The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Less interesting: the villain’s genesis; the villain’s madness; the villain’s cackling; his plans, explosions, momentary triumph, eventual defeat. The special effects are utter and seamless plastic, and go lengths to prove things we don’t need or even want proven. As the critic A. O. Scott has written, the impulse to knit together improbable, breakneck, still-photographic comic-book panels into a flow of smoothly animated movement is a self-defeating one. The real evocation and mystery inherent in the comic form is found in the white lines of border between panels, where the imagination of the reader is energized and engaged. Comic books are all stills and jump cuts. I don’t know whether this effect can ever be claimed for film, but I perversely hope not. I was happy that in this moment of digital apotheosis, with anything possible, what those kids and I wanted and got was a good movie kiss.

  It all worked. Records were broken. Those are always counted in dollars, but I wonder: Did more human souls just see the same film in three days than ever before in history? I guess there’s no way to measure because there’s no way to correct for repeat viewers. Still, whatever exactly happened in America May 3–5, they’ll want it to happen again. In the theater, preceding the movie, while I was still considering being annoyed by the garrulous child behind me, before I’d given in to the stream of commentary, we watched a trailer for the unfinished filmization of The Incredible Hulk. All they had yet was a short sequence showing the actor’s transformation from normal man to gigantic green monster, his rapid destruction of a house, then a simple card which read “Hulk. Summer 2003.” It was awesome. The parent of the child behind me snorted at seeing that the film was more than a year from release: “Summer 2003? Oh, please.” It might be hard to be a parent these days. Remember, we were at the eleven o’clock Friday-morning showing. The child, though, was typically unguarded: “I think I’m a little scared of that.” The parent replied sourly: “You’ll have plenty of time to prepare yourself.”

  —London Review of Books, 2002

  Everything Is Broken (Art of Darkness)

  “Broken pipes, broken tools / People bending broken rules …” These words come from “Everything Is Broken,” a 1989 Bob Dylan song. The lines happen to be set to a Ventures-style guitar riff familiar from the ’60s Batman television show starring Adam West, my own personal ur-Batman, cheesy and harmless though he may be. By necessity I thought of Dylan’s song when, last night, I marked a return to my own Gotham City—Brooklyn, domesticated and oversold as it may be—by perversely commemorating September 11 by finally seeing The Dark Knight, now nestling into place between Titanic and Star Wars as the second most popular film of all time. (We’ll agree to set aside nonmonetary definitions of “popular.”) This was after a long summer spent in the distant countryside, laboring in the salt mine of a novel in progress, far from multiplexes, and also beyond reach of a reliable wireless signal. That’s to say I’d been deaf to tabloid and blog reality, had instead been gleaning the culture merely through the tinny earpiece of a daily paper (this one) that on this particular Maine peninsula is delivered by truck to local grocery stores, usually by eleven o’clock. Most days I remembered to pick up a copy.

  When I parted ways with the wider data stream in early June, Bill Clinton was still a red-faced bully, “Palin” the name of my favorite member of the Monty Python ensemble, and The Dark Knight a would-be summer popcorn hit made awkward in advance by the tragic death of a young actor. I don’t mean to play dumb: Before I switched off my sonar Heath Ledger’s extraordinary physical projection into nihilistic madness as Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, was already widely and disturbingly in evidence in the culture in the form of stills and YouTube clips, a premonition of something—but of what? Three months later, The Dark Knight having been ratified as the movie we all desperately needed to see, we ought to understand.

  Last night, coming home from the movies, I didn’t. It couldn’t have helped that I switched on MSNBC to find my nightly Alaskan Wildlife Atrocities coverage preempted by vintage 2001 news footage of the destruction of the World Trade Center, accompanied only by the original newscasters, caught revising their disbelief in real time. In my confusion I scurried for the shelter of Google. There I found affirmed what a certain yellow-shading-to-orange-alert panic I’d experienced in my multiplex seat had led me to fear, but I hadn’t articulated for myself: The Dark Knight, with its taciturn and self-pitying vigilante, its scenes of rendition and torture, its elaborately leveraged choices between principles and human lives, might offer a defense of the present administration’s cursory regard for human rights abroad and civil rights at home, in the cause of reply to attacks from an irrational and inhuman evil. Poor Batman, forced again and again to violate the ethics that define him, to destroy the world to save it.

