On lyricism and the poetic simpleton

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless (he'll probably call himself out in the comments section anyway) gave me a sort of challenge when he learned that I was finally going to see Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which he'd recommended to me several months ago.

(In my defense, the movie only came out in Australia this past Thursday.)

"So tomorrow we find out if it's lyrical filmmaking or Malick you object to," he wrote in an email to me.

He actually wrote "languid filmmaking" rather than "lyrical filmmaking," but I remembered it as "lyrical" in my head as I was watching the movie.

He's right to characterize my tastes that way, but I guess I took some umbrage at the fairly neutral and thoroughly accurate comment. I have objected to some of Terrence Malick's films, in some cases vociferously (The Thin Red Line) and in some cases bemusedly with moderate affection (The Tree of Life). I'm not a Malick champion, that's for sure.

Yet I do feel like it's not just a personal preference thing, like there's something lacking in me that makes me like Malickian movies less than most people -- most discerning people, who are the only ones I really care about when comparing my movie tastes to theirs. Why don't I like Malick's brand of visual poetry a little more than I do?

Ain't Them Bodies Saints was possibly going to provide some kind of answer to this, though I didn't even know that it warranted the comparison to Malick until my friend wrote the email in question.

Of course, I should have known. The title is like something William Faulkner might have come up with, establishing it pretty well as Southern Gothic. And most Southern Gothic is lyrical or languid or whatever term you might use.

Then there's the fact that Casey Affleck spends the trailer talking just above a whisper about his vows to find his love (Rooney Mara) again. It's actually his regular speaking voice, but the "just above a whisper" comment is meant to make the comparison to the work of Malick, whose everpresent voiceovers are marked by their whispery quality.

It's Affleck's work that made me realize what it is I don't really care for in movies like this:

Uneducated low-level criminals from the South who speak in a string of childlike platitudes about love and destiny, whose simplistic construction gives them a wisdom and authenticity that could never be managed by a skilled wordsmith.

Since you might guess from the previous sentence that I am, or consider myself to be, such a wordsmith, you might not be surprised that I find myself in opposition to such characters.

So it's not the lyrical, languid world of a Terrence Malick film that really bothers me. It's the characters who populate it.

Since some plot description of David Lowery's acclaimed new(ish) film is probably now warranted, I'll tell you that it's set a bit in the Bonnie & Clyde world of Malick's masterpiece Badlands. (See, I do think some Malick films are masterpieces.) Affleck and Mara are young lovers or spouses (it's not quite clear) who have just discovered they're expecting a child. They're trying to make a life for themselves and their child through armed robbery, but that career is cut abruptly short during a shootout with police where their accomplice is killed and an officer is wounded. Although Mara's Ruth took the shot that wounded the officer, Affleck's Bob claims responsibility and is sent away for a long prison sentence. It's at this point when he starts doing VO of the letters he writes to Ruth, promising such things as "Each day I will awaken thinking it's the day I will see you again, and one day that will be true."

Puh-leeze.

Okay, it's a nice thought. I wish I'd come up with it. But the thing is, I can't come up with a thought like that because I'm an Ivy League graduate who would write it and re-write it until all its enviable sense of spontaneity was gone. I'd obsess over it until I killed it.

Not Bob Muldoon. Because Bob is an uneducated low-level criminal from the South (Texas in this case), his emotions are simple and pure and vivid. When adults try to draw children's drawings, they can't make it look right. But Bob's heart and his words of love for Ruth are a child's drawing that comes naturally to him, because he's at that state of emotional evolution.

I'm not picking on Ain't Them Bodies Saints in particular. I'm only picking on it because we've seen this so many times before. The first few times, it felt sort of fresh. This tragic fellow has a quick temper and he hurts people accidentally and he does the wrong things, but his quivering words of love are as pure as a baby's tears. He loves his girl and would do anything to be with her, and that's all there is to that. But by time number, I don't know, 47, I felt I'd seen this story before.

