JRR Tolkien and a Long-Expected Journey

"'Well, now we're off at last!' said Frodo. They shouldered their packs and took up their sticks, and walked round the corner to the west side of Bag End. 'Good-bye!' said Frodo, looking at the dark blank windows. He waved his hand, and then turned and (following Bilbo, if he had known it) hurried after Peregrin down the garden-path.They jumped over the low place in the hedge at the bottom and took to the fields, passing into the darkness like a rustle in the grasses." 

The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 3: Three Is Company

My mom’s finally moving out of the house where I grew up, from ages 9 to 21, to downsize her life and make her expenses and lifestyle more manageable. She deserves the break, especially now that we, her children, are fully engaged in the process of making our own lives and establishing our own households. Still, the bite of change stings a little when you clean out the attic, or when you walk down the hall and see everything cleaned up and dusted off for the eyes of potential buyers. This is your youth, suddenly repackaged and commodified. This is farewell to that vain hope that someday you might be able to return to this sanctuary, a time and a place that wasn't laden with the demands and frustrations of adulthood.

Cleaning the attic was the foremost item on the agenda over Thanksgiving, and I ran across the traces of many childhood amusements and escapes… decks of tarot cards, old comic books, photographs of best friends and first loves. The whole effort was sustained by our nostalgia, our sense of personal history in watching these things pass before us to go to other storage, or thrift stores or trash cans. Every time you handle an object that you haven’t touched in a decade, you feel the texture and permanence of your past, vibrating up through your fingers.

I was lucky, though. In the silt of farewell, I found the gold dust of rediscovery, a trace of an old interest that I could actually follow back to its source, at least for a moment. That was a small hoard of old maps, books, figurines, and calendars from my years of desperate, hopeless love for the work of JRR Tolkien. On some other recent visit, I had already rescued my whole Tolkien library – The Hobbit, the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and a third-party book called The Tolkien Bestiary. Now, over Thanksgiving, I rediscovered the accessories and artifacts that were pure Middle Earth fetish objects, free of the weight of words and commitment.

I think the calendars are the most personally poignant of these artifacts. There is a great history of wall calendars illustrated with scenes from Tolkien’s works, which I was collecting long before Peter Jackson’s three films came around to infect Tolkienism with the faces of celebrities. There was John Howe’s 2001 calendar, and 2002’s calendar illustrated by Ted Nasmith, both of which were engorged with rich, intense paintings… but these calendars already had a sort of concept-art feeling to them, with theatrically-staged, dramatically-lit images that seemed to gesture toward the films that were coming out around the same time.


The real treasure was a 1994 calendar, illustrated by Michael Kaluta, that was obviously the first Tolkien calendar I had ever owned. Kaluta’s images are wild, expressive drawings, toned with broad spreads of color, not given to dramatic gradients or realistic chiaroscuro. In every scene, some figure seems to be seized with the tremors of an inner demon, from Boromir at the Council of Elrond to the Orc at Helm’s Deep, thrashing in the ecstasy of battle, a sort of tortured non-sequitur who’s burst into the foreground of the layered landscape. Kaluta’s lines are sketchy and complex, and whether he paints mere figures or elaborate three-dimensional spaces, he seems to be working intensely in two dimensions, pressing pandemonium into the confines of the page, though it seems to spill back out at the edges.

Since last weekend, I’ve been struggling with the question: what do I do with them? Do I just scan every page? Do I rip out my favorites and hang them up in our front room? Do I store the ravaged calendars somewhere obscure around my place in Bushwick, so I can discover them again when we move to a new apartment? At any rate, I'd stopped drawing or painting for a while, and these calendars made me suddenly start thinking about it again.

Strange, isn't it, how a little encounter like that, a chance meeting with a few emotionally-charged artifacts, can cause sudden swerves and turbulence in the inertia of everyday life?

The other Tolkien artifact I found that struck me was a map of Middle Earth I had bought at some point, a big glossy spread folded like a highway map and tucked in a card-stock cover. It certainly wasn't as beautiful as Michael Kaluta's calendar, looking more like standard decorative art assembled to indulge a consumer fan base, but it's full of information -- exactly the thing to hook us fanboys -- and this is what drove me to stick it in my suitcase to take back with me to Brooklyn. This map had an interior, a network of references and entry points, constellations of associations and emotions encoded into place names. It made me want to go back to that world.

I'm very lucky, in this regard, that Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is coming out in fourteen days. I might have picked up the books anyway, but with this film coming into view on the horizon, it's like Middle Earth is beckoning me back, promising a festival in my honor. Jackson did an exceptional job of giving life to that world, better than any of us expected, and when I saw his Fellowship of the Ring back in 2001, I felt like I had already met the characters on the screen and already visited those places he had brought to life.

It's hard to believe it was that long ago. As Frodo left Bag End with the Ring in Jackson's adaptation, so I was leaving that home in Collegeville -- the same home that my mom's finally moving out of -- for my first year in college. Like Frodo, that was the end of my time as a steady resident of that particular household. For the past 11 years, I've been making new homes in new cities, carrying the wisdom of that old house with me into each new community. And mom is finally leaving that house, too, just as Bilbo is leaving The Shire in another Tolkien adaptation. It's uncanny how our lives and our stories echo one another.

So now, suddenly, I'm back to drawing and painting a little bit. More importantly, I'm back to reading Tolkien's stories, for the first time since I was 12... I started The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring simultaneously, intending to get through the first third of the former book before the movie comes out on December 14th (it turned out to be a very easy goal). Every night, before I go to bed, I feel those stirrings again -- the feeling of safety and habitation, as if my apartment was a little Hobbit hole in the Shire, and simultaneously, I feel a sense of displacement, like I'm lost in the great landscape of my own life, separated from the comforts of a childhood home. Both of those feelings resonate through these Tolkien books, alternating and colliding in my sentimental brain.

