Albee, Guare and the Novel on Stage

It was a treat to notice that the movie version of Six Degrees of Separation showed up on HBO Max this month. A faithful adaptation of the Lincoln Center production of John Guare’s play, the film has stuck with me over the years and it was exciting to see it anew. The virtuouso performances still thrill and the dialogue remains unrivaled for its cleverness, rhythm and subtext. The film is a reminder of what movies could be doing for us in 2021 and what a mistake it was for audiences to have allowed Hollywood to abandon the character-driven, indie aesthetics of the 80s and 90s. Or, maybe the problem is that we’ve ceded film to Hollywood when what we need are the more traditionally grounded “New York” stories, from Breakfast at Tiffanys’ to Mean Streets.

After I watched Six Degrees (twice) I read the script for the stage play and was struck by how little Guare changed adapting it to film. In the play, originally staged in a 3 quarter thrust, Flan and Ouisa, the couple at the center of the action, break the fourth wall to narrate directly to the audience, as if engaging them in cocktail party conversation. A theme of the play is how we so easily reduce life-altering events to fodder for idle conversation. In the movie, they set up each recount to have an audience (at a wedding, at a charity dinner) rather than have our protagonists talk to the camera. However they are presented, the words in the screenplay almost perfectly match the words in the stage script.

What sets Six Degrees apart is the layering of meaning in each line. The audience almost doesn’t realize that they’re watching the dissolution of a marriage as the story plays out because the director and writer respect them enough not to spoon feed everything. In this, Six Degrees is novelistic in its story telling.

Reading Six Degrees sent me to other scripts in my collection, including some shorter works by Guare and then, finally, back to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It has also been a long time since I’d cracked open those words and maybe it’s all the talk of Catcher in the Rye in Six Degrees, but reading Virginia Woolf was very much like reading a short novel. The dialogue is fast-paced, hilarious, layered and detailed. The stage directions are artful. With different formatting, I think you could offer up Albee’s play, word for word, as a novel and it would not only pass, but stand up as a solid work of dialogue-driven prose fiction.

It even has its own “Catcher in the Rye” moment when the history professor George, left alone for a few moments during a drunken night of “Hump the Hostess” and “Get the Guests” with a younger biology professor and his wife, sits down to read a book and recites: “And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and burdened with a morality too rigid to accomodate itself to the swing of events, must…eventually…fall.” I wondered if Albee had made this up or was quoting some real book about foreign policy from the late 1960s. If it were real, I might even want to read that book, as a glimpse into the thinking of the time. That is an amazing accomplishment — Albee set me off on an intellectual path separate from his domestic tragicomedy. It seems Albee had invented this sentiment, another layer of reality that adds depth to the entire story.

I’m no declinist about the state of the arts. I know there’s a lot of great writing out there right now, in film, theatre and prose. But, we’re no longer seeing work like Guare or Albee get consistent, mass attention and financial support. The culture is poorer for it. We need and deserve more.

Pinter at the Movies

Great piece on LitHub about the creativity and genre-changing innovations that Harold Pinter brought to his film adaptations of classic novels, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman. We could really have more and better theatre in the United States if we also had a public television system well-funded enough to bring the talents of our best playwrights to screen like Britain did with the BBC during Pinter’s formative years.

This piece also makes me think of David Mamet, who adapted some of his own plays to film and did so in a style that preserved the theatricality. Oleanna is particularly well done in that regard.

I’d love to see more stage to screen out there.

Why The Undoing’s Ending Didn’t Resonate (or maybe it did?)

Fascinating essay from author Jane Dykema in Electric Literature today about how Grace’s dissasociated behaviors throughout the murder mystery/court drama made her a murder suspect in the eyes of viewers who have internalized dangerous tropes about “unstable” women. There’s a lot to consider here.

A good portion of HBO’s The Undoing was a murder mystery. A young and exoticized mother has an affair with her son’s oncologist and she turns up dead. The oncologist, who had lost his position at the hospital over the affair and lied to his family about it, then flees the city, only to turn up later to enlist his wife’s help in his criminal defense. The series at that point changes from murder mystery to court room drama and actually seems a bit like its last episodes could have been condensed and slotted into any run of Law and Order.

From what I can tell, folks did not seem universalkly impressed with the series finale, where we learn that, yes, the oncologist is guilty. Dykema’s critique, that Grace (the oncologist’s wife, played by Nicole Kidman) should never have been consideredd much of a suspect by viewers is compelling. She never seemed a murderer, though that might have been an interesting angle.