I could never be such a romantic hero in such a Faulknerian, Malickian story. As me, Vance, I'd be overthinking everything, so I'd never have the quick temper, nor hurt people accidentally, nor do the wrong things to begin with. (Oh, I'd do wrong things, but it'd be like plagiarizing a paper in school, not robbing a liquor store.) The romance of the situation is dependent on how little is calculated and calibrated about the thoughts and speech. Everything is "from the heart," not "from the brain."

It occurs to me that these sentiments are similar to some I expressed when I was struggling with why I didn't connect with Drive the way some people do/did. Here's a link to that piece if you want to read it. In that case it was more the strong silent type than the child-poet, but in both cases, it's characters who are essentially different than I am.

I wonder why we, as an audience, get so much more out of love stories between simple folk than love stories between university professors. At this point, we don't even get the opportunity to see love stories between university professors, so uninteresting is their love. Those eggheads aren't spontaneous or reckless or dangerous. Therefore, they're not romantic.

There must also be some kind of sense of superiority going on here. I think we need to look down on Bob and Ruth as children, of a sort -- our intellectual inferiors. We can examine their love as though it were the love of two lemurs in a zoo. There's something feral and elemental and basic about it. Advanced love is too hard for us to process in a pastime designed as escapism, since most likely we're dealing with some fucked up version of advanced love in our own lives, where people give each other the silent treatment for reasons they don't even remember, and no one gets involved in shootouts.

But back to this issue of the lyrical or languid style of filmmaking that Malick and David Lowery have in common. (You'd say Lowery is ripping Malick off, except that it's too well-made to really deliver that kind of indictment.) Another 2013 film disabused me of the notion that I couldn't wholeheartedly endorse the style of filmmaking Malick has made his calling card at least since The Thin Red Line. It has the photographic beauty of a Malick film, and if anything, it makes even less sense.

That film is Upstream Color, and I've already seen it twice.

I wasn't a fan of Shane Carruth's debut feature, Primer, but I ate up his sophomore film with a big spoon. Even though most of the time I had to rely on flimsy half theories of what was even going on.

Could it be a coincidence that these characters are modern, intellectual northerners?

I mean, we're not talking about brainiacs or anything, but Kris and Jeff are both denizens of a large, bustling city. No one talks about how close they are to seeing or touching each other. If they talk about anything at all, it's weird conspiracy theory shit that doesn't even make sense to them.

And I discovered while watching Upstream Color that I didn't need to know what was going on at all, as long as I felt like I dug how it was going on. In fact, I simply luxuriated in being immersed in an experience that was unlike any I had ever had.

Unlike in Ain't Them Bodies Saints, a tale as old as William Faulkner.

I can't leave this topic behind without acknowledging a certain hypocrisy in what I've just written. I say that these characters ring a little false to me, but the fact of the matter is, one of my very favorite movies of all time features a tragic relationship between two poetic simpletons. That movie is Raising Arizona, and Nicolas Cage's voiceover is just about the shining example of everything I'm railing against here.

But that just adds strength to my claim that it's all about the timing. That was 1987, when I hadn't already seen these characters so many times before. And, that was a comedy, in addition to the tragic romance. There was barely any languidness or lyricism to be seen.

So I can answer my friend as follows: It's not languid filmmaking, nor lyrical filmmaking, nor Terrence Malick I object to.

I object to these characters who can't find the words, who always find the perfect words. 

Strong and silent is not my type

I've been continuing to wrestle with Drive.

I posted once about it, very optimistically, in anticipation of its release. I then posted after seeing it, full of doubts and complaints (but recognizing some very memorable strengths -- I thought about the movie for days afterward).

Since then I've talked to a number of people about it. Most tell me I'm crazy. Some don't.

But I think it was last night that I finally came to understand my most salient complaint about it:

I don't relate to the strong silent type.

See, I hate pauses. I hate when no one is saying something in a conversation. And Drive -- particularly the scenes between Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan -- is chock full of pauses.

