The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  1. Ernie Kovacs was, along with the Beatles and the Monkees, Alfred Hitchcock and Mel Brooks, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, one of the ten or so cultural things I most plainly recall my mother deliberately introducing to me. I can know, thanks to outside sources, the exact circumstances of her opportunity (in a world before the universal jukebox of the Internet): PBS, Channel Thirteen, which showed a sequence of the Kovacs “Specials” in 1977. She simply sat me down in front of our family’s television (in which everything, up to and including The Wizard of Oz, was broadcast in the same black and white as the Kovacs shows). She didn’t need to do more than that. All of the Beatles and Monkees, Brooks, Bradbury, Asimov, and Hitchcock were at that time alive, so Kovacs was my introduction to dying too young. Since my mother was about to do that herself, it’s probably not surprising how personal this feels to me.

  2. The Nairobi Trio is (and I’ve conducted tests on my own children, trust me) one of only two things in the entire universe with the power to wildly delight any human being from age two to the most sophisticated (i.e., sullen, punk, tripping on drugs) teenager to adults of any age, and not only do so on first contact but repeated to infinity. I’m certain this effect would pertain across any imaginable cultural or linguistic boundary, and I’d even be willing to bet that there are certain animal species (guess) who’d likely be entertained by the trio. (The sole other thing containing this vast power being a Buster Keaton gag in a short called The Scarecrow, involving a dog chasing Keaton along the top walls of a roofless structure. One of the last things Kovacs filmed was a pilot for a television show called Medicine Man, featuring himself and Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton, along with Jack Benny, Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Stewart, and many others, attended Kovacs’s funeral.) The Nairobi Trio is three monkeys (who doesn’t like monkeys?) playing instruments (who doesn’t like monkeys playing instruments?) and bonking one another on the head (who doesn’t like monkeys playing instruments and bonking one another on the head?). But these monkeys, really men in monkey suits (one long rumored to be Jack Lemmon) and dressed in heavy overcoats, are also, in an uncanny conflation, wind-up figures in some infernal device. That’s to say, at a level we register semiconsciously, the Nairobi Trio are emblems of eternity, doomed to their slow-burn enactment until the solar system implodes.

  3. Poets, a fierce and suspicious lot, don’t like being made fun of. Yet every poet I know adores Percy Dovetonsils, Kovacs’s affectionately devastating charade of a cocktail-sipping, loopily lisping connoisseur of doltish rhyme. One poet I know signs his correspondence Percy Dovetonsils.

  4. The offhand danger contained in Kovacs’s work is that once his sensibility has colonized a certain cultural matter it stands no chance of ever being retrieved for serious purpose. I have had to take it on faith my whole life that the song “Mack the Knife” conveys some sultry essence of decadence or menace; for me, thanks to Kovacs’s use of it as complement to an endless series of sight gags (which are in turn exalted into a weird aura of decadence or menace by the song), it is only like having my arms held behind my back while I am tickled. Swan Lake was always done in gorilla outfits, no? Who could ever read Camille now without hearing a cough? When I first learned that an important art-film cinematographer was named László Kovács, I had trouble believing I wasn’t being kidded, that László whoever-he-was hadn’t picked the surname sheerly as a joke.

  5. Not unrelated, Ernie Kovacs wrote for Mad magazine. Of course he did.

  6. Ernie Kovacs wrote a novel, he claims, in thirteen days. The subject was the New York television rat race; he turned it in just before moving to Los Angeles, and when his publisher asked when he’d do the copyedits, he quipped, “On the first rainy day.” In fact, it was a sudden Los Angeles rain that likely caused Kovacs to crash his car the night he died. Either that, or he was trying to light his cigar while driving in the rain.