It's great that I can go back to the world of Middle Earth so easily. That's one of the great comforts of an imaginary universe... you can pick up the book, and you'll go right back there, to whatever degree you can abandon yourself to the story. My real childhood home, that house in Collegeville, won't be so easy to return to once somebody else owns it. As with Bilbo and Frodo when they left the Shire, I'll always hereafter be a stranger there. That home isn't an open door, eternally waiting for me in case I need to go back to being a sheltered 12-year-old fantasy nerd again. Rather, it's the bank of a river that I've had to cross on the way to kingdoms where I've had larger parts to play.

So, instead of counting on that home being there, a site for escape and nostalgia, it's up to me to carry it with me into the new homes that I create... my encampments and conquests in the strange land of adulthood, this new fantasy where I've lost myself once again.

Tree of Life: Malick, Proust, and the cinema of memory

A month or so ago, I started reading Swann's Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust's epic novel "In Search of Lost Time" (otherwise translated as "In Remembrance of Things Past"). About halfway through, I went to a screening of Terrence Malick's widely-discussed recent film, Tree of Life; there was much to admire in it, but also lots of mixed feelings and dubious appreciation. And just last week, as I was finishing up Swann's Way, I discovered it was Proust's birthday. Happy birthday, Marcel!

Tree of Life is difficult to reconcile privately, I think. It's one of those films that's loose enough -- devoid enough of structure and cues, sufficiently unhinged from standard expectations -- that you might never really know what (or how) to think of it until you can bounce your ideas off of someone else. It's interesting, the way it demands to be reflected upon, and thereby, in a strange way, makes the act of analysis kind of mundane. When you do a critical reading of Wolverine or Harry Potter, there's something subversive about the act... when you write a meditation on Tree of Life, it seems almost perfunctory (i.e. this, and this, and this, and this, and this). The movie is asking for us to read it, to interpret it, to generate conclusions about its themes, its imagery, its technical and creative decisions. In a certain way, being ambiguous and experimental is its way of being predictable (at least to Terrence Malick fans and film students, who seem to be its audience).

In terms of scale, and in relation to the director's other work, I'd liken Tree of Life to Darren Aaronofsky's The Fountain or Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" films. Each of these feels like the director was trying to reach some pinnacle of style, as if to max out their own capacity for filmmaking. In each case, the result seems to overreach, toeing the boundary between eccentricity and self-indulgence. Aaronofsky and Tarantino followed their respective films up with fresh approaches... Aaronofsky totally reversed his heightened melodrama and made The Wrestler, almost comically opposed to The Fountain in spirit. Tarantino took a break from exploring tortured souls with Deathproof, and then went on to make Inglorious Basterds, which was another "masterpiece" film, but felt more like a film he was willing to grow into, and out of.

Perhaps Malick will give us something radically different with his next film, as well; his sensuous-poetic-introspective mode really does seem to have reached some sort of apotheosis with Tree of Life. These speculations aside, however, it's an important demonstration of an artist's ability to push his own defining tendencies as far as possible. The stylistic similarity to Badlands, Malick's first film, is tenuous at best, and he seems to have purged every conventional narrative and literalist instinct that was present in that first film.

Swann's Way was the culmination of Proust's work, as well, though I'm not sure whether he intended it that way (Proust scholars? Steve Carell?). The story is told as a sequence of interwoven memories, some being direct accounts by the narrator of his own life, and others being accounts of the life of Charles Swann, a French aristocrat, whose life intersects with the narrator's at a few key moments. There's a constant theme of budding love and the frustration of romantic asymmetry, all grounded in memories of specific people and places. It's the secondary characters, people like Aunt Leonie and Mme. Verdurin, who make the book so readable.

These two works have the potential to illuminate one another considerably. There are both stylistic and structural similarities between them, and I think you could discover some concordance in their intended effects. Both are experienced as emotionally-fraught reminiscences of grown men looking back on the defining moments of their lives. Both feel like reveries, journeys of the imagination to a personal history of the senses, of sights and smells, less concerned with motivations and grand designs of human lives and more concerned with individual moments.

For instance, the narratives in Proust are evoked via involuntary memory -- the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, the sight of a pink hawthorn flower. These memories, meandering through the narrator's youth, are not called forth as an explanation or a didactic personal history; rather, they emerge as images from a mind freed from immediate tasks. They're the daydreams, distractions, unchained nostalgia, the roaming spirit. They are already filtered, leaving only the most significant, the ones with the most emotional resonance.

And this is why Malick's film feels the way it does, as well: it's a reverie. It's the adult Jack's escape from his solitary life, into his own sense memory. Youth is when memories leave the strongest imprint, and these childhood vignettes quiver with the vitality of boyhood.

One of the tensions in Tree of Life, hinted at in the criticism, is between the feeling that it's "naturalistic" (i.e. referring in an authentic way to memories of an actual time and place) and the feeling that the whole thing has something of the glossed, exaggerated artificial about it. It's a testament to Malick's skill that he can evoke both a real time and place, and also the mood, the golden glow of nostalgia. But the tension between "naturalistic" and "stylistically overwrought" won't really be resolved, because the film is largely about the transition between the two: about how memories become myths, about how the filtering and feedback of internalization can turn the banality of a simple sense impression into a cosmic signifier, a portent, a lesson about good and evil and failure.

Of course, that treatment leads to these scenes having an echo of archetype. (Theory side note: despite the constant references to Heidegger in the criticism, I'd argue that the film owes more to C.J. and Sigmund than to Martin). Mrs. O'Brian's butterfly, and her levitation; a harsh lesson about letting a screen door slam, a backyard wrestling match, a ruined watercolor, a house submerged in water -- to those who are symbolically literate, these might seem too obvious, too blunt. The signification begins to overwhelm the immediacy of the scene. In using such symbolic details, Malick puts himself in a tough position: he has to use convention, tapping the familiar to bring out its semantic resonance, but he has to do it in a way that doesn't feel played out. His product is defensible, but not flawless.