Interminable, pregnant, awful, uncomfortable pauses.

I'm a talker by nature. I have a lot to say, especially when I'm comfortable with a group of people. I'm excited to get together with people because I want to say things to them. Say things at them? Nah, I don't barrel over them -- there's definitely a give and take. But I am guilty at times of the sin discussed in the deleted scenes from Pulp Fiction, in which Mia asks Vincent if, as a conversationalist, he listens or waits to talk. I listen, but occasionally, I just wait to talk.

So a strong silent type -- who primarily listens, and doesn't contribute much in terms of speech -- is a person who makes me somewhat uncomfortable.

I have friends who I might characterize this way, but I prefer hanging out with them in groups. Their refusal to pathologically fill up the dead air with chatter makes me worried what will happen in a one-on-one situation. I almost feel like I should have a list of go-to topics ready, just in case I find myself in this scenario. I relate much better to talkative neurotics, who compulsively fill the empty spaces just as I do.

Gosling's character in Drive -- famously unnamed -- is the last guy in the world who would care about filling the empty spaces with chatter. He seems to thrive on the empty spaces.

Everyone who criticizes Drive, as I do, seems to agree that the scenes between Gosling and Mulligan are weighed down by unnaturally long pauses. It's a thoroughly intentional decision by Nicolas Winding Refn. But this to me is why they read as fake. Because I see the world the way I do -- holding the belief that human beings should fear awkward silences -- people who don't have this fear seem somehow artificial to me. Not artificial as in ungenuine, but as in actual constructions of fiction.

Before you go off on me, let me explain that I know this is irrational. The world takes all kinds of people. And if all of them were chatterers, we might go crazy.

I may not myself even be an extreme chatterer, except under certain circumstances, as when I have a lot in common with someone. In fact, I barely ever bore people I don't know with stories about myself. That's not what I want you to take away from this, the idea that I talk people's ears off. (Writing their eyes off on my blog is another matter.) But I do believe in lubricating social situations however I can, so that they flow more easily. This is where my verbal tendencies really come into play.

And so I don't relate to someone who will not only allow conversational dead spots, but actually seems to encourage them.

This realization came on my drive home from a friend's house last night, where five of us guys were hanging out. Lately these guys have teased me a bit about being too talkative, most notably on Facebook, where a joke has risen up that I explain in too much detail why I can't come to a particular social event. While the strong silent type might just say "I can't make it that night," I feel the need to say "I really want to come, but unfortunately, my dad and his wife are coming to town the next day, and we need to clean the house. Not only that, but I owe it to my wife not to be out the night before she has to start sucking it up for a week with her in-laws. Plus the baby has had a bit of a cold. And I've got a really big pimple on my nose right now." This is an exaggeration, but not a huge exaggeration.

As an attempt to prove them wrong, last night I told myself I was going to be that silent type, a person who receives more information than he sends out, a person who listens and laughs but lets others dictate the flow of the conversation.

Couldn't do it.

When I get together with these guys, I'm just exploding with the desire to talk about the pop culture we've consumed since we last saw each other. (Drive being one of these pieces of pop culture.) I don't hang with friends as often as I did in the pre-baby days, nor do we hang as long on a given night -- in fact, two of the five cleared out before 10 p.m. So it's even more important to utilize the available conversation time to shoot the shit about which new TV shows are good (and which suck), which movie trailers we love (and which we hate), etc. I tried as a test to shut off the part of me that's wired this way, but I couldn't. I just had to keep the conversational agenda moving along at a rapid clip. It's in my DNA.

But it's not in the DNA of Ryan Gosling's Driver, and it's not in the DNA of Viggo Mortensen's Tom Stall/Joey Cusack from A History of Violence. See, it wasn't Drive alone that helped me reach my conclusion about the strong silent type. For the first time on that drive home last night, I made a conscious comparison that might have occurred to me earlier -- the reasons I don't really like Drive are very similar to the reasons I don't really like A History of Violence.