  A fellow novelist, Andrew Klavan, celebrated this interpretation in the Wall Street Journal: “… a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror …” Trace the Bat signal’s outline with your finger and “it looks kind of like a ‘W.’ ” Is it so?

  In the words of critic Dave Kehr, “I’m not sure that it matters whether or not The Dark Knight espouses conservative values … it certainly expresses them … ideology creeps in on little cat feet, whether you want it to or not.” I’d add that a popular myth or symbol as resilient, open-ended, and also somehow opaque as Batman has a tendency to collect and recapitulate meaning beyond a creator’s accounting. Yet Klavan’s confident partisan interpretation seemed to grant this film too little and too much at once. Perhaps I’m prone to bear down on The Dark Knight as the tea leaves in the dregs of a political summer’s cup, but I couldn’t shake the sense that a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real “takeaway,” chaotic form its ultimate content.

  Everyone agrees that Ledger’s Joker steals the show, but really, what’s there to steal? The film was the Joker’s to begin with. Scene after scene presents a sensual essay in taking good-guy torture and a crumbling social and economic infrastructure equally for granted. No one in this Gotham can remember a time before corruption, and the movie declines to hint at a way out, only noting that our hero’s bitterness was predetermined by his failure—or was it the reverse?

  Like the fogy I’ve become I felt brutalized as I watched, but after the tide of contradictions had receded I wasn’t stirred to any feeling richer than an exhausted shrug, as when confronted by headlines reminding me that we no longer have a crane collapse or bank failure, we have the latest crane collapse, the latest bank failure. In its narrative gaps, its false depths leading nowhere in particular, its bogus grief over stakeless destruction and faked death, The Dark Knight echoes a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction, and cultivated grievance. This Batman wears his mask because he fears he’s a fake—and the story of his inauthenticity, the possibility of his unmasking, is more enlivening than any hope he might deliver. The Joker, on the other hand, exhibits his real face, his only face, and his origins are irrelevant, his presence as much a given as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or Fear Itself.

  If like me you’d hoped, distantly, vaguely, probably idiotically, that the 2008 presidential contest might be a referendum on truths documented since the previous presidential election, guess again. That our invasion of Iraq was founded on opportunistic lies, that it was hungered for by its planners in advance of the enabling excuse of 9/11, is a well-delineated blot on American history. It is also one that, nonetheless, apparently cannot afford to be described within hearing of its irrational deniers (a majority of Republican voters still believe, or believe again, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the World Trade Center attack). Never mind that Barack Obama’s having stood for this truth defined, once upon a time, his distance from his rivals for the Democratic nomination. He may have been free to do so only because he wasn’t yet in national office. For those of us interested in a conversation about accountability it was always declared to be too soon—we remained unsure of the evidence, or to
o traumatized to risk fraying the national morale—until the moment when it was abruptly too late, when it became old news.

  Yet I suspect it is still the news. While both teams are running on the premise that Washington Is Broken, I’m disinclined to disagree, only to add: Our good faith with ourselves is broken, too, a cost of silencing or at best mumbling the most crucial truths. Among these, preeminently, the fact that torture evaporates our every rational claim to justice and will likely be the signature national crime of our generation—a matter in which we are, by the very definition of democracy, complicit. (I wonder if some unconsciously hope that electing a man who was himself tortured will provide moral cover, just as the trauma of Batman losing his parents to violent crime forever renews his revenger’s passport.) No wonder we crave an entertainment like The Dark Knight, where every topic we’re unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear, and, finally, absolving confusion.