In Swann's Way, Proust seems to have fully solved this problem. He floods his narrative with perceptual details, many of which resist interpretation; he focuses on those things which have personal resonance for his narrator, such as the sight of a female form through the shurbbery, the moments of tension between Swann and Odette, and the unconsciously cruel remarks of Gilberte. Rather than relying on the great reservoir of pre-defined cultural symbols (Malick perhaps overuses the symbols of water and trees), Proust creates an internal symbolic language: the madeleine and the hawthorn, the blue feather, the monocle, the pathways through Combray, the writing of Bergotte. This allows the story to remain contained, and provides a cohesion that Malick never achieves.

In a sense, Malick is trying to do far more than Proust was doing: he's trying to link the episodic memories of an individual life with the mythic history of the universe as a whole. The origin-of-the-universe scene, which I haven't even touched upon here, attests to that ambition. He's also doing it in a single two-hour movie, rather than a seven-volume masterwork of literature. This is perhaps one of the downfalls of this fallible film: it starts to leak out of its scope, and with no horizons, its themes get fuzzy (which is not quite the same as being "complex" per se).

Whether you can appreciate Malick's ambition apart from his execution -- whether you can marvel at his imagery without getting too caught up in the convention and ambivalence of his symbols -- that depends on how you judge execution apart from intention, and on how keyed you are to his particular mode, and to this film's particular time and place. Variance aside, however, it's remarkable how much Malick has to say about what and how we remember our lives, and how these memories make us who we are.

P.S.

I think there's a lot more to be said about this film. Wish I had the time, energy, and expertise. For instance:

• Why does it use the language of gestures, in lieu of actual dialog? Could it be seen almost as a ballet or a modern dance?


• What of Malick's romanticized and stylized naturalism, especially considered as an objection to "realism" as a filmmaking philosophy?


• With a nod to Nathaniel's post of things people were heard saying at the film, what makes this film so difficult? What's to be gained from spurning the audience's expectations of narrative direction, rhythm, and legible emotional cues?


• As noted above, what about the debts to Freud and Jung? Just how densely archetypal and psychological is Tree of Life?

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001): The Best Gothic Horror Novel Ever Screened

Looking at reviews and opinions of Brotherhood of the Wolf (directed by Christophe Gans, 2001), you discover a general consensus that the film is a mess (or, to put it more sympathetically, "eclectic"). David Edelstein expresses this opinion by listing an armament of movies that seem to have inspired it: "The movie is a teeming mixture of The Curse of the Werewolf and Cry of the Banshee and Jaws and Sleepy Hollow and A Fistful of Dollars and Let Joy Reign Supreme and The Name of the Rose and Fists of Fury and Mad Max and Once Upon a Time in China II and The Last of the Mohicans and The Hound of the Baskervilles and maybe a thousand other pictures that rumble around in the collective unconscious of schlock fiends." Scott Hunter, in a slightly less receptive review, puts it thusly: "Certainly the loopiest thing that's come along in many a fair year, 'Wolf' is a mad agglomeration of styles and traditions that ultimately results in nothing so much as a mad agglomeration of styles and traditions. Nothing in it really connects with anything else."

These reviewers see this as something to snark at, indicating a deep-seated confusion within the film. Even Ebert, whose review is notably more positive, seems to see it as a triumph of chaos: "The Brotherhood of the Wolf plays like an explosion at the genre factory. When the smoke clears, a rough beast lurches forth, its parts cobbled together from a dozen movies." The reviews all scream "Entertainment!", urging us to forget the goofy anachronisms and campy dialogue, and to forgive what seems like a total breakdown of coherence, abandoned in favor of the filmmaker's fancy. And yes, on this level, it's already a fun film.

However, forgiveness goes hand in hand with dismissal, and as far as I can tell, all the reviewers have dismissed any search for a unifying principle to Brotherhood's form. But it's there... if you step back a level and consider all the motivating elements of Brotherhood's plot and style, you'll find an undeniable formal reference that justifies the cross-pollination of all these random elements: the swashbuckling, the supernatural horror, the mystery, the court intrigue, the colonial-era exoticism.

Two words: Gothic Horror.

I'm not talking about your local teenager's "gothic," with the black eyeliner and the skateboarding. I'm talking about that genre of dark romance fiction that rose to prominence in the mid-1700's and declined by the mid-1800's, with Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer often considered its apex. The gothic genre morphed into classic horror and "tales of the Weird" during the Victorian era, which is when you started seeing more urban settings: Edgar Allen Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, and old Bram Stoker are the better-known of this later, more familiar gothic literature. Brotherhood of the Wolf bears more resemblance to the proto-Victorian gothic tradition, which was less gritty and more fanciful and romantic: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and the aforementioned Charles Maturin are all worthy reference points for a study of this form.

And once you're keyed into this worldly, discovery-era gothic aesthetic, with its grand adventure plotlines and dashing heroes, you'll see that Brotherhood of the Wolf, though adapted for a modern action-movie audience, is actually one of the most faithful adaptations of this style ever put to screen. Honestly, it's a hard style to adapt... it set the stage for horror, with its unspoken spiritual threats and transgressions of conventional norms, but it didn't have a lot of the horror tropes that have become so standard. There were no scrambling pursuits through the mud or tiny, secluded, hermetically-sealed spaces, like basements or back rooms; indeed, in the gothic novel, the world always seemed vast and wild and unexplored, and most of the chases were on horseback, in the shadows of forbidden castles. There were far fewer themes of bodily violation, and more of spiritual and mental perversion. Hopelessness and nihilism weren't pervasive; rather, the horror was interspersed with romance and adventure, and there was a frequent sense of heroism and redemption, all but vanished from modern horror.

Brotherhood of the Wolf is told within a framing narrative, transcribed during an old aristocrat's last moments before his submission to the mercy of a mob of revolutionaries. This, already, is an obvious indicator of the gothic nature of the tale. Melmoth the Wanderer was a baroque construction of nested stories, often told or written in the final hours of the narrator's life or sanity. It's a well-established genre convention that's been kept alive through the history of horror, recognizable even in the 20th-century stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti.

