8 Mile

At last a good movie rears its unfamiliar head in the Netflix queue. 8 Mile, the 2002 Eminem vehicle, had that trip to another land quality that good movies offer. There was not a break in the intense rhythms of the movie. A conventional story told in a way that humanized a world usually closed to the general culture — ignored might be a better word — presenting with dignity and warmth the people who live on the margins of American consciousness. The tumultuous surface of the movie revealed what was underneath: despair, bristling life, a yearning for undefined release.

The rap form itself melds so many threads into a raw form that publicly expresses the most personal material: a person's life story — one of the few things you really have if you live poor and on the outskirts — mixing so understandably with the powerful drive for something better; an impulse to have your voice heard. At times the movie felt like gospel in its intensity of feeling; other times it reminded you of a bizarro Apollo Theater — at the edges of the mind's urban boundary; the audience was as much a part of the show as the performers; “battles”, verbal duels, that civilized the face to face confrontations into a play of word and improvisational quickness on a stage, in front of a fully engaged, physically pulsing audience, that felt on the perpetual verge of riot — something was at stake for everyone. This is culture at its incantatory baseline.

It has to be said that like much of edgy contemporary pop culture there is a proto-fascist quality to rap. The worship of body stripped of spirit, the crude formulations and impatience with all but violent solutions, the assertion of ego without reference to quality, the beat pounding out any allowance for nuance or ambiguity, all add up to unrefined energy for its own sake, drained of the full humanity to which rap aspires in its search of “authenticity”. This description leaves out much and is unfair to the wide variety of rap — I'm sure no specialist in this realm — but that's, in general, how rap feels to me.

The story-line is not syllable for syllable that of Eminem's life. But it touches all the bases, ending up an advocacy trailer for Em's form of expression. If you read the comments on Netflix, many people, at first intimidated or irritated by the violent tribal posturing of Eminem's act, find when they watch this semblance of his story, great sympathy and understanding.

Curtis Hanson did a great job directing this movie, telling an unrelenting story. There wasn't a bad performance. Eminem's movie “crew” were all individuals, all with their own survival tactics; all-star actors in an all-star movie.

Steve Martin

A repeat interview on Fresh Air with Steve Martin. I've been a longtime fan. Martin is an interesting case. Martin is the most ingratiating and most ambitious of the comedians of his generation. At one time his ironic take on standup comedy hit the nail of the current pop culture moment on the head. He realized you had to make fun of being a comedian if you were to be funny. He would throw a bowl of spaghetti down his pants in a bit on Carson but smile knowingly, with the audience. He seemed in those days to be mocking pretention. Recently, in his interviews, I've had the uncomfortable feeling he really wanted to be those pretentious figures, but hadn't worked up the nerve until that moment. Even more disconcerting, he seemed to have no real sense of the distance between art and performance — a diminished value set derived from too much pop culture, too few interior discussions. When Charlie Rose suggested that the New Yorker was happy to publish his stories because he is so famous, Martin said that the New Yorker “doesn't need me”. But they do Steve. Martin seemed not to understand that the days of Pauline Kael and Arlene Croce, of the detached and savvy sophistication of the New Yorker, had long passed. It is just another magazine now. But in a self-effacing way, he was making claim to the powerful validation the New Yorker once could confer.

I'd never heard Martin speak about personal matters before. Martin said that his dying father had told him that he “had done all I ever wanted to do.” Gross asked him if that were too personal to share. Martin said no, because it was positive. Martin's answer focused on the public's reaction rather than seeing his story for what it was: the betrayal of a deathbed confidence — of a difficult father to his long suffering son. Publicly revealing the story was actually an aggression against his father; telling the story was a way of complimenting himself by indirection.

Gross, slavering Martin with praise, said people don't know “how smart you are”. Martin said that when he is around really smart people he feels like a dog must feel around humans. For a man with the ambition to be Chekhov it sounded a bit disingenuous. You can see why politicians admire actors: effortlessly actors manage to be self-effacing and self-absorbed.

It does point out a striking feature of Martin's personality though — again, a reason politicians are fascinated by celebrities. I said Martin was ingratiating; another way to say it would be that he has an uncanny sense of the diplomatic utterance. When Gross asked him about his bickering parents he said that yes, “they are always contradicting one another.” What an astonishing deflection “contradicting” is — a deflection of the truth of discordant relationships. It may explain why, try as he may, Martin doesn't seem capable of getting beyond middle brow performance — his need to consider the audience above all else, to say things nicely, euphemistically. It leaves out the interior life — a great bond human beings share and the subject of all art — the cacophonous sea upon which the public self attempts to sail.

George and Terry

Terry Gross interviewed George Clooney today. Clooney has the easy charm of someone who was moved around a lot as a kid and had to adjust to the stresses of new schools, new kids. His father, working in TV news, was constantly on the move with his family. Clooney said, about himself, that he “wasn't bright enough to be a TV news correspondent”; this is an occupational requirement I hadn't realized existed for news readers. I've never seen evidence that such a standard does exist in all the years I've watched TV news. In fact, the exact opposite seems the more reasonable conclusion.

(Mel Gibson had said in an interview awhile back that he wasn't smart like his father. Gibson's father is a Holocaust denier.)

