The Face Knife

Last night I was browsing audible.com for language-learning programs I could listen to on my iPod. I had downloaded the ‘taster’ of Pimsleur’s French at the beginning of the month, and I loved it, but was unsure if I wanted to spring for the rest of the very expensive set. I was also looking for some other languages, but anyway….soon after I logged into the Web site, my mobile phone starts ringing. The number display was an 800 number, and I thought it was Cingular calling me to ask me to please pay my bill, which was late. Since I had actually paid the bill that morning, I thought it wouldn’t be a bother to pick up and tell them that. But it wasn’t Cingular. It was a telemarketer from audible.com, asking me to try a new membership plan (although I have purchased from audible, I’m not a member). I was pretty non-plussed but I’m sure I mentioned that I was browsing their site at that very second. I can’t say for certain whether or not I unwittingly triggered an ill-considered marketing plan or if it was just an odd coincidence, but it was certainly freaky nonetheless, and i forgot to tell the woman to NEVER CALL ME AGAIN.

Bloggers be talking about last Saturday’s “Lazy Sunday/Chronicles of Narnia” mini film/rap on Saturday Night Live like it was the second coming of the “The H is O,” but I don’t think it’s a patch on, say, anything Andy Dick has done for a Viacom special in the last half-decade. Apparently, compared to the SNL of recent years, which i haven’t watched because I absolutely loath Jimmy Fallon (i know he’s no longer on it) and the incredibly over-rated Tina Fey, as well as the rest of the no-names, it’s quite good, but, my feeling is like, if the Sigma Chi Frat performed this for Spring Fling I would be impressed but then I would go back to the beer-bong, you know?
The only thing the rap has done for me is to inspire me to perpetuate the term “Hambones” as slang for 10 dollar bills. Yeah, I made that up. And cupcakes, yeah, I love me some cupcakes.

ETA: Okay, now it’s hit the Times and even my MOM has sent me a link to it. Friends, it’s just making me think about cupcakes, and with Buttercup a mere 3 blocks away, that’s just torture.

This is probably a horrendous personality defect, and it may just be the result of congenital shyness, but I’m always incredibly uncomfortable around “scenes.” In addition to sullenness, this often manifests itself in the activation of my fight or flight instincts, which happened Saturday Night as I waited in the lobby of Anthology Film Archives in a sea of hipsters to be let into a screening of Andrew Bujalski’s (Funny Ha Ha) new film Mutual Appreciation. This is particularly ironic because that audience is more or less the same demographic that the film is about , which I guess I must be part of because I liked it as much as I did Funny Ha Ha.

Alan (Justin Rice), like so many of his kind, has recently emigrated to Brooklyn where’s he temporarily crashing in the circle of Laurence (Andrew Bujalski) and his girlfriend Ellie (Rachel Clift) while he tries to get his music career together. Alan is immediately struck by how much people in New York have to strive to get things done, and how everyone here seems to have a project which they are acting on. While the idea that everyone wearing a pair of hornrims and holding a messenger bag is some sort of artist on the make is ennervating in the extreme to me, Alan is inspired, so much so that he jokingly suggests forming a club of like-minded artists, the name of which I regretfully forget because it sums up a LOT about this movie, but goes something like “The inclusive, cool people helping each other out” club.

It seems odd that such an independent production would have such ambivalence towards community, as it seems most of the actors worked gratis the same circle of friends participated in making both of Bujalski’s films. Alan is more or less immediately accepted by New York Hipster society - for instance, a randy college radio DJ straddles him in her kitchen, and his “band” receives raves the first time they play out. But Alan remains at a remove. I think there’s something about all the things that are happening to him that feel at a distance, feel mediated, and when someone comes along and seems to not want anything from him he takes that appreciation of himself as something deeper - perhaps love.

The bohemians of Mutual Appreciation hedge their bets too much for the pseudo Jules et Jim triangle that develops to really scorch any of them, but I don’t think that Bujalski is necessarily mocking anyone for their lack of conviction. While the characters may say things or do things that may be the object of fun, it’s never as if we’re laughing at what the character represents - there’s no belittling of anyone’s life, which is certainly not the norm for comedies, particularly about marginally employed ‘creative’ young people.

I think Mutual Appreciation is a little less successful than Funny Ha Ha for a few reasons - one, the lead is nowhere near as charming and likable (though my impression may be colored by the fact that I would rather sleep with awkward girls than awkward boys). Two, the structure of Mutual Appreciation is more diffuse. I really like the way Bujalski has ended both of his films - there’s a real rythym to the interactions between the characters that signal the end of the film even if the story is not quite finished, but in this case, the interactions are not as strong as Funny Ha Ha. Perhaps that’s part of the problem that Bujalski is trying to examine with regard to the communities his films take place within - appreciation takes the place of or can be confused for deeper passions, but while we leave Marnie on the cusp of an emotional breakthrough in Funny Ha Ha, Allan, Laurence and Ellie seem determined not to upset the status quo.