Many more motifs and tropes appear in Brotherhood of the Wolf that we find echoed from the classic adventures. Fronsac, the protagonist, is the epitome of the swashbuckling hero, complete with the explorer avocation "naturalist," an indirect reference to so many adventuring doctors from those classic stories: Bram Stoker's Van Helsing, Sheridan Le Fanu's Dr Hesselius. These guys all seemed to be jacks of all trades, ready to go on adventures and track evil to its source; Fronsac is not unique in his ability to fight off ruffians and do taxidermy, though he may be a little more exaggerated than the Gothic gentlemen of old (with his expert martial-arts swordsmanship and all).

Le Fanu's work is definitely worth comparison, along with Mary Shelley's... these authors, along with many others, were instrumental in rationalizing the occult, treating supernatural phenomenon as natural science and vice versa. Brotherhood of the Wolf certainly inherits from this tradition, being the ostensible "explanation" story of an infamous folk mystery (The Beast of Gévaudan, a classic cryptozoologic case). Superficially, the film seems to side with Fronsac, the skeptic, who demands a reasonable explanation for this supernatural phenomenon; yet, Brotherhood subverts its own lesson, allowing side-kick Mani to use his Native American pantheism as a way of collaborating with wolves and trees and the dead. Gans treats one wolf as a totemic spiritual guide (Three Wolf Moon!), and he allows spirits to speak and prophecize in dreams. As with Fanu, who systematizes the irrational as a way of enshrining its enigmas, Gans sides with rationalism and naturalism, while allowing the inexplicable to come into relief beside it.

What else? How about Mani, the Mohawk Indian blood-brother to Fronsac? He represents a motif that appeared in gothic fiction, as well, though not as consistently as the previous ones: the noble savage. Maturin also had a lengthy episode about an innocent uncivilized character, written to shed light on the moral complications of social and political man. This character, and the Spanish Jew who provides refuge to one of the novel's protagonists, demonstrate Maturin's fascination with the exotic, a role filled by Mani the Native American and Sylvia the Italian prostitute in Brotherhood of the Wolf. These characters give Gans' world a sense of expansion and uncertainty, of vastness and rumor and geographical fluctuation, truly an accomplishment, considering it was filmed at the height of 21st-century globalization.

And let's not forget the antagonist, the closest thing we can get nowadays to a moustache-twirling melodramatic villain. In classic romantic fiction, the villain is always a charismatic lord, transparently evil to the audience but inexplicably opaque to his fellow characters. He tends to wear some badge of villainy, and for Jean-Francois, this is the missing arm, later revealed to be concealed and mutilated into a sort of devil's claw. His alarming combination of political savvy, combat proficiency, and sexual perversion, kept under wraps until late in the story, make Jean-Francois the epitome of an aristocratic devil, even to the point of his leading a cult meeting at a caern in the French countryside.

Of course, Brotherhood of the Wolf reaches at least a bit beyond its genre referent. The martial arts are an absurd anachronism, but they serve a purpose in this elaborate referential structure. They are the credentials of the new global adventurer, shorthand for single combat in the modern world... the martial arts face-off is the new equivalent to the duel of sabers or the barroom brawl. Is this necessary? Not technically, but perhaps thematically. After all, of all the genre cliches, fencing and fisticuffs have become some of the most associated with camp and Disney fairy-tale fantasy. When we're seeing a face-off between martial artists, we're still able to take it seriously and accept it as an actual form of violence, though just barely. It also plays into the "exoticism" motif that feeds so much of Brotherhood's aesthetic and atmosphere. As a modernization of an adventure convention, it's definitely covered under Gans's artistic license.

I've addressed some specific conventions that relate Brotherhood of the Wolf to the classic Gothic horror novel. If I had more experience with the genres, I'd find a deeper way to connect this film's structure to those old stories. It is, after all, a canvas of political history, social and aristocratic conspiracy, and partially-debunked supernatural anecdote. One-hundred forty minutes starts to seem rather short when you consider that Gans wove together messages about aristocratic France, the peasantry, social politics, and the birth of rationalism in the age of exploration. There's also significant subtext about motivated messaging and sensationalism in one of the earlier periods of "mass media" (indicated by an early discussion of the availability of newspapers). But as I said before, this baroque architecture of themes and messages isn't unprecedented: already, a few hundred years ago, those Gothic novels were weaving together complex messages about spiritual wholeness, aristocratic greed, religious and secular politics, and the tension between civilization and human nature.

If I've encouraged any action film watchers to go out and read some of these strange old novels, I'd like to reassert that encouragement. And if (less likely) you're a Gothic horror and romance buff who's looking for a film to go along with your reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho, I'd like to urge you to see Brotherhood of the Wolf. I'd love to hear about your thoughts on this long comparison.

Jim Thompson on screen: The Killer Inside Me (2010), After Dark My Sweet (1990), The Getaway (1972)

Note: This is rather long, and it contains some light spoilers (light in that I refer to the twists and surprises, but don’t spell them out precisely).

Jim Thompson is a rare literary bird, a genre novelist who’s genuinely transcended his genre (pulp noir) not by subverting it or cross-pollinating it, but by fully assimilating it to his own style. In his greatest works of fiction, like The Getaway, After Dark My Sweet, and Savage Night, Thompson purified the pulp novel of its dependence on pop, its clever twists and moralistic statements. The stories he wrote were meditations, twisted forays into the meaningless order of disturbed psychology, dismantled parables from a noir world where fatalism and betrayal are mechanisms of everyday life.

James Foley directed perhaps the first innately successful adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel. In his film, After Dark, My Sweet (1990), he shows us the naked brutality of Thompson’s vision of the world, where good fortune is so scarce that the characters fight tooth and nail for every scrap of it, and still tend to come up tragically short. It’s a noir universe, parched under the exposure of the Western sun, where the sentimentality is vintage in the way only a shameless storyteller can write it.