  Enough of my morbid and sentimental list, which could go on forever. Here’s the mystery I offered to frame: Putting aside how Kovacs makes you laugh (and it should be said that much of his work is too conceptual and deliberate and even awkward to be smoothly seductive to the viewer’s hilarity; it often presents itself as humorous while actually being only interesting and uncomfortably odd), his great claim, his indisputable achievement, is as an excavator of a new medium’s possibilities. Kovacs is to videotaped television what D. W. Griffith and Orson Welles are to narrative in projected celluloid, what McCartney/Lennon and George Martin are to eight-track tape-recording in pop music, what Hank Shocklee is to digital sampling in hip-hop: one of those artists whose personal expressivity takes the form of a series of astonishing and playful demonstrations of what a medium’s potential—and true nature—might be. If we take this as a given, and I think it’s impossible not to, on the evidence, then the mystery is how an artist defined by his place within a medium rightly characterized by Marshall McLuhan as “cool,” and whose explorations seem in so many ways to prove McLuhan exactly right, moving as they do in the direction of postmodern fragmentation, of parody, of repetition, of irony, of disruption of convention without convention’s replacement by new frameworks, instead by an increasingly rapid series of subsequent disruptions; if we further agree that most of Kovacs’s avowed inheritors—from Laugh-In and Monty Python, to video art, to Carson and Letterman, and beyond—are unquestionably “cool” in temperature (elusive, ironical, uncommitted), the mystery is this: How is it that Kovacs, our human guide into this cool world, is himself such an almost unbearable figure of warmth? You feel you know this guy from somewhere else, and that you’d like to be inside the television with him, that’s what’s odd. Watching, you feel his anger, his ambition, his joy, his nearly violent curiosity, his impatience, his terror of screwing up all are worn right on the outermost surface of his being. Even self-amusement, usually the iciest part of a comic’s persona, and therefore either carefully hidden or brandished as a fuck-you (think Groucho and Letterman again), in Kovacs is an element drawing you nearer. There are a few moments on these tapes when he breaks down and laughs for a while at something invisible to the viewer either because it lies outside the frame or because it hides somewhere inside his head, and you kind of want them to go on forever. That’s it, the whole mystery I want to outline and that I don’t purport to solve: how it can be that Ernie Kovacs generates such an astounding degree of love in the viewer, that you’d almost rather see him laugh than laugh yourself.

  —Playboy, 2011

  Marlon Brando Breaks

  We know now what we could only have suspected: By the time Rolling Stone writer Chris Hodenfield and photographer Mary Ellen Mark cornered Marlon Brando on the Montana set of Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks it was basically over, not only for Brando as a beauty and a star but, largely, as an actor; not only for Brando in all those senses but also for the world he’d known and made; over, perhaps even for us, before we’d even begun. The year of the film’s release, 1976, marked a fair horizon line for the sunset of so many radical possibilities: the end of a wide-open era of American filmmaking Brando personally catalyzed by his performances in the ’50s and crowned in Coppola’s Godfather; the end of a species of genuine risk in performance—risk of failure, that is—a species unknown to Brando’s smug and calculating Missouri Breaks costar Jack Nicholson, who’d prove so willing to compromise with Hollywood’s every shift from art to commerce; the winnowing and commodification of a vibrant alternative culture of pop and drug-based revelation; the chance that the Democratic Party could throw up anything but feeble moderation to the surging reactionary tide that has carried us to where we now live, a world in which Brando’s beloved Black Panthers and American Indian Movement can only be recalled as quaint precursors to really important terrorism.

  “He had this rule,” recalls Mary Ellen Mark today. “You had to ask him first: Mr. Brando, may I take your picture? I was there for ten days and of course I didn’t get anything. I said, So Marlon, I’m leaving, I don’t think I got anything. He said, Well, you can ph
otograph me now. I did it all at the end. I got about four frames. Maybe ten exposures.” She adds: “That’s fine, I’m a purist. Less is more. He liked it, and asked me to work on Apocalypse Now.”

