to
play this murderous, possibly psychotic
character. "American Psycho" rings the most
daring change on this convention by turning the
novel's long, turgid parodies of rock criticism
into spoken preludes to murder, addressed by
Patrick Bateman to his uncomprehending victims.
The voices that echo in our heads are not like
the ones that echo in the darkness of a movie
theater.
The reliance on voice-over as a convenient
preservative erases this difference and reduces
the literary to the literal. Who talks that way?
Why would he say that? What's that supposed to
mean?
Or, most treacherously, Why doesn't he just shut
up? That question is brazenly risked by "High
Fidelity," which transfers large tracts of Mr.
Hornby's novel directly into the mouth of John
Cusack, ironing out its Britishisms to suit Mr.
Cusack's amiable Midwestern delivery. The movie
beautifully captures the riffing, digressive
energy of Mr. Hornby's prose, and of all the
films discussed here it's perhaps the most
shapely and satisfying.
But also the least daring. Its story, after all,
hews to one of the top five movie plots: a
self-centered, basically decent guy confronts his
self-centeredness, affirming his basic decency
and thus meriting the love of the woman he had
driven away. Like the novel, the movie restricts
itself entirely to that guy's point of view, and
most of the film's action consists of Mr. Cusack
speaking into the camera directly to us,
obstructing our view of what the other characters
might be doing.
"High Fidelity" thus manages to be engaging
without quite being a movie; it's more like a
staged reading of the novel, with some
interesting visual illustrations and a soundtrack
to die for.
"High Fidelity," like the other books mentioned,
is narrated by a young -- or at least not quite
mature -- man, and its subject, buried under the
flash and noise of rock 'n' roll, is the way
young men think about women. It's a curious
coincidence (and a sign of welcome and overdue,
if tenuous, change) that the directors of "The
Virgin Suicides," "American Psycho," "Luminous
Motion," and "Jesus' Son" are women, who have
staked the development of their own distinctive
styles on bringing studies in male narcissism to
the screen and then quietly, respectfully but
pointedly subverting them.
In all of these books, women -- the star-crossed
Lisbon sisters in "The Virgin Suicides," the
alcoholic mother in "The History of Luminous
Motion," the barely differentiated wives and
girlfriends in "Jesus' Son," and the victims in
"American Psycho" -- are visible only through the
distorting lens of male self-regard. They are
objects of longing, rage and need, but never
selves in their own right with autonomous
interior lives, fears and desires. But the
transformative magic of movies is that characters
who on the page may be ciphers, icons or
fantasies are permitted to come alive as embodied
persons.
Readers of "Jesus' Son" may be stunned to find
that Michelle, a character whose abortion figures
in one of the stories and about whom we never
learn much more, has become Samantha Morton,
whose noble, fearless performance gives the movie
an emotional depth and coherence not found in the
book.
And the remorseless self-obsession of Patrick
Batemen in "American Psycho" is brilliantly
undermined, in Ms. Harron's sharply satiric
rendering of the book, by Cara Seymour as the
prostitute who grasps, perhaps better than the
audience does, what Patrick is about. Deborah
Kara Unger in "Luminous Motion" and Kirsten Dunst
in "The Virgin Suicides" provide those movies
with similar emotional gravity and intelligence.
None of these films are perfect. All of them have
the rough edges of worthwhile experiments pursued
with discipline and imagination. Their
imperfections make them interesting and suggest
new permutations in the long relationship between
literature and cinema. In the end it may not be
possible to make such odd and challenging books
into movies, but Ms. Harron, Ms. Coppola, Ms.
Gordon and Ms. Maclean have nonetheless
transformed them into novels.
__________________________________________________
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
Well, after the LSU victory, I felt philosophical.
TTFN
frodeauxb
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