  It may be possible to see the nightly news in a similar light, where any risk of uncovering the vulnerable yearnings, all the tenderness aroused by the seemingly needless death of a promising young actor or a brilliant colleague, all hope of a conversation between the paranoid Blues and the paranoid Reds, all that might bind us together is forever armored in a gleeful and cynical cartoon of spin and disinformation. Key words—change—are repeated until adapted out of meaning into self-canceling glyphs. Meanwhile, pigs break into the lipstick store, and we go hollering down the street after them, relieving ourselves of another hour or day or week of clear thought.

  Beneath the sniping over symbols no more material to our daily selves than Danish cartoons to an Iranian’s, I suppose any of us can think of a few things that lie in ruins: a corporate paradigm displaying no shred of responsibility to anyone but shareholders, yet seemingly impervious to question; a military leadership’s implicit promise to its recruits and their families; a public commons commodified into channels that feed any given preacher’s resentments to a self-selecting chorus. If everything is broken perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way. Unlike some others, I have no theory who Batman is—but the Joker is us.

  —The New York Times, Op-Ed, 2008

  Godfather IV

  For my money, if there is to be a Godfather IV the series should abandon any notion of sequel or prequel, forsake any impulse toward the epic or the broad-canvas pageant of history. Instead, the Godfather series should plunge back into what we all secretly crave and fetishize: the iconography of the original film, those sequences and set pieces which have become, in thirty-seven short years, almost biblical in their mythological resonance and allegorical power. Depict scenes from Luca Brasi’s childhood, showing how he became the character doomed to be garroted in an empty bar. Show us a Korean War scene—just how did Michael earn his medals? Give us Fredo’s life in Vegas. Film the prehistory of John Marley’s Hollywood studio head; show his acquisition of his prized racehorse; better yet, let us see the approach of the Godfather’s ninjalike emissaries from the horse’s point of view. Please, please let us know Sterling Hayden’s corrupt Captain McCluskey in his off-hours, meet his wife and kids, show him entering the restaurant and using the very same toilet behind which is taped the pistol that will murder him. The cannoli—when and by whom were they eaten? Who baked the cannoli?

  —GQ, 2008

  Great Death Scene (McCabe & Mrs. Miller)

  I’m walking down the street with a screenwriter friend when we duck into Video Free Brooklyn to rent Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. “Great death scene!” my friend exclaims. I instantly agree, but it turns out we mean two different things. He’s thinking of McCabe—Warren Beatty, that is—succumbing from his bullet wounds after going to ground in a snowstorm, then enveloped by swirling flakes and the elegiac tones of Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song.” Yes, this is one of the Western’s great death scenes. It completes one of the slowest and most heartrending descents in all cinema, the shattering of McCabe’s dreams having come to stand for a farewell to both the Western tradition (which was practically always saying farewell from its beginning, anyway) and to the sublimely fragile idealisms of the glamorous hippies both Beatty and McCabe really were beneath gruff Western garb.

  The death I had in mind comes in the middle of the film. Keith Carradine plays a gooberish cowboy who trots into town because he’s heard of McCabe’s fabulous whorehouse. An angel of innocent lust (“Who wants to be next?” he asks the prostitutes, and when one says, “Which one of us do you fancy?,” he replies, “Aw hell, don’t make no difference, I’m gonna have you all!”), the man-boy endears himself to all and then is gunned down, in an act of horrifically whimsical sadism, while trying to buy himself a pair of dry socks for the journey home. Killed on a wobbling rope bridge across a frozen river, the lanky Carradine plunges through the ice and drifts in place, while Altman’s wide framing pitilessly stares, letting the viewer fill in every bit of the emotion.