Another critique I’ve seen is that the victim, Elena, is a seductive latina outsider to the upper west side community that dominates the show’s focus. While you can see the writers trying to turn the series into a critiue of upper crust morality, they wind up turning the crime victim into an after thought and the whole thing becomes Grace’s story. Can Grace, a successful Manhattan therapist also born into fantastic wealth accept that her husband Jonathan is a sociopath and a killer? The practical struggle here is that if she does not, if she decides to persist in the illusion of a perfect marriage to a wonderful man who has devoted his life to curing pediatric cancer patients, that he will get away with the crime. But the justic narrative winds up secondary to her personal journey and we’re really presented with “can Grace find peace with all of this?” This seems a minor issue given that another character has been bludgeoned to death with her sculptor’s hammer.

While I agree with both of these takes, my problem with how the show played out is more fundamental — it seemed like Jonathan was the murderer from episode one. Almost none of the twists and turns thrown in to direct suspicion at any other character can overcome the obvious narrative that Jonathan, after developing a close relationship with the mother of one of his patients, had an affair with Elena. The affair cost him a prestigious and irreplaceable job, so he decided to end it and try to reclaim his old life. Elena, of course, would refuse to be casually discarded and insinuate herself further into his life and at a moment of maximum tension, he kills her.

Seven episodes to get to “he did it,” seemed excessive in retrospect. I craved something more interesting like Grace’s father hated Jonathan and framed him for the crime. But maybe that’s the test of the series — how much do we crave an ending that absolves the otherwise successful white man? Maybe the ending worked out better than I’d thought.

A Course on Kafka’s “The Trial”

I just completed Professor Richard T. Stock’s online course about Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and if you’re a fan of podcasts and literature, I highly recommend it. Professor Stock takes you through the book chapter by chapter, with a plot summary and analysis of each. It’s an enriching reading experience (and a great reread).

I won’t spoil the course, but I was surprised that Professor Stock does not read the story the way I do at all. To me, “The Trial” is an allegory for life. As Woody Allen quipped in “Love and Death,” all people are ultimately sentenced to death for crimes they never committed. Like Jospeh K., we are all subjects to a capital punishment heariing where the best we can hope is to push back the inevitable sentence. Or, as Allen put it:

“Isn’t all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed? The difference is that all men go eventually, but I go six o’clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o’clock, but I have a smart lawyer. Got leniency.”

“Wheat. I’m dead and they’re talking about wheat.”

Joseph K.’s last thoughts are that he’s executed “like a dog.” This seems to be the condition of life. We are all sentenced for execution and the best we can hope, as Joseph K. is urged over and over, is to fight to prolong the trial, not to seek its end.

Why Do America’s Most Vile Companies Associate Themselves With Tolkien?

J.R.R. Tolkien cautioned against reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as simple allegory, as the mythos is meant to speak for itself. But taken as an epic cycle, it’s the story of an innocent Bilbo Baggins who takes a heroes journey and unearths a great lost power when he discovers the “one ring” forged by Sauron, the greatest, most powerful and corrupting evil in the world.

A generation later, Bilbo’s nephew Frodo Baggins, equally as innocent as his uncle, is asked to deliver the ring to the wise and immortal elves. But even they are potentially corrupted by its influence and so Frodo and his friends, including the deposed king of men, a representative from the elves, a representative from the dwarves and Frodo’s hometown friends undertake to destroy the ring by hurling it into the fires of Mordor. Along the way, they are stalked by a pitiful creature corrupted by the ring’s influence and all are twisted by a plant engulfing war that spares no one and allows for no neutral parties.

In the end (spoiler alert?), Frodo and his best friend Samwise succeed at their task, but at the painful loss of their innocence and childhoods. There are themes of heroic sacrifice and, yes, the notion of seemingly powerless people accomplishing great things against the forces of history.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have occupied significant space in western popular culture, from Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins to two film trilogies by genius director Peter Jackson that redefined the Hollywood blockbuster. Nerds love it.

Nerds name their businesses after it.

The most prominent example is Palantir, a global surveillance and big data analysis company that took its name from the crystal orbs that wizards in the Tolkien universe use to see far away places. It’s a clever name for a company that, as The Intercept described, “Helped the NSA Spy on the World.”

But it’s also misnamed. Palantir, founded by libertarian techno-tyrant Peter Thiel, who once destroyed the media outlet Gawker because he didn’t like it, has built a company where the looking glass focuses on others but nobody can see into Palantir (well, except that now Palantir wants to sell stock so we can see that prying into the lives of everybody on Earth is still a money-losing proposition.)

In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf is aghast to find that his colleague Saruman is utilizing a Palantir. In the books, this is not a one way device. When you look into one Palantir, somebody looking into another might be watching you. In The Lord of the Rings, the evil Sauron is on the other end.