In some of his novels, Thompson takes a surrealist route; here, he’s uncompromisingly realist. Both modes work because of the little absurdities and inconsistencies, the gaps in communication and behavior, the general failure of order and explanation, all of which indicate a world that’s not chained to an author’s calculations. Seriously, what was Fay doing when she put Charley out in the woods near her house? Was she trying to kill him, let him escape, or simply find a way to get him out of her house and her disarrayed life? This is plotlessness in the midst of a plot, rough breaks in a smooth stream, and they’re the details that make Thompson’s books so rich in texture and psychology.

Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of The Killer Inside Me (2010) is cinema’s latest attempt to capture Jim Thompson’s spark. Winterbottom’s Lou Ford is a landmark performance of pathological insecurity, played by Casey Affleck, who has a penchant for this sort of thing (as evidenced by The Assassination of Jesse James (2007), another brilliant downbeat piece of cinema). Honestly, I never pictured Lou Ford as a skittish, mousey guy… in his more stable moments, I pictured him as a classic Good Ol’ Boy cop, a la Ron Elard in House of Sand and Fog (2003). Thompson's Lou Ford was a guy the whole town could trust, just because he presented himself as such an upstanding citizen. The only flaw with Casey Affleck, I think, is that his “healthy” state looks too much like his “sickness” state, so it’s hard for me to see him as a cop that people could have mistaken for trustworthy in the first place.

Still, the rural noir tone, the offbeat musical cues and twisted hints of humor, and the wild swings from tenderness to depravity – these all scream Jim Thompson. This is the real shit, the unsettling, uncompromising view of the world that Thompson wrote into so many of his novels, nailed perfectly to the wall by Winterbottom. Perhaps the most compelling reproduction of a moment from the source material comes when we hear Amy’s letter, voiced over a scene from a diner that never happened, where Amy walks to the bathroom to let Lou escape; this scene is paced and rendered and framed in perfect harmony with its counterpart in the novel, so much that it seems to echo Thompson’s words.

You’ve gotta give it to Winterbottom for evoking this moment so perfectly. The rest of the movie does the same, to varying degrees, but this scene is perfect verbal-visual mimesis, and it’s a beautiful moment. The only other perfect reproduction of a “Thompson moment” that I remember is from Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet: that scene at the very end, where Kid Collins masters his innate eccentricity just long enough to proffer a great gesture to Fay, his lover.

The more tone-sensitive adaptations of Thompson’s work also tend to be meticulously faithful. Both After Dark and The Killer Inside Me are almost obsessive about following the sequence of events set forth in the script; Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972) is far less so, and as if by necessity, it seems to lose some of the tone of its source material, as well, sacrificing open-air cross-country paranoia in favor of a lovers-on-the-lam Western feeling.

In the former two films, Jim Thompson’s personality seems to subsume those of the directors. Winterbottom has always been a chameleon, whose only trademark is that there’s something convoluted about his work, whether thematically or structurally. Foley’s own oeuvre fit perfectly with the Thompson novel he directed: his work has always been lurid, paranoid, and violent, and he seemed to sink right into the story he was telling.

Peckinpah’s adaptation, on the other hand, is what you might call “loose.” It excises some significant narrative blocks… the desperate, panic-inducing cowering in the bottom of a well, and the whole cynically offbeat ending, which I won’t deign to spoil here. The rhythm of the story changes, and the atmosphere changes, as well, taking on a much more dust-bowl/Southwest/cowboy flavor. The violence, which Thompson tossed off with a cavalier flourish, feels abrupt and brutal under Peckinpah’s direction. Apparently these departures were good moves: Packinpah’s film was his most successful, and it’s still the most successful of the Thompson adaptations. Even so, it’s a bitter success for fans of Thompson.

Maybe it’s the ending. Thompson’s endings are unapologetically downbeat, and Steve McQueen made sure that shit wasn’t goin’ down on The Getaway, his comeback movie. Even Winterbottom tweaked the ending of The Killer Inside Me a little, placing more focus on the disastrous love between Lou and Joyce… a theme that he emphasizes through the length of the film, which had a noticeable sentimental edge over Thompson’s novel. Only After Dark, My Sweet seemed to hit the ending nail right on the head, with Jason Patric landing Kid Collie’s final deception with perfect, gut-wrenching panache.

It’s worth asking: are these movies misogynistic? Is Thompson himself? This is what’s stirred a lot of the controversy around The Killer Inside Me; as with any story by an intelligent author, it’s not simply a matter of misogynistic-or-not. Thompson’s world is a brutal, paranoid, unforgiving landscape, both socially and psychologically, and it’s dominated by masculine characters wrestling with their manly identities… Lou Ford is a pathological sadist, but it doesn’t make him a happy man. No, indeed, he has the bad habit of killing those he loves (especially his lovers), and we can see that for him, there’s no appreciable boundary between loving them and wanting to damage them. Not only does his psychosexual deviance make him unhappy – it also makes him unstable, and induces him to entangle himself in a situation he can’t resolve. The film is a chronicle of his universe, constructed from sex, violence, insecurity, and self-indulgence, crashing down around him.

Peckinpah’s adaptation is the only adaptation of these three movies that actually crosses the line into misogyny, which isn’t too surprising, considering it’s the product of a pair of manly men par excellence. This patriarchal tendency is partly due to the source material, which, of Thompson’s works, is one of the least sensitive to the female point of view. Throughout the novel, Carol McCoy mostly blunders and frets alongside Doc, who steers their dangerous road trip from the chauvanist driver’s seat. Still, at the very least, there’s a sense of retribution at the end of Thompson’s story, as the characters’ rottenness devours them, figuratively and literally.

However, Peckinpah and McQueen turn this into a cowboy action movie, a long chase with a benign ending, and this actually reverses the implosion that gave the novel its intellectual substance. Instead of a reflection on inner conflict and mutual resentment, the film becomes a justification for all of Doc McCoy’s cavalier womanizing, which even turns violent a couple times. The two female characters are a slimeball (Fran / Sally Struthers) and a loveable, sexually-empowered sidekick (Carol / Ali McGraw), and the hero and the villain are paragons of masculinity, respectively noble and depraved. As the ending affirms, this is the correct way of things in Peckinpah’s world.

