This weekend, Twitter followers of novelist Bret Easton Ellis were treated to BEE’s views on the films of director David Fincher, with particular consideration paid to Fincher’s overlooked (by audiences, at least) 2007 film Zodiac. I liked Ellis’s commentary, not just because I think he’s spot on here, but also because he points out why so many people might not have liked (or, dare I say “got”) Zodiac on first viewing: the movie was mismarketed. Here’s BEE—
In my original review of Zodiac, I pointed to my own early misunderstanding of what the film was—
When Zodiac came out last year, I prejudicially–and wrongly–assumed that the film, the tale of the infamous Zodiac killer who menaced California in the late sixties and early seventies, would be a moody character study, all ominous texture, smoggy chase scenes, and desperate anger à la Fincher’s 1995 thriller, Se7en (that movie where Gwyneth Paltrow’s head gets chopped off), or even worse, Fincher’s awful 1997 effort The Game. Most Hollywood suspense films–Fincher’s included–propel themselves on chase sequences, meaningless yelling, and overstated light and music queues that seem to scream “this is the part where you feel tense.” Zodiac, however, eschews all of these often vacuous tropes in favor of simply telling a story.
Zodiac is a methodical, investigative procedural about truth, a film that looks at what happens when we try to put order to disorder, when we try to give narrative to life’s loose ends—when we try to understand radically stochastic violence. In retrospect, it seems to me that Fincher’s work here is akin to Roberto Bolaño in some ways, and I think that if people went into it understanding that it was going to be a meditation on truth, and not, say, a cops and robbers thriller, they might appreciate it more (for what it’s worth, several people wrote in on my review to tell me how wrong I was about what I liked about the film. I think, like Ellis, they should give it another shot).
I don’t know the meaning of life. I don’t know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it’s a complete mystery.”
All citations are from Charles M. Schulz: Conversations, which I now want to read.
I teach a night class on Wednesdays, and although I enjoy it, I also teach morning sections on Wednesdays, so I’m exhausted when I get home over twelve hours later that night. Anyway, I was thrilled to find a nice little packet from Shocken/Pantheon when I came home last Wednesday—a memoir, a graphic novel, and a book that blends and comments on both.
Meir Shalev’s My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner is new in translation from Schocken. Their description—
From the author of the acclaimed novel A Pigeon and a Boy comes a charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev’s birth. Here we meet Shalev’s amazing Grandma Tonia, who arrived in Palestine by boat from Russia in 1923 and lived in a constant state of battle with what she viewed as the family’s biggest enemy in their new land: dirt.
Grandma Tonia was never seen without a cleaning rag over her shoulder. She received visitors outdoors. She allowed only the most privileged guests to enter her spotless house. Hilarious and touching, Grandma Tonia and her regulations come richly to life in a narrative that circles around the arrival into the family’s dusty agricultural midst of the big, shiny American sweeper sent as a gift by Great-uncle Yeshayahu (he who had shockingly emigrated to the sinful capitalist heaven of Los Angeles!). America, to little Meir and to his forebears, was a land of hedonism and enchanting progress; of tempting luxuries, dangerous music, and degenerate gum-chewing; and of women with painted fingernails. The sweeper, a stealth weapon from Grandpa Aharon’s American brother meant to beguile the hardworking socialist household with a bit of American ease, was symbolic of the conflicts and visions of the family in every respect.
The fate of Tonia’s “svieeperrr”—hidden away for decades in a spotless closed-off bathroom after its initial use—is a family mystery that Shalev determines to solve. The result, in this cheerful translation by Evan Fallenberg, is pure delight, as Shalev brings to life the obsessive but loving Tonia, the pioneers who gave his childhood its spirit of wonder, and the grit and humor of people building ever-new lives.
I read Daniel Clowes’s Mister Wonderful that Wednesday night. It was a treat—a wonderful balance of sweetness and acidity. I’m sometimes frightened by how closely I identify with Clowes’s protagonists. Full review next week.