Terry Gross' worshipful demeanor had its own issues for this long time listener to her show. You sort of want this excellent interviewer to acquire a shred of a clue about context. The guy is a movie star who just said he isn't bright.

You can understand the context for Clooney, and his aspirations: Clooney is getting the rewards our society has to offer. He is famous and wealthy and for many, like Gross, unquestionably interesting and engaging. George has status; just because he is George. You can understand that someone with such a flood of unmerited benevolence thrust in his direction by society would want to validate it in some meaningful way. To reassure himself. “Maybe I am serious and important. I should deal with 'serious issues'. Then people won't think I'm just a fluffy entertainer, but that I care and have depth.”

Clooney seems, as I said, a very likable do-gooder. I don't think he has much to say. But then again, that didn't stop him from talking for an hour, nor Gross from asking him, or herself, why she was talking to him at all. We all have to ask ourselves that question: why do we listen?

Agape

After enjoying The Ninth Gate, Polanski's gothic horror movie, I tried another by the director. Bitter Moon, Polanski's two hour fifteen minute 1992 movie about the sexual encounters between two married couples while sailing from Istanbul to India. If you haven't seen this ghastly mess of a movie but plan to (don't, do not) refrain from reading on as I'll be talking plot.

Polanski tells an old story: a couple yearning to psychically unwrap in the seeming freedom from consequences provided by travel. Polanski attempts to present the story in an ironic way, making the encounters and dialog so over the top you feel the humor underneath. It didn't work, not a single syllable, not a cut nor pan nor transition. It was so bad it was unintentionally funny. I do have to say, I watched the whole movie. It wasn't boring. But then, in The Producers, Mel Brooks presents the whole audience agape, the awfulness of the show leading them to drop their jaws in unison — they too were attentive — in disbelief.

With movies this bad you begin to think of things only indirectly related to the movie itself. Polanski's wife once again, as in The Ninth Gate, plays the exotic seductress up to no good. Then again exotic seductresses always seem to be up to no good — but why Polanski sees his wife in this role is one for Dr. Shrink-a-polanski.

Polanski's wife is a large woman with large eyebrows. She has some talent as an actress but simply should not be trying to carry a movie like this. I wondered if, given the plot line — a seductive couple drifting into the thrall of sadomasochism — if Polanski was playing some sadistic game with his wife in real life, or as real life as a movie set can offer — he must have known how poorly she came across. This is what you think about when a movie tanks — how hubby and wifey are getting along. One clue that makes you think Polanski didn't catch on: the kitsch “jazz” choreography seemed to be presented “straight” — as though it was really dancing rather than an an effort by the semiotician in Polanski to make a pop culture reference to Elaine doing her herky jerky dance in a Seinfeld episode.

I wondered if others who had seen the movie felt the same way. I went to imdb.com and checked. The first review I read related how the reviewer, a guy, had cried at the searing evocation of human love. It went on and on for pages like that. The most beautiful, feeling, wonderful movie they had ever seen. In only a few of the reviews was there a chime of recognition that the movie might have an ironical, satirical subtext, and might have failed in the attempt.

Randomness

Joseph Nocera has become one of my favorite writers at the NYT. His columns on Saturdays in the business section are always easy to read; they take you interesting places — far beyond mundane commerce.

His article on 10/1/05 considers the idea that randomness is in the eye of the perceiver. The author (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) of the book and theory under discussion says that what we attribute to our cleverness, our analysis and smarts, would more accurately be described as luck.

This is an idea that has occurred to most of us along the way. Sheer chance so often seems a better explanation for occurrences in the human realm than predictive or analytical approaches could offer.

What are Mr. Taleb's central ideas? Here's how he describes them in the first sentence of the prologue: “This book is about luck disguised and perceived as nonluck (that is, skills), and, more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as nonrandomness (that is, determinism).” Here's the Cliff Notes translation: Mr. Taleb believes, first of all, that many of the things that happen to us - career success, or decisions that turn out well, or gains in the stock market - that we attribute to our own skill or hard work, are really a result of plain dumb luck. And secondly, he believes that the kind of rare events that really change the world - be they wars or disasters, inventions or serendipitous discoveries, bubbles or crashes - are things we don't see coming, and aren't prepared for.

Human culture really exists in the realm of chaos theory — seemingly overdetermined after the fact, but far to complex to analyze with confidence when the outcome is still to be determined. Taleb's theory implies that prediction and analysis (forecasting and risk management are the terms of choice in the financial markets) are really activities designed by human beings to reassure ourselves, to give us a feeling of control, to assuage our large egos and our bottomless anxieties.

Soulless Boxes

I've been reading Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House. It is Wolfe's attempt to explain skyscrapers, the soulless boxes populating the downtowns of big cities. How could such hollow architecture, the pretensions of glass and stone, become the default?

The book is about the length of an extended magazine article. In the section I am currently reading Wolfe is explaining the way theoretical competition became as important as getting the commission and seeing the building go up:

…Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

Besides being beautifully written and analytically accurate, this example of Wolfe's writing presents the most civilized example you will ever come across of someone saying, “Le Corbusier has his head up his ass.”