  Brando looked chunky. Brando looked crazy. And when given full voice by Hodenfield’s generous profile, Brando sounded heretical, paranoid, visionary, distracted, and alternately cynical and reverent about his craft, which he’d practiced not at all in the years since the polar-opposite triumphs of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. So this was a Marlon Brando come out of the wilderness, beamed in from Tahiti, specifically, the world’s greatest actor condescending not only to be interviewed but to be sighted at large on planet Earth in the first place.

  As Hodenfield portrays the scene, Brando was treated with dazed awe by the professionals on the set, normally so irreverent and hard to impress. The crew waited out his enigmatic silences, wrote lines on cue cards to indulge his growing resistance to memorization, and turned a blind eye when the FBI, seeking to pin Brando to a whole series of outlaw political affiliations, arrived to interrogate the actor in his trailer. In Breaks Brando plays a mercurial Western serial killer, one using his role as a bounty hunter as an excuse for his nihilistic undermining of the frontier’s tenuous social fabric. The part seems an ideal container for Brando’s muddle of motives for even bothering to make a film at that point in his life. He delivers with Shakespearean gusto, in a wild variety of accents, like Norman Mailer running for mayor.

  Yet Missouri Breaks is broken. The film is unable to sustain the performance and its insinuations, leaning instead to convention: Nicholson dispatches Monster Brando and gets the girl. The real showdown between the two occurs in the middle of the film, when Brando, unarmed and undressed, wreathed in a bubble bath and facing the point of Nicholson’s gun, utterly dominates the younger actor simply by turning his appallingly fleshy back and rolling his eyes to the ceiling, daring Nicholson’s character to shoot him in the back (or perhaps to reproduce the notorious butter scene). Nicholson, understandably, quits the stage in disgust.

  What’s shocking in the moment is Brando’s complicity with the collapse of his masculine energies, and of all they imply for the viewer’s self-image. Nicholson’s reaction prefigures the audience’s revulsion at the remainder of Brando’s public career: revulsion for his gargantuan bulk and ugliness—the ruins of the prettiest man anyone had ever seen—and for his seeming failure to care about his art. Brando must have intuited how untenable he was as “a man of the people,” as an advocate for Native Americans or a surrogate for you and me. Instead he’d become a monster and a saint, beyond the human ken. All that remained was Apocalypse Now, one more ludicrous embodiment of an inhuman villainy, and signature on his accomplishment. In his villainous roles of the ’70s Brando planted a tombstone on the grave of individualist American manhood, where lay the rebels and martyrs of The Wild One, The Fugitive Kind, and On the Waterfront. The Brando of Missouri Breaks is a hired killer, ready to destroy more than anyone had ever asked him to. Including Marlon Brando.

  —Rolling Stone, 2006

  Missed Opportunities

  Did you know that Jerry Lewis turned down the role of the killer in Cruising, the lead in Being There, and the title role in Charly? What’s more, he turned down the Robert Shaw part in Jaws, and the role of Salieri in Amadeus. Also Peter Ustinov’s part in Logan’s Run. Can you imagine him as Humbert Humbert? Apparently he couldn’t. And we will never have the privilege of knowing how he would have handled Portnoy’s Complaint—he turned down a chance to star in and direct that film. He was also screen-tested for the Sterling Hayden role in The Godfather and the John Hurt role in Alien, though it is unclear whether he was actually offered these parts or not. How different might be the history of American film in the ’70s had he actually taken the roles of the wiretapper in The Conversation, Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, or Lex Luthor in Superman—though I suppose we can be grateful to him, in a sense, for the opportunities given Gene Hackman, who certainly did not disappoint in these parts. Nor is it likely he could have improved on Jason Robards’s portrayal of Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men, or on Rip Torn’s performance in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Perhaps most frustrating for the film buff is the knowledge that Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, died before realizing his hope of casting Lewis in a thriller. Lewis had previously turned down the Martin Balsam part in Psycho and the Sean Connery part in Marnie. Equally tantalizing is the large Lewis role trimmed out of Nashville during last-minute edits—in interviews Lewis claims it as his masterwork. Robert Altman attempted to make it up to him, but an embittered Lewis turned down parts in Altman’s next seven films. He also turned down the parts that went to Walter Matthau in both Charley Varrick and King Creole, thus missing his chance to work with veteran director Don Siegel (as well as to appear opposite Elvis Presley). He also turned down the John Lithgow part in Blow Out and the part that was reworked for Richard Pryor in Blue Collar. He refused the part Jack Lemmon played in The China Syndrome, though it was later pointed out that the role was developed for Lemmon and Lewis was never offered it. He also refused the role of the off-screen voice of Charlie in the hit television series Charlie’s Angels, a role taken by John Forsythe, later of Dynasty. Unquestionably, Excalibur would have been a different film completely had Lewis not dropped out during the first week of shooting to be replaced by Nicol Williamson as Merlin. He also turned down the role of the arsonist in Body Heat.