It occurs to me that the talents of Bujalski and his casts, as well as the concerns of his milieu, might work out very well as a serial or TV show. Sundance channel? IFC channel?

Mutual Appreciation is available for purchase at the web site. A limited theatrical release is likely in late Spring/Early Summer 2006

Hillary Brown’s Review of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet on Flagpole is inspiring, not the least for introducing my non-Italianate ass to the concept of sprezzatura, defined as an “artful artlessness,” which I immediately want to claim as my own by twisting it into dumb, genealogically suspect puns like “spazzatura” or “sprezzatourist” or “spechgesangatura.” Because that’s how I roll.

Brown brings the ultra-unfashionable Harold Bloom into the mix, by big-upping his concept of “canonical strangeness” - briefly, the idea that what makes great art is the batshit weirdness of it, in form or subject. I want to expand on this, by addressing how, according to Bloom, a work acquires this “canonically strange” properties. As I see it, there are two possibilities: the creator is uniquely disturbed (which, you know, guarantees strangeness, but probably isn’t very helpful for the creator) or, the application of a “strong misreading” to a past canonically strange work. A strong misreading is a deliberate (though it may be unconscious) twisting of the aims and forms of the work of an admired forebear - Bloom calls this “the anxiety of influence.”

Personally, I’ve always thought that “originality” was the result of incompetent plagiarism, (that’s an enabling fiction for me) so I’ve got some love for New Haven’s self-proclaimed Falstaff. Therefore, I’m going to apply this theory to Trapped in the Closet, and assert that it’s (among a great deal of other things, which maybe we’ll explore in future pieces), a strong misreading of Arthur Schnitzler’s/Max Ophul’s La Ronde.

Trapped in the Closet is an exploration of sexual mores across social spheres, like La Ronde. Both films have a quite prominent narrator figure who actually appears on camera. Yet while La Ronde’s abiding metaphor is a merry-go-round, a closed circle, so far the relationships in Trapped in the Closet has been radically rhizomatic, a much more contemporary viewpoint. The chart I am preparing, TK, will illustrate this, and I hope it will be the first of many ways of looking at this project.

One of the most unfair things about this world is that other people seldom act the way we want them to, and that can make life just plain difficult. If they could only see what you see, grasp the facts of the situations the way you can, surely - surely - a positive outcome for all could be reached. But most of the time, other people just don’t seem to get it. Are they all just fucking jerks, or is something else going on?

Gradually, it seems, the American independent filmmaker is emerging from a solipsistic cocoon and making movies that deal honestly with what I like to call “the problem of other people.” That problem is essentially that a part of everyone who is not you will remain forever inaccessible and in reserve, no matter how hard you try to break down the barriers. An inability to work around this fact results in neuroses, which often have debilitating, but quite possibly entertaining for the rest of us, symptoms.

I myself happen to take it for granted that you, dear reader, are an autonomous individual capable of some, to be sure, spectacularly wrong-headed opinions but ones that are probably based on the available facts as you see them. I’m willing to give you that doubt, not because I am particularly magnanimous but because all evidence seems to indicate that there is, not, in fact, a cosmic conspiracy to frustrate my ambitions, with various government officials, family members and even, at times, “inanimate” objects acting in concert.

The (giant) Squid and the Whale engage in a deep sea combat that until very, very recently (after the production of this film) had not been witnessed by human beings. Yet it was more or less taken for granted by biologists and animal death match enthusiasts that this combat did take place, although we couldn’t really see it. Despite our best cogito-ing, phenomenological bracketing and what not, a bulletproof proof of the autonomy of the “other” is not forthcoming. Heck, half the time the so-called experts even have trouble proving that they themselves exist, much the less the rest of us.

What to do, what to do? Well, one way to tackle the problem is to interpret the actions of all and sundry as accidental or on-purposeful attempts to make your life difficult. And indeed, in addition to praising his favorite texts as “very dense and interesting,” Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) is inclined to plead for his family members to “stop being difficult,” whenever he doesn’t get his way.

Another way to tackle the problem is to retreat so far inside yourself that you become incredibly alienated. The younger brother acts how I would imagine a shell-shocked Danny Torrance from The Shining would, chugging beers and marking his territory at school in squirm inducing ways.

At one point, the older brother, when confronted with his limitations, says to his mom that he “doesn’t see himself that way,” and indeed, being alienated from other people also leads to self-alienation.

Noah Baumbach is unflinching in detailing how that sometimes relationships, be it with a family member or potential love interest can be based largely on projection. In this year’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July deals with similar themes but seems to posit a solution that everyone has similar doubts and insecurities, and therefore it is not necessary to be afraid of intimacy. Baumbach’s film shows that this solution is, while appealing, ultimately facile, and that other people are really capable of inflicting terrible damage on you, without you ever being able to explain why, except with empty words like “difficult.”

To be continued in a review of Talk to Her(2002).