Another evil company with a Lord of the Rings name is Anduril. In The Lord of the Rings it is the sword of Aragorn, forged from the remnants of the sword the heroic Isuldur used to chop the ring off of Sauron during the first world war. So, this is the weapon that, in the novels, defeats the worst evil the world has ever known and reminds us that there’s always hope and cause to fight.

Thje real-world Anduril, however, supplies drones to the U.S. Border Patrol for use stopping brave people fleeing political, social and economic oppression by making a hazardous trip across our militarized southern border. So, it is evil. Not only is it evil, it delights in its crapulence by boasting on its careers page:

“We won’t tell you that you’re making the world a better place with ad optimization and emoji filters. We believe the most socially impactful thing we can do is help people in life-and-death situations make better decisions.”

Ha, ha. Make the world a better place by utilizing drone chicanery against defenseless refugees. How heroic. Dorks.

A Kid Posts About Kubrick

“Why is Kubrick trending?” I wonder, and fall right into one of Twitter’s traps, despite having watched The Social Dilemma just two short days ago. I click, thinking maybe some undiscovered work has emerged or somebody has found yet another clever way to link Dr. Strangelove to current events. Instead I get this:

The Twitter takes were harsh and cutting. There are the jokes about Kubrick somehow not living up to his potential, there are the screen grabs that prove that most of Kubrick’s output was an outright criticism of toxic masculinity, there are screen grabs of other headlines by Mendelsohn that reveal, to put it kindly, immature tastes.

Which got me thinking, he must be young. I found his bio on ScreenRant and for sure he is new at this and developing his style there and at CBR.com, putting out a mix of serviceable listicles and criticism. He seems to be enjoying himself.

“Jon Mendelsohn is a graduate of Ithaca College with a degree in film. Currently a writer for both CBR and Screen Rant, Jon is also a filmmaker and lover of anything and everything pop culture. When not writing or binge-watching Netflix, Jon loves to travel and find all the hottest foodie spots.”

He’s just out of school. He’s making films, thinking about films, talking about films and writing about them. He’s also coming up in an age where living wages for writing is rare, where the internet demands quantity over quality and where the traditional and vital relationships between editors and young writers is hard to come by.

Put another way, how many editors saved me from my own piss-poor, just out of school takes? Mendelsohn is trying to make his way through the world with some productive grit and creativity. The temptation to earn internet clout by citing Kubrick’s “toxic masculinity” as his artistic Achilles’ heel may be intense.

At my feet sits a bin of notebooks, written mostly between 1997-2000. Some of those thoughts went into columns and reviews I wrote for Lies Magazine. I had column one devoted to politics and one to jazz and blues music. That I considered myself an authority on jazz and blues is now embarrassing to admit. Politics is for everybody, but jazz and blues? That takes deeper understanding and I didn’t have it then and don’t have it now. Really liking Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown is not enough.

I’m always tempted to look in those notebooks but I know there’s embarrassment on top of embarrassment in there. Fortunately, they’re at my feet and not online. Even the stuff I put online, for publications or my old blog, seem not to have survived outside of the Wayback Machine, if they’re even there.

Young writers and critics and artists today are really operating without a net. They can publish on impulse and so their impulses have to be perfect. Hopefully, the day that a young John Mendelsohn tried to get a dead Stanley Kubrick to get over his hang-ups and realize his potential won’t be long remembered. If it is, let’s remember it for the risks young writers, thinkers and artists face these days. Mendelsohn has plenty of time to realize his potential and I’m sure he will, if he’s encouraged with care.

Jaws!

Last night we saw Jaws at the Saco Drive-In, just outside of Portland. It’s a fun, kitschy movie that’s eerily prescient these days, as the Mayor of Amity grasps at every wish and hope to save his economy as a 25-foot Great White Shark has moved into local waters, intent on consuming swimmers.

It’s a well told story by now that keeping the mechanical shark operating was both difficult and expensive but that direct Stephen Spielberg turned this into an advantage — you don’t see much shark in the movie. The John Williams score does a lot of the work, or you see the shark pulling a dock off of its base when some village idiots try to catch it with a pot roast, or pulling barrels around the water when Quint, the professional shark hunter harpoons the beast. Restrained footage of the shark creates mystery and tension and saves the movie from looking hokey.

Jaws holds up well as a disaster/horror film and from the distance of a drive-in, the effects are just fine and even refreshing in an era where the shark would probably be CGI’d into a dinner scene on the boat, sitting in the chair with a top hat and smoking a cigarette.

Jaws at 45: Joe Alves designed Bruce the shark — and kept Jaws ...
I swear Quint said the sharks have dead black eyes, not these gray ones…

The one thing that really shows, though, is how few parts for women there are in the movie. Police Chief Brody has a wife, but her only job is to worry about him and their kids. Her curiosity about sharks and suddenly fearful reactions to what fierce predators they are serves the movie’s exposition. There’s one angry mother of a boy who the shark eats. She gets her moment.