It’s borne out by all three films – not just the least faithful, but also the two that adhere slavishly to the novels – that Thompson’s world is difficult to capture, and impossible to improve upon. Whether you’re an iconic director working with a 70’s sex symbol, or an indie crime-drama filmmaker out to shoot something profoundly authentic… or maybe a marginal Hollywood director with the guts to make a provocative film out of hazardous source material… you’re going to be fighting against Thompson’s subversive psychology, which is elusive even to his most discerning readers. His characters are compromised, contemptible, deserving victims of their own sins, and Thompson’s task is to chart their downfalls. It’s all cinema can do to keep up with these stories as they rush into oblivion.

Intimate May: Watership Down (1978)

Watership Down: a mysterious, mature animated movie about a society of rabbits abandoning their warren in search of a new home; a flight from danger through a world that's expansive, pastoral, and deceptively hazardous... like many films of great journeys, it's partly driven by the rhythmic contrasts between security and unease. The contrasts in setting are striking: at times the environment becomes outwardly dangerous and forbidding, as when the rabbits struggle to cross a river ahead of a dog, or when they infiltrate a farm to find the captive Does in a shed. At other times, there are stretches of calm: the safety of the field of flowers, the serenity of the new warren on the top of a hill. The contrast between the calm and the chaotic is what allows the filmmakers to play with our expectations: in Cowslip's warren, the sense of safety is undermined by the submissive treachery of the domesticated rabbits, who are being bred as a food supply.

This narrative rhythm, from danger to safety to danger, is repeated in virtually all "epic journey" stories. McCarthy's The Road, both The Hobbit and the Frodo story in Lord of the Rings, and Easy Rider all share this flow. One film in particular seems especially relatable to Watership Down, though it may not seem obvious at first. This is Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, one of the most unique and effective films to come from the film noir tradition. Night of the Hunter is about a family with a secret stash of dirty money, infiltrated and taken hostage by a criminally insane preacher after the death of the family patriarch. To escape from the murderous preacher, whose name is Harry Powell, the two young children of the family have to travel down a river in the middle of the night. Their only hope for sanctuary is with a pious old woman waiting for them at the end of their nocturnal drift.

These films seem to take place in the same natural world, draped in shadow and unsympathetic to the travelers' fragile lives. It's an empty, solitary sprawl, its folds concealing minor mysteries and dangers: a snare, a chorus of frogs, a hunting dog, an alluring stranger. This isn't the blind, deaf, hostile wilderness of Into the Wild and Grizzly Man, but it's also not peaceful or harmonious; if anything, it's a restless spiritual plane that gives shape to the journey undertaken by our protagonists. The woods are dangerous, but when there's something even more dangerous approaching from behind, their indifference becomes a protective force.

If you're sensitive to this sort of thing, you may notice that the environment -- "nature," if you will -- is given its own visual identity in Watership Down. Unlike the rabbits, animated in classic cell-based pen and ink, the environment is painted in broad strokes and textures, a landscape from the tip of a brush. This gives it the subjective beauty of impressionism, the hazy sense that it's a product of a particular eye at a particular moment, only taking on as much perfection as the point of view allows. The third dimension is created by panning foreground and background layers across one another... a technique used even today in live action films, where backgrounds are often constructed from layers of matte paintings panning over one another.

Had the current digital technologies been available to the Watership Down filmmakers, they could have added some simple touches, like parallax and perspective and enhanced lighting. One wonders how different it might have looked -- perhaps breathtaking, even by current standards of animation, or perhaps too stylized, too post-produced. Modern animation lacks the gesture associated with fine art, a strong asset that seems to have faded after the classic era of animation: Ralph Bakshi, Yuriy Norshteyn, and the film currently being considered. As it is, there's something quaint, but beautiful, in the self-aware simplicity and inconsistency of its visual treatment, and perhaps this isn't a thing to be improved upon, so much as a thing to be celebrated, a masterpiece of craftwork in an era of fabrication..

One of the defining tonal features of Watership Down is that it takes the spiritual realities of its protagonists absolutely seriously. The film is built around certain events where the rabbits are touched by spiritual knowledge, from the genesis sequence that introduces the film, to the events that initiate the rabbits' exodus... Fiver's revelations looking over the field... through his later visions of danger, death, and deliverance... and to the eventual conclusion, which goes far beyond the particular journey of the warren and instead respects the total spiritual journey of one of its members. It's particularly interesting to see that the film's spiritual trajectory has it start with the birth of the world, and of the whole protagonist species, and end not with the death of the species, or the completion of the main conflict, but rather with one particular individual's final transition. This movement, from general to specific, gives a sense of the universal to the grand narrative arc.

This dialectic -- between the epic migration and the personal journey, between nature as force of frustration and nature as guide and protector, between the pastoral serenity and the hazardous microcosmic wilderness -- is what gives the film its scope and credibility, and makes it a potently intimate account of a sweeping adventure. Watership Down is a complex film, invoking romance and adventure, spiritual transition, and drama and tragedies that's very human, considering it's being played out by rabbits. One of its most important meta-messages is that every life is lived on its own scale, and it deserves to be measured as such. In a certain way, all great stories are the tales of families, traveling across a province, looking for shelter and stability in the face of an inherently chaotic world.

INTIMATE MOMENT: Farewell to the old warren

Intimate May (sort of): Nosferatu the Vampyre (Herzog, 1979)

Nosferatu the Vampyre – an homage to, and riff upon, F. W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens – which is itself a copyright-violating reconstruction of Bram Stoker's Dracula – is an art-house treatment of a classic tale of gothic doom. Herzog restores some of the original character names, including the Harkers and Dracula's, but he mostly cribs his shots and angles from the Murnau version; by doing this, he executes an interesting reintegration of two divergent versions of the same mythology. Of course, being Warner Herzog, collaborating with Klaus Kinski, he also manages to turn this mythology into a film that's challenging and personal, structured around three interwoven destinies: Jonathan Harker, his wife Lucy, and Count Dracula.