  The Western is a genre wealthy with death scenes, but the most characteristic are in close-up, and often quite talky, featuring last cigarettes and stoical words of forgiveness. I’m thinking of Charles Winninger in Destry Rides Again, Burt Lancaster in Ulzana’s Raid, Robert Duvall in Geronimo, and above all, Joel McCrea in Ride the High Country. Altman handles his deaths differently. Nobody gets last words or smokes. The camera zooms in or out of wide shots emphasizing the victim’s surrender to an indifferent natural environment, withholding any hope of an ascent into legend (these guys’ last names aren’t Holliday or James). McCabe is one of the most painterly films ever shot by an American director, and these deaths evoke Breughel’s Icarus, plummeting mutely into a chilly sea. Any talk was gotten out of the way long before, practically before the film begins. (Which is good, given that you can only make out about a third of this film’s dialogue, unless you hit Rewind a lot.) In a sense, my friend and I don’t disagree even slightly: The entirety of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a “great death scene.”

  —The New York Times Magazine, 2007

  Kovacs’s Gift

  A warning: There’s a mystery at the heart of this inquiry, one we won’t really be able to penetrate here, instead only hope to define, the better to abide with it. The mystery I have in mind isn’t what I like to call the Bob Hope/Lenny Bruce Perplex, though it does apply to Ernie Kovacs; i.e., why need we be given so many (predictable) life-decades of the one, such scant (mercurial) years of the other? Why couldn’t a few years, heck, even months, have been shifted from one to the other? For me Kovacs goes with Nathanael West and Buddy Holly in the Greatest Potential Unrealized column. (Cars and airplanes have a lot to answer for.) But the Hope/Bruce thing is merely a fannish way of complaining about death, which isn’t really a mystery at all, though our fear wants to call it one. Faced with someone as alive and yet as dead as Ernie Kovacs is (both more alive and more dead than ourselves, that is), we living are stuck with our fear.

  Anyway, cataloging Potential Unrealized—a mug’s game, in truth—shouldn’t stand in the way of lavishing appreciation for the thing that was given, of scrupulously cherishing said gift, of raising its provider onto a pedestal commensurate with the pleasure and wonder we’ve drawn from said gift, and also of archiving the evidence left behind, securing it in libraries and museums, and in the annals of culture. Only in Kovacs’s case we’ve failed utterly. How many recent geniuses—not arcane, hermetic geniuses ensconced in high modernist castle or tower, I mean, but accessible, relevant, capricious, joyous, salt-of-the-earth, explosively generous, and even silly geniuses (are there any others who’d even rate all those adjectives besides Kovacs?)—how many are so totally erased from their right place in cultural memory? In Ernie Kovacs’s case, literally erased. Taped over, for crissakes.

  This goes beyond any artist’s worst fears of being out of print, or of receding in mists of antiquity, or even of being a victim of the chemical time bomb of nitrate prints that have devoured century-old silent films; this is more rece
nt and irresponsible and incredible even than that. They taped over his work, the fuckers. Here’s Ernie Kovacs, the bridging figure, at the very least, between Groucho Marx and David Letterman; the immediate and proximate father, at the very least, of both Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Nam June Paik; the uncle, at the very least, of Laugh-In and The Tonight Show and a thousand lesser television moments; the permissive next-door neighbor, at the very least, of Donald Barthelme and Frank Zappa. A man whose great work was accomplished in the ’50s and ’60s and whose widow and collaborator was alive until two years ago as of this writing is, rather than a household name, a rumor, a subliminal notion, if not strictly even a secret to which you and I have, to this point, alone been privy.

  Eh? What’s that I hear you say? Who’s Ernie Kovacs?

  Young person, I’m deeply disappointed in you. I thought we were together in this. And no, I’m not going to explain, let alone sell, Ernie Kovacs to you. No, with what time remains to me here I’ll pretend I didn’t even hear that terrible question you asked, and instead go on and degenerate into a personal accounting of a few of the peculiar things I love about Kovacs and how they came to me, and then I’ll try to recollect my purpose in trying to define that mystery I mentioned to begin with.