  Strangely, Jerry Lewis was never considered for any part by Michael Cimino.

  —McSweeney’s, 1999

  Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks

  or

  Sex in Movies for People Who Have Sex

  “—Donald Sutherland’s buttocks—” Those were the words that drew my attention from the other side of the table. My wife’s friend Pauline was speaking them to my wife. What struck me most wasn’t the odd specificity of the reference, nor the muddled thrill of jealousy and delight that lurches through my heart as it does anytime I gather that someone is talking of something sexual with my wife (and which ensures the instant obliteration of my attention to any topic I might have been discussing at my end of the table). What struck me then, and what strikes me now, is that I knew what Pauline was talking about, instantly. And so I leaned across and said, “Don’t Look Now.”

  No one who has ever seen it has forgotten the sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The scene is characterized by a tension between Roeg’s cool, artily distancing camera and the (apparent) commitment to total disclosure on the part of the unclothed actors, which has led to the legend that what was filmed was something more than a performance. The borderline-explicit sex is edited, too, in a disconcerting series of cuts, with flash-forwards to the couple dressing to go out afterward. This deepens the meaning of the sex scene, adds a note of pensiveness, even sadness. The rest of the film—a supernatural melodrama both tragic and terrifying—seems to tug at the edges of that single scene, making the sex appear in retrospect more poignant and precious. Their beautiful, disturbing, uncannily real fucking will turn out to be the only moment of reprieve for the two characters, the only moment of absolute connection. Even the film’s title comes to seem a reference to the intensity of the sex scene. The result is like a brand sizzling into the viewer’s sexual imagination. We feel we’ve learned something about sex, even as we’re certain it required every bit of our own previous knowledge of sex to be in a position to receive and confirm the scene’s knowingness, its completely nonverbal epiphanies. And so when I heard Pauline say “Donald Sutherland’s buttocks,” I felt with a shudder my memory of this scene instantly recover itself, and I was touched and frightened and turned on again. And I wanted to take my wife away from Pauline and the others and show her the scene, because unlike nearly any other scene of sex I’d ever watched, this one was like a piece of my own sexual past.

  This, to put it bluntly, is what I want. Not Donald S
utherland’s buttocks in and of themselves but films that install themselves this way in my sexual imagination, by making me feel that sex is a part of life, a real and prosaic and reproducible fact in the lives of the characters, as it is in my own life, and at the same time makes me feel that sex is an intoxicant, a passage to elsewhere, a jolt of the extraordinary which stands entirely outside the majority of the experiences of the characters, as it stands in relation to my own experience. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I want the paradox. I want it all.