Nosferatu provides a shining example of one of Werner Herzog's greatest skills – the skill of constructing a distinctive space where his narratives can play out. Stroszek, with its barren and heartless middle America; Aguirre, with its fetid, hostile, alien jungle; Fitzcarraldo, with its Amazonian spiritual labyrinth; and especially Nosferatu the Vampyre, which is a constant exercise in world-building. Herzog starts with the sanitary but uneasy atmosphere of Wismar, an enclosed pocket of peaceful civilization, and later contrasts this with the apocalyptic emptiness of the outside world. This is the world of the Carpathian Mountains, riddled with vagrant encampments, forbidding canyons, and vast, empty tundras. These are the breathtaking landscapes that inspire curiosity, but don't welcome intrusion.

In fact, it seems that Wismar is the only stable human settlement in Nosferatu... every human outside the city limits is traveling, from the coachmen to the Roma in their caravans. They all seem to realize they're not wanted in the natural world, and they all know to stay mobile, passing under the radar of the unknown world. Countless barriers stand between them and Count Dracula, including Borgo pass, which threatens to swallow anyone who enters, and castle Dracula itself, which inspires near-panic from the tribe. They have no interest in trying to surmount these barriers, respectful as they are of the unknown. Unfortunately, Jonathan Harker has no such scruples.

He agrees to go to Castle Dracula, ostensibly because he wants to buy a bigger house for Lucy, but this rationale is thin. After all, Lucy herself wants him to stay, and there's no evidence that she's the type of woman who would go for a pimped-out crib anyway. It seems that Harker is really following a call to danger that men know all over the world, a potent but sometimes self-destructive curiosity about the world, and about one's own limits. In pursuit of this goal, he seems determined to surmount every obstacle and spurn every warning, which is a bad idea when you're a character in a gothic-horror-romance from a famously cynical director.

Lucy is the Cancer to Jonathan's Saggitarius, issuing warnings and acting on her intuition. She is intensely loyal and maternal, her first line being an admonishment of her husband's stress level. She takes up Nosferatu's challenge, attempting to hunt hum down in Wismar, but she appears to do this largely to protect Jonathan. Her foresight and spiritual awareness make her a different kind of outsider, the kind that sits alone in cemeteries and gazes out to sea. Lucy and Jonathan's relationship is best captured in their walk along the beach, before Jonathan leaves for the Carpathians: they walk on the boundary of the known world, loving one another as wanderers and outsiders, unwilling to fully surrender to mundane everyday life. This is both their power and their folly, as they will stir up the evils of the great beyond and provide them with a gateway to Wismar.

It's easy to see Jonathan as a tragic hero of this apocalyptic narrative, but he's actually one of its supporting villains, along with Renfield (a disturbingly brilliant performance by Roland Topor). Harker may be hapless, in a sense, but he is far from innocent: his insolence in the face of so many warnings, his insatiable need to explore forbidden spaces, is the catalyst that leads to the destruction of his soul and his home.

When the ship arrives in Wismar, it initiates a complete collapse of the idyllic town, brought on by plague-ridden rats and the long shadow of The Count. Like the plague he accompanies, the Count is viral, hitching rides with unsuspecting travelers; he is also parasitic, attracted to healthy bodies (the Harkers, the cargo ship, and ultimately Wismar itself) so that he can use their resources and destroy them. Wismar's collapse is orchestrated by Herzog like a ballet, choreographed with lines of coffins and deranged danses macabre in the empty town square.

Herzog's Dracula is one-of-a-kind. Where Murnau's Nosferatu seemed twisted and remote and eerily absent, even when he was a scene's centerpiece, the Count is treated with close attention, imbued with a personality, and grounded within the rest of the film. As far as Vampires go, The Count seems oddly helpless, a slave to self-preservation. His voice is quiet and whispery, barely rising above the sighs of the wind when he waxes poetic on the nature of loneliness and the pain of immortality. He hitches a ride to Wismar on a doomed ship, apparently by vanishing into the substance of the rats and the soil he's transporting, never actually appearing until the ship is docked at its destination. His desperation shows in his junkey desperation in biting Jonathan's hand, and in his hesitation when he intrudes on Jonathan's room; he follows this by feeding on Jonathan and then locking him into the castle without trying to offer any sinister speeches or explanations, which comes across as a little passive-aggressive. The midnight feeding in Jonathan's room is the most harrowing scene in Herzog's film, as the Count looms over Jonathan's bed, looking as inhuman as any human actor can be.

I didn't have Intimate May in mind when I picked up Nosferatu the Vampyre, but there's something appropriate about it. The fear that Herzog evokes is, in fact, an intimate fear – far from the panic of Monster movies, or the jump-scares of serial killer horror, it's the anxiety and unease it creates to be very close to something aversive and dangerous. This is an effect of making Dracula so weak, desperate, and parasitic: when he hovers over Jonathan, or stands behind Lucy in her bedroom, we can practically smell him. The key scenes are filled with silence, devoid of soundtrack, empty of atmospheric sounds except for the wind and the occasional sound of plague-ridden rats. This creates an enclosed, decontextualized space for the action, whether it involves conversation or sucking blood.

It's clear to me at this point that my diet of classic and art-house movies has changed my sensibilities. I'm now a lot more sensitive to individual shots, and more patient with them when they're held for a while. I'm also more appreciative of ambiguities of character, unforecasted changes in narrative and tone, and details that I once would have considered non sequiturs. Before I'd undergone this shift in sensibility, Nosferatu the Vampyre probably would have just seemed kind of incomprehensible. However, watching it through this lens – listening for its subtle tensions and suggestions, responding to its unbalanced psychology and metaphysics – I think it was among my favorite of the horror-oriented films I've seen.

INTIMATE MOMENT: Jonathan's fate is sealed

Renegade April: Throne of Blood

Along with Robin Hood, one of the other infamous renegades of Western literature is a Scottish general, seized with pride and ambition, who decides to murder his king and take his place on the throne. This is Shakespeare's Macbeth, treasonous war hero, and he's unique among this month's renegade characters in that he's not a noble outlaw, but rather a figure of treachery, chaos, and self-destruction. He's been played on film by Sam Worthington, among others, but that's not the version I bothered with... the Macbeth I saw was Toshiro Mifune in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.

It's worth looking at what it might mean to be a "renegade" for Kurosawa in Japan, as opposed to Shakespeare in Scotland. Going back through the Elizabethan viewpoint on the feudal system, obviously the hierarchies are strong, and loyalty to kin is a powerful force. However, presumably, even in this ancient era of Western history, the importance of individualism and self-reliance was already forming... Shakespeare's time was, after all, the age of exploration and mercantilism, shortly following the Protestant reformation and the progressive rule of King Henry VIII (aka Jonathan Rhys Myers).

Displaced into feudal Japan, Macbeth has extra punctuation on the themes of loyalty and honor. Nobody was more bound to their lord than the samurai, the great retainer of ancient Japan, who staked his life on his service to his lord. There's no way to quantify the difference between the Eastern and Western sensibilities, but it's fair to assume that for Washizu, this inner conflict is deeply-rooted. The Great Lord isn't just at the top of a political ladder -- he's a focal point for the society's ideology, its spirituality, and its whole familial structure... and themes of disgrace shudder under the surface of the whole bloody affair, from the haunted death-chamber of Fujimaki ("this is dog's blood") to the unsettling ambivalence of Washizu's soldiers, whose loyalties are tested in the final minutes of his short reign.

The politics of Throne of Blood are sweeping, and Washizu's inner conflict is severe -- however, it doesn't have the stormy turmoil of Macbeth, partly because we never hear any soliloquies from the treasonous main character. In fact, Throne of Blood simply doesn't feel as violent as Macbeth, despite a great deal of viciousness, assassination, and warfare. It feels more harmonious, as a whole, than the bard's masterpiece, and to what extent this is an effect of the Noh influence, I can't say. To my uneducated eyes, it's the result of rhythm and tone, and to a presence that infects the setting from the forest journey onward: the presence of the evil spirit, puppetmaster to Washizu's intrigue and anxiety.

In accordance, the whole film seems obtuse and haunted (as opposed to fierce and uncontrollable, as Macbeth felt in the reading). The presence of that forest spirit hangs over the affair, speaking through animals and manifesting as different sorts of presences at different times: the chilling echo of a traitor in a bloody chamber, the sad, silent ghost of a friend betrayed, late to a lords' dinner. Even in the minimalist ballets of implied intrigue and control between lord and lady Washizu, there's something watching. Perhaps it's us, the omniscent eye, giving a perilous meaning to the events that unfold. I'd give this theory a chance: perhaps the viewers are the evil spirit, and our expectation is driving the plot's sinister, inevitable machinations. Perhaps fate is not so much predestined by Washizu's personality, nor enforced by the invisible hand of the kami, but rather propelled by our own demands for bloody resolution. This feeling of order and inevitability, the dark clouds of fate gathering from the moment the prophecy is uttered, is partly because of a lack of soliloquy, but it's probably more because every scene of Throne of Blood is so perfectly constructed, and so pregnant with meaning.

Indeed, one of the contextual effects lacking in Throne of Blood, that gives it such a sense of purpose, is an indication of an everyday life outside the intrigues of the main characters. The castle, the North Garrison, and even the fields at times... the sites for conversation, routine, and employment... frequently seem empty, providing sparse stages purpose-built for putting ambition and uncertainty on display. Has anyone noticed that when the other castle-dwellers are shown, they always seem to be loitering, sitting in one place, gazing around a courtyard, barely conversant? They don't seem to be at home in their own residences, and like us, they seem to be waiting for some sudden development, some turn of fortune or deferred sign of fate. The peasants outside are less "folk" and more like ghosts of everyday life, just crossing into this mysterious spirit-world for a moment when the Great Lord rides past them through the field. Perhaps in Throne of Blood, the characters have already crossed into the spirit world, so they all feel like unwelcome guests, in a hurry to do their violent duties and get the hell out.

And in the midst of this haunted feudal Japan, we have a great deal of action that ultimately seems to center on Washizu, victim of the voices around him. He is the transgressor, the scapegoat for the sin of disloyalty, which is a fire lit within him by an evil forest spirit, and then fanned by a scheming spouse. He supplies the fuel for this inevitable flame to burn him to ashes, and when he finally falls, it's at the hands of his own army, assembled from his victims' soldiers -- a roundabout method of suicide, for sure, but still, in a certain way, it's death by his own hand.

I wish I had more original analysis to provide, but one of the triumphs of Throne of Blood is the fact that so much of the film is felt, rather than sensed, understood, and deconstructed. Other critics have talked about the use of editing to create confusion, or the narrative symmetry of the film, layered over visual symmetry in a number of important scenes, or about the lines of force (horizontal, vertical, and diagonal) that signal shifts in tone and temprament. However, these factors are fairly insignificant in comparison with the whole effect, which is vast, empty, and uneasy. This is a rare occasion where it's hard for me to analyze the experience, which is so intuitive and complex, so I'll leave you with a recommendation to go see this film if you haven't, and if you have, maybe even see it again.

And I'll also leave you with Washizu's Renegade Profile, in accordance with our monthly theme.


TAKETORI WASHIZU (Macbeth)
Renegade Profile

Hot-shot general who, under the influence of an evil spirit and a scheming wife, makes an unscrupulous grab for power, discovers the political and psychological consequences of being too ambitious

• High treason
• First-degree murder
• Consorting with evil spirits