I can’t believe that Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus hasn’t been remarked upon more—perhaps folks are still digesting it, like me, I guess. I consumed the first 50 pages immediately after finishing Mr. Wonderful, staying up way too late (all of this, accompanied by some mediocre red zin led to a mini-hangover and a generally poor performance teaching classes the next morn). Anyway, MetaMaus is far more engaging than any description of it might suggest. It combines Spiegelman’s cartoons with interviews and other media to detail the process behind creating the original Maus books (or, book singular I suppose is more appropriate). Fascinating stuff, covering memory and art and representation and mice &c. I’ll probably review it in bits and pieces—it seems like too much to process. It also comes with a DVD which I haven’t taken the time to look at yet—-
Attack the Block is a strange, charming little film that imagines what would happen if aliens attacked a council estate in inner-city London on Guy Fawkes Night. (In Americanese, a council estate is a project, an urban ghetto marked by violent crime, disenfranchisement, and low opportunity). The teenage heroes of Attack the Block are slang- (and sword and bat) wielding youths right on the precipitous edge of adulthood; Attack the Block narrativizes the strange intersection of children’s games with the kind of real-world concrete violence that entails lifelong consequence. Moses, the gang’s perceptive and courageous leader, already has one foot strongly planted in the adult criminal world. The alien invasion—an attack on the block, which is to say the entire known world for these kids—affords Moses a real chance to rise to the talent—and violence—writhing inertly within him.
We first meet Moses and his gang of charming ruffians in the middle of a mugging. They rob poor Sam, a female nurse whom they don’t recognize as actually living in the same building as them, but a meteor crashes into a nearby car, interrupting the robbery. A bizarre ape-featured creatures erupts from the explosion; Sam takes the opportunity to run away and Moses and his gang follow the alien. In a tense scene that establishes Moses’ badassery (and thoughtless recklessness), they kill the thing. After scaring a few of the estate girls, Moses takes the creature’s corpse to the “weed room,” the most secure spot on the block. The weed room is owned and operated by Hi-Hatz, a ruthless drug dealer/would-be rap artist who is equal parts menacing and comical (Nick Frost plays his front room dealer). However, the alien corpse only serves to attract much larger, gorilla-sized aliens who, um, attack the block in manic droves. The kids’ response: go grab their store of weapons (bats, novelty swords, fireworks, and chains), jump on their bikes, and set out to kill the suckers. In the process, they’re reunited with their victim Sam, a conflict that underlines the core message of the movie, which concerns understanding our neighbors (so that we can, like, kill outside invading forces). The film is in a sense about the misplaced “othering” that functions in ideology, an “othering” that prescribes social and economic roles and prevents empathy or progress.
Attack the Block, a British production, was directed and written by Joe Cornish, whose sense of exactly what the film should be doing is muddy to say the least. Tonally, Attack the Block is all over the place: it’s not sure if it wants to be a hard-edged horror film, a “kids-take-the-night” adventure film with ironic edges and a fun-loving spirit, or a study in contemporary British views on race and class with preachy undertones. Is the movie ultimately dark or sweet, message-driven or an exposition of economic disenfranchisement and nihilism? It’s never quite clear. This messiness is awfully charming though, just like the creature effects which are, uh, very BBC. Attack the Block is at its best when it smashes its ironic self-awareness of the hoary tropes its trotting out (from War of the Worlds to The Goonies) up against an earnest, heart-felt spirit, a spirit that perfectly matches the enthusiasm of a bunch of repressed and forgotten young males actually getting to go prove themselves by doing awesome shit. Cornish’s best scenes restage the classical conventions of British romantic adventures, right down to a new-fashioned joust scene that’s both rousing and comical.
American viewers may feel we hold a monopoly on films about youth in the projects trying to survive (a survival which Attack the Block obviously literalizes through the magnifying lens of a sci-fi horror invasion); this sense of cultural entitlement can lead to strange moments of cross-cultural cognitive dissonance that won’t be unfamiliar to anyone who’s felt the minor alterity of watching a British synthesis of Hollywood tropes (Guy Ritchie’s films come immediately to mind). There’s also the issue of dialogue and slang; perhaps Cornish used LPs from Dizzee Rascal and The Streets to flesh out his lexicon (or maybe Cornish is just that “down,” but one senses affectation either way)—in any case, I was never quite sure if a British audience would find the youths’ speech legitimate, but I did very much enjoy it. It only compounded my sense that Attack the Block is sort of like a crueler E.T. scripted by Russell Hoban. There’s a lovely streak of Riddley Walker in Attack the Block.
Attack the Block, despite—or perhaps because of its flaws—is a charming, spirited film with a strong protagonist in Moses. It’s one of the few films I’ve seen that actually gains something (some ineffable quality I don’t know how to name) in trying to appeal to fans of different genres and backgrounds, and if it made me cringe at times with its clumsy tonal shifts, it also thrilled and moved me in turn. Recommended.