There are definite stylistic similarities between the two films, such as the somewhat languid pacing interrupted by flashes of gruesome violence. Violence certainly moves things along faster, but there's something "man with no name" about Mortensen's character here, too -- having two names is almost as much of a comment on the meaningless of his name as having no name.

But the thing that aligns him most with the "man with no name" archetype is that he doesn't say much. He has intense, soulful eyes, as does Gosling in Drive. But he doesn't like to open his mouth any more than he has to. Perhaps he's only developed this laconic nature as a defense mechanism, to keep his Philly accent from bursting through to the surface. But the end result is the same: He's a guy who pierces you with solemn looks and speaks few words.

In other words, not my kind of guy.

What's troubling me now is to figure out how deep this runs in me. For example, I don't feel negatively disposed toward Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name character -- that I can say for sure. But I think that's because in westerns, that character is an archetype that's part of the very fabric of the genre. I accept more easily that strong silent types in westerns do their talking with their guns. I have never known any other way.

Tom/Joey and Driver, on the other hand, are modern men. And yeah, I guess they are each cowboys. But modern cowboys strike me as overly stylized, and somehow, false. We live in an age that is defined by chatter -- emails, texts and tweets fly back and forth across the world with such frequency that if you pictured them visually, they'd look like the world's busiest freeway projected at ten times its normal speed. I've gotten on board with this frenetic pace -- Tom/Joey and the Driver have not.

Does that make me right and them wrong?

No. But it does explain why I don't really relate to them.

The man with no name, the man with too much of a name

One thing that consistently gets my quills up is when characters in a movie have no name.

You know, like the main character in Drive.

In the credits of Drive, Ryan Gosling's character is referred to only as "Driver."

Fortunately, I did not actually notice that he had no name until that point. I'd certainly prefer that to the alternative: a bunch of really clumsy dialogue that trips over itself trying to come up with synonyms to the person's name. "He" and "that guy" and "the kid" (etc.) get old pretty quickly.

As soon as I realize the characters in a movie don't have names, I immediately think of that movie as some kind of Samuel Beckett ripoff. Of course, the filmmakers are not usually going for the same things Beckett was going for, but the same level of pretentiousness may be present. "The character has no name because he could be anyone, he could be your or me!" Yeah, I get it. It addresses nothing less than the universality of human experience. Good for it.

(I should pause here to tell you something that may be obvious by now: I had my complaints with Drive. One positive is that I saw it on Sunday night and am still thinking about it/processing it on Tuesday morning, which undoubtedly qualifies as a good thing.)

However, the reverse is also true. I hate it when a character has too much of a name.

No, I'm not talking about characters of Spanish heritage who have a dozen first/middle names. I think that's excessive as a cultural tradition, but it doesn't bother me and is not relevant to this particular conversation.

What bothers me -- with a few notable exceptions -- is when a screenwriter is so proud of the name he/she has created for a character that it gets repeated ad infinitum, almost like the name itself is a joke/piece of clever screenwriting. Sometimes, this name even becomes the title of the movie.

Take Charlie Bartlett. (Please, ha ha.)

As Charlie Bartlett is purely a work of fiction from an original screenplay, they could have made that character's name anything. Yet I suspect the name Charlie Bartlett was chosen because the rhyming first syllables of each name made it particularly fun to say. And then, particularly fun to repeat in quick succession in the trailer:




I actually kind of like Charlie Bartlett, but I can never think about it without thinking about the major screenwriting crutch of giving the character a snappy name -- so snappy that it can function as the movie's title. There are certainly plenty of other titles that qualify, but this is the one that always comes to mind whenever I rail about the laziness I think is inherent in naming a movie after its main character.

Ah, but remember what I said about exceptions?

I don't have this problem with Donnie Darko. No doubt, the exact same thinking applied -- instead of the rhyming of "Char" and "Bar," it's the alliteration of the two Ds that makes the name roll off the tongue easily. Either way it's cutesy.

But see, in this case, I don't care.

I think Donnie Darko is a masterpiece, and a masterpiece forgives all faults. In fact, Donnie Darko works as a good example in this post in multiple ways.

See yesterday, I had a disagreement with someone about the quality of Drive. He loved it -- I'm not exactly sure how I feel about it, but my feelings are never going to qualify as love. What I did know was that I could list a litany of small complaints I had about Drive, complaints that could certainly qualify as nit-picking. That brought up a larger discussion about the usefulness of nit-packing as a critical exercise ... and whether it should even be called nit-picking in the first place.

During that discussion I had a realization about the term "nit-picking," which is that it is almost always -- okay, always -- used negatively. If you are said to be "nit-picking," you are tearing down an idea or piece of art based on allegedly unimportant details, things you should be able to overlook.

The thing is, if you are concentrating on those details, it means that the idea or piece of art has not done enough to convince you that they were unimportant. I'd argue that the actual best way to consider the fine art of nit-picking is as "early criticism." You pick nits when you are not yet able to articulate why you did not like a particular film. As brilliant as we film fans like to fancy ourselves, sometimes we just don't immediately summon the words for why a particular film didn't work for us. Until the time that we can, we sometimes find ourselves saying things like "Yeah, I didn't like the clothes that guy was wearing, they were stupid." Better than that, I hope, but still not really to the heart of what was wrong with the film.

And so Donnie Darko entered into that discussion as well. Described even by its devoted fans as a movie that does not make perfect sense, Donnie Darko is just the kind of movie that could die under the intense scrutiny of so-called nit-picking. But see, I don't nit-pick Donnie Darko because I love it so much. I don't care that there are some things that don't make sense, and I don't care that the title is a perfect example of a movie-naming convention I find to be lazy. Donnie Darko had me at hello, and that's all there is to it.

As for Drive and Charlie Bartlett ... well, they've still got more work to do.

Exaggerated conclusion: Movie characters should have a first name but no last name. Every male character should be named Mark, and every female character should be named Julie.

The dawn of a name

Remember when you first heard the name Quentin Tarantino? Didn't it just sound like a name you needed to remember? Or perhaps more accurately, a name you would not need to remember, because it would soon become unforgettable and possibly inescapable?

The last few weeks, I've been tossing the name "Nicolas Winding Refn" around in my mind in the same way.

I don't know all that much about Drive, which comes out today -- I've seen the trailer once and I have a basic idea of the premise. However, there's something so invigorating about the footage, and something about the fact that Refn won best director at Cannes for this film, that fills me with hope that this could be the dawning of a new auteur. Maybe a good Tarantino imitator for once.

Nicolas Winding Refn. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, unfortunately. (The guy's Danish, what's he gonna do.)

Now, it's not accurate to say that Refn is new. His name may be new to me, but he's already directed seven films, dating back 15 years. Most notably Bronson, which received some positive critical attention a couple years ago. (Though the only person I know who saw it was left cold by it, and as a result I haven't considered it more seriously.) However, Drive is his first American film, his fourth in the English language.

After I'm done seeing it -- most likely this weekend -- Drive may not remind me of a Quentin Tarantino film at all. But we know that Tarantino has a fetish for heists, guns, shady characters, fast cars and stunt drivers, so it's most likely it will.

The real question is, will it be good Tarantino or bad Tarantino? There's a lot more of the latter than the former. Then again, Cannes -- where Tarantino is a favorite son -- is not known for giving out best directing awards to bad Tarantino impersonators.

Obviously, the buzz for Drive is quite good. However, on one of the podcasts I listen to, they quoted what director Rian Johnson said about it -- he enjoyed it, but we should temper our expectations. Too late! (Besides, Johnson is overrated.)

Say it with me ... "Nicolas Winding Refn. Nicolas Winding Refn."

Eh, we'll get used to it.