  Where and how this can come to happen in cinema’s future is beyond my expertise—it occurs rarely enough in cinema’s past and present that I suspect it is beyond anyone’s expertise, that it instead must be discovered, perhaps even scared up sideways, in the midst of operations in pursuit of other truths. (Certainly Don’t Look Now wasn’t conceived, or received, as a “sex film”—and I’ve recently learned that the famous scene was in fact an afterthought, shot after the script was exhausted but the director unsatisfied.) I didn’t meet even a hint of it in Closer or Y Tu Mamá También or Henry & June or We Don’t Live Here Anymore, but I did in the Israeli director Dover Koshashvili’s Late Marriage, a slice-of-life drama both farcical and realistic. In Late Marriage, when the mama’s-boy protagonist calls on his secret girlfriend, an older woman, the two unexpectedly devour each other in a long explicit scene that pinballs from annoyance to arousal to boredom and back to arousal, with a pause in the middle to sniff a used tissue for traces of bodily fluids—precisely the sort of Donald Sutherland’s buttocks moment that makes a sex scene ineffable and lasting, a revelation. I met it for an instant in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, in the expression that crosses Barbara Stanwyck’s face, so giddy it almost feels like an actor’s lapse out of character, as she says to Henry Fonda, “Why, Hopsie … You ought to be kept in a cage!” (Oh, yes, I meet it often when I watch Barbara Stanwyck, and I wonder where our Barbara Stanwyck is hiding … might it be Maggie Gyllenhaal? On the strength of Secretary it seems possible … but then why aren’t today’s filmmakers making dozens of Maggie Gyllenhaal vehicles … what’s their problem?) I met it, unexpectedly, in Miranda July’s ensemble comedy Me and You and Everyone We Know, where several child characters are portrayed with their sexual curiosities not only intact but capable of setting up genuine erotic reverberations in the adults, with results that are not only disturbing and funny but also disconcertingly honest. (This is a matter that American films have been too fearful to take up, despite Hollywood’s compulsive trafficking in child sexuality as an unacknowledged source of revenue, and as a source of energy in otherwise lifeless product.) I met it in Ralph Bakshi’s pornographic animated films, a couple of times—most of all in the crude sequence of sex in a moving jalopy, set to Chuck Berry’s frantic and bawdy “Maybellene.” The scene somehow manages to convey a moment of sexual self-discovery in the autobiographical cartoonist character who is drawing the images, ratifying his own lust by satirizing it. I met it, of course, in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, when Catherine Deneuve, playing a wealthy housewife slumming as a prostitute, dares herself to look into the mysterious buzzing box presented to her by the enigmatic Asian whorehouse customer. What she sees there intrigues her, and her curiosity pleases the Asian gentleman. We cut to a scene afterward, where both have been gratified by whatever it was that occupied the strange, buzzing box—we never get to see inside it ourselves. Am I calling for a return to reticence, to mystery? No. I’m calling for what I don’t know to be calling for, I’m calling for surprise, for complicity delivered in an instant, I’m calling for filmic moments that lure and confuse me the way sex can, at its best. I don’t want to choose between scrupulous, grainy, documentary realism (or the new and unsavory high-definition nudity I’ve been warned about) and fantasy, imagination, exaggeration, cartoons—I want them both. Give me prosthetics, like Marky Mark’s penis extension in Boogie Nights—give me even more like that, give me a whole cinema of actors in fake bodies, like Cindy Sherman’s prosthetic pimply butts and swollen breasts in her still photographs. Give me the sex lives of animated characters, and of rotoscoped actors, like the ones in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly—a perfect solution to marrying glamorous and recognizable actors to explicit bodies without disturbing us or the actors by disclosing the actual bodies of actors, a perfect way to keep from rupturing the dream. Give me real bodies, too, of actors I haven’t met yet, in scenarios which are stubbornly unpornlike and only half erotic, like Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs. Let me see what happens if Michael Winterbottom has to show his bottom, and Eliot Winterpenis his penis, and Carla Summertits her tits, and Lucius Springtesticles his testicles, and Delia Solsticeclitoris her clitoris, and so on. And, for that matter, Donald Sutherland is still among the living: Let’s see how his buttocks are holding up. C’mon, show me something the mention of which will make my head turn at a dinner party thirty years from now. Try and make me blink. Try and make me keep from blinking.