I was lucky enough to live in New Zealand for a few years as a kid, so I got to experience Guy Fawkes Day. We made effigies of Guy, then we burned them on a bonfire. There was a barbecue and fireworks. To my American ass, it seemed a mixture of the Fourth of July and Halloween—strange and marvelous.
It was a few years after my last Guy Fawkes experience that I read Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. V, an anarchist who wears a stylized Guy Fawkes mask, wages a vigilante war on a harsh authoritarian government. Along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, V was a first for me, something different from the comics I was reading at the time, stuff like Chris Claremont’s run on The Uncanny X-Men and other Marvel titles.
A film version of V for Vendetta was released in 2006; Alan Moore famously had his name removed from it. I enjoyed the film, although it certainly wasn’t as good or thought-provoking as Moore’s original story. And even though the film looked good, the passive experience of watching an action movie can’t measure up to David Lloyd’s original art work and that wonderful space between the panels of comics that engages the reader’s imagination.
This afternoon [see editorial note below] I finished the first graphic novel of Alan Moore’s run writing Swamp Thing, and I can’t wait until my library hold on the second graphic novel comes in. I had no idea Saga of the Swamp Thing would be as good as it was, nor as beautifully illustrated; it’s actually better than V for Vendetta or Moore’s other famed work, Watchmen (and none of these titles are even in the same league as Moore’s masterpiece, From Hell). Alan Moore and Steve Bissette’s run on the DC Comics series essentially led to DC’s creation of the edgier Vertigo imprint for their more “mature” titles, such as The Sandman. These titles helped to change the audiences of “comic books” and helped to make the graphic novel a new standard in the medium (no mean feat, considering the fanboyish culture of comic nerds, a culture that prizes rarity of print run over quality of storytelling).
One of the lessons in V for Vendetta is to illustrate what happens when we don’t allow for dissent, what happens when ideas are both prescribed and proscribed, and all dialogue is muted. Authoritarian governments consolidate their power from the silencing of ideas. A healthy society requires all sorts of opinions, even ones we don’t like. The smiling Americans in this photo aren’t burning effigies of would-be revolutionaries, they are burning something much more dangerous–books.
[Editorial note: So, I ran a version of this post on Nov. 5, 2006—it’s actually one of the first posts I ever did on the blog, which I began in Sept. 2006. Looking over it—which is to say editing it and making minor revisions (and grimacing frequently, but trying to keep those revisions minor, like moving commas)—I can see the growth and scope of the blog; especially I can see my own limited sense of what I wanted Biblioklept to be. The post also strikes me as excessively vague and preachy (especially that last paragraph, written after years of Bush Era Fatigue, which is kinda sorta still going on, I guess, Bush Era Fatigue, I mean, only I’d give it another name now). I wish I could remember more details of Guy Fawkes Day/Night, but I was young—9, 10, 11—and it seems vague. I still remember the history of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, although that’s probably more a result of paying attention in AP European History than anything else. This editorial note is way too long. I never finished Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, but the second volume was good, as I recall].
I picked up a bevy of books at my favorite bookstore sometime last week ; can’t remember the day, exactly. Anyway, some of these selections come from reader recommendations re: nonconventional lit.
I ordered David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I’ve been meaning to read for yonks but had never found used. Horrible, horrible cover
Bernhard’s Correction: Thomas Bernhard came recommended by a number of readers in the aforelinkedto post; dipping into Correction immediately recalled Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn for some reason.
George Saunders: another reader recommendation. I actually read Pastoralia this week. I love short stories. Anyway, full review forthcoming. Short version: good stuff, but DFW casts a pretty big shadow.
Georges Perec was another reader rec, but it was his novel Life: A User’s Manual that kept popping up. I found Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, his collection of essays and other stray bits, by sheer chance. I think I was looking for something by De Sade, actually. Anyway, I love, love, love this book—it kinda reminds me of Bolaño’s Between the Parentheses or even the Vollmann reader Expelled from Eden—the kind of book I see myself dipping into again and again, a little mini-labyrinth of ideas.
I also picked up Faulkner’s last novel, The Reivers; been wanting to read it for a long time now. I’ll try to get it in over the Christmas break.
In my original review of Zodiac, I pointed to my own early misunderstanding of what the film was—
Lots of 
Biblioklept 