Every other woman is background — girls in swimsuits screaming or nagging wives. This movie is about three guys who don’t much like each other at first taking a boat into the ocean to do battle with sharks. They also compare scars and sing drinking songs. I love how willing they are to get blind drunk while battling a dangerous, prehistoric predator.

Another thing I noticed is that Quint is clearly the prototype for big game hunter Roland Tembo in Jurassic Park. This makes sense not just because the two films share Spielberg as a director but because Michael Crichton and Peter Benchley were contemporaries as novelists, working in a thriller genre that borrowed heavily from both horror and science fiction.

I can’t believe the “looks like you’re going to need a bigger boat” line is actually repeated. But I guess you don’t know you’ve written an iconic line until you do. I can barely listen to the “Man goes into water, shark in the water, our shark…” bit because to me it’s the salsa shark routine from Clerks.

Was nice to see Roy Scheider at work. Though All That Jazz will always be his master performance in my book.

Everybody Missed the Point of “Apropos of Nothing”

Finally finished Woody Allen’s engrossing and hilarious memoir and have been reading the reviews along the way, as well. The press has focused on the issues between Woody and former lover Mia Farrow and yes, the last third of the book is about what it’s like to live falsely accused of a horrible crime. But that’s not what the book is about and it’s too bad that we now lack popular reviewers who can read more deeply.

Apropos of Nothing is the tale of Allen’s artistic success and his loves along the way, for sure. Woody’s taken uncanny heat in the press for describing attractive women as attractive women, particularly for his jokes and poetic license. He’s even breen criticized for enthusiastically participating in the free love decades, as if the right thing to have done would have been to abstained in preparation for pruder times. But even this is really not what the book is about.

The heart of the memoir is Woody’s description of his character Zelig, the human chameleon who takes on the beliefs, appearance and mannerisms of anybody he’s with:

Zelig was about how we all want to be accepted, to fit in, to not offend, that we often present a different person to different people knowing which person might best please. With someone who loves Moby Dick, for example, the protagonist will go along and find things to like and praise about it. With one who dislikes the book, the Zelig character will get with the program and dislike it. In the end, this obsession with conformity leads to fascism.”

Zelig, trying too hard to fit in…

This is a memoir about the virtues of self-direction, without deference to the opinions, desires and morals of others not because there’s anything wrong with other people or the way they think, but because it’s dangerous for society when individuals cave to what they perceive as the whims of others.

Allen’s movies have never been for everybody, and that’s intentional. He remarks in the book that he has no interest in collaborating with his audience on his films, so he’ll allow his backers to hold focus groups to inform their marketing but he won’t change his films based on some sample audience reaction. In an age where technocrats think they can quantify creative success, Allen’s story is a refreshing counterpoint.

In the end, his insistence on being himself is why he’s such a polarizing figure. Too few people are willing to do that in a world designed to reward those who merrily go along. This is the tale of a great iconoclast.

Publisher with History of Defying Censorship picks up Woody Allen’s Memoir

Arcade Publishing, the press that brought out Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing in a surprise drop today, has a venerable record of fighting censorship and prudery. Its founder, the late Richard Seaver, brought D.H. Lawrence’s suppressed novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover to the public in the 1950s.

Suppressed book finds a home!

From the 2009 New York Times obituary:

“Richard Seaver, an editor, translator and publisher who defied censorship, societal prudishness and conventional literary standards to bring works by rabble-rousing authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade to American readers, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.”

As editor in chief of Grove, he also published The Story of O as well as work by William Burroughs, Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade. Arcade, the publisher he founded and grew into one of the most important independent publishers in the U.S. has an impressive backlist that includes the memoir of director Ingmar Bergman, for which Allen provided an introduction.

How appropriate that this daring publisher has stepped up to douse the flames of 2020’s virtual book burning.

Apropos of Nothing

Last spring, The New York Times published “Woody Allen Pitched a Memoir. Publishers Weren’t Interested.” The idea here is that Woody had been effectively cancelled and this came on the heels of Amazon censoring his very fun film A Rainy Day in New York (I saw it in Amsterdam last fall). Allen warned that the Times had the story wrong. Publishers were interested, he said. Well, it turns out that Grand Central Publishing bought the rights to it two months before the Times story ran.

In bookstores April 7, 2020!

Hopefully, this means that American culture is ready to re-embrace one of its best and most prolific artists. It also hopefully means that A Rainy Day in New York will be released in the U.S. soon and that the upcoming Rifkin’s Festival will also be available to Woody’s fans.

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