More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  However much sweat went into these essays, the results pleasingly mimic those adrenaline conversation one overhears or engages in coming out of a revival house after a showing of this or that auteurist masterwork or cult gem—that rush of speech after the long silence of a meal at Hollywood’s cornucopian table. Like a lot of good conversation it offers a form of healing from everyday wounds: first, and most obviously, for the “neglected” performers given their due here after careers in the “shadows.” (There are probably millions of us who prefer Warren Oates and Thelma Ritter to anything else in the films in which they appear, yet they retain their magical function as tokens of obscurity, so that it’s thrilling to see them enshrined here.)

  Healing in a more profound sense is proposed by Stuart Klawans’s terrific “Shined Shoes,” a meditation on LeRoy Daniels, the dancing bootblack who performs a brief number with Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon (1953). Klawan’s detective work reveals that Daniels was a real dancing bootblack, scooped off the streets of L.A. and never to appear in film again. Klawans then widens his frame ever so slightly, recalling the homeless man with a paper cup who functions as a de facto doorman for his apartment building, and the world—our real world—floods in. The book also provides the same rush as David Thomson’s Suspects, Marcus’s “Real Life Top Ten” column, and certain homespun Internet fan sites (find Ray Davis’s Tuesday Weld homepage for a particularly fine example) can, by vigorously and cheerfully exploding our mute acceptance of pop culture’s ideas about what parts of itself are lasting or important, by continuously swapping spit and other bodily fluids with the gods.

  Sante and Pierson include a handful of reprints to round out the commissioned essays. To my eye these provide the only speedbumps. John Updike’s 1983 paean to Doris Day remains too much the review of Day’s autobiography it presumably was, and its highbrow defensiveness is dated—the rest of these writers take for granted the cinematic ocean in which we swim. Manny Farber’s “The Decline of the Actor” (1971) is an odder case. Farber’s a descriptive genius (“Sinatra’s romantic scenes with Miss Leigh are a Chinese torture: he, pinned against the Pullman door as though having been buried standing up, and she, nothing moving on her body, drilling holes with her eyes into his screw-on head”) and hugely deserves revival. But his thesis here—that overloaded visual frames and over-conceived shot designs have calcified individual performances—is nicely contradicted in the discussions of Oates and Walsh, as well as by the steady arrival of new performers like Steve Buscemi and Janeane Garofalo, who seem capable of doodling in the margins of even the most hypertrophied spectacles.

  I suspect that Updike and Farber are included here as legitimizing paternal figures, precedents to show how these particular million flowers were seeded. This display of bona fides isn’t necessary, but then it isn’t necessary that this be a tidy book. It isn’t telling a tidy story, and personally I’m grateful for its breadth. As I said, I’d love to see O.K. You Mugs turn into an open-ended series. And listen, Luc and Melissa: after you’ve enjoyed my take on Robert Ryan I’m sure you’ll be eager to know what I think of Agnes Moorehead and Val Avery and Lily Tomlin and…

  —Bookforum, 1999

  More Than Night

  In my neighborhood the best local video store is aimed at the twenty-something college-educated hipsters who set the local tone, and it’s eerily deficient in “Classic Hollywood.” Japanimation and blaxploitation and concert documentaries rule these shelves; Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne and Greta Garbo might not have ten vehicles between them in the whole place. The perfunctory “directors section” forms an inverted auteurist pyramid that would make Andrew Sarris nauseous with vertigo: Cronenberg, Lynch, Coen Brothers, Tarantino, Jarmusch and Hartley resting on Altman, Penn and Kubrick, who in turn rest on Hitchcock, Welles and Nicholas Ray, who rest on—nothing. No sections for Ford, Hawks, Capra, Lubitsch, Sturges or Cukor. No Lang, no Huston, no Wilder. Whenever I rent there I recall the title of George Trow’s classic ‘70’s essay on the ahistorical diffuseness of post-television culture: Within the Context of No Context.

  The exception is the store’s film noir shelf, which proudly overflows with titles good, bad, indifferent and camp. Here’s where Lang, Wilder, Hawks and Huston sneak into the shop—just so long as they play by the rules, working in black and white and casting Bogart or Edward G. Robinson in a story with guns, trenchcoats and plenty of shadows. Here are dozens of 1940s and ’50s titles which would be forgotten without the consecrating force of film noir’s permanent vogue. Here too, otherwise jaded clerks lean forward, eager to offer the consolation that if Odds Against Tomorrow is already rented, Gloria Grahame and Robert Ryan also appear together in Crossfire. I once pointed out to one such clerk that In a Lonely Place should be moved from “film noir” to “Nicholas Ray” and he seemed crushed that a perfectly good black-and-white Bogart movie should have to go sit beside the squarely technicolor Rebel Without a Cause and Johnny Guitar.

  This isn’t exactly a depthless view of film history, but the depths it suggests aren’t auteurish or historical, they’re stylistic and iconographic—fiercely so. Such fetishization surrounded noir from its inception, suggests James Naremore in his brilliantly grounded More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. His argument is nicely paradoxical, since he begins by convincingly disrupting cherished myths about when and how that inception took place. Sure, it was French critics who teased out of certain Hollywood products the tendrils of noir style, but Naremore shows that it was Surrealists, as much or more than usual-suspect Existentialists, who set the terms. And noir may have been erected on a platform of the American crime novel, but the key writers were themselves not primitives. Rather, Cain, Hammett and Chandler were Europeanized aesthetes, responsive to High Modernism, with strong resemblances to their Nobel Prize–winning contemporaries Faulkner and Hemingway, as well as to a Brit whose noirish “Entertainments” may have cost him the Nobel—Graham Greene. Naremore’s restoration of Greene’s place among noir progenitors is one of the book’s virtuoso sequences.

  Naremore’s program is to insistently complicate the long-standing debate over the boundaries and characteristics of Hollywood’s most infiltrative and self-conscious genre. His book works, though, because this program is anything but nakedly theoretical. In fact, it’s often barely visible for being subsumed in the pleasures of original, thorough and un-programmatic research into the making and makers of films. Some of the noirs he scrutinizes so fondly are legends residing at the center of the canon, others pleasingly widen that canon’s margins, which, by the time Naremore is finished, can seem to embrace anything from Citizen Kane and Leave Her to Heaven to, yes, blaxploitation.

  More Than Night is structured like Kurosawa’s Rashomon, as a series of views onto aspects of an impossible, elusive story—as Naremore is quick to point out, each chapter might have been worked up into an entire book. The structure invites and rewards browsing: allowing oneself to be allured by a still (the book is generous with stills) from a favorite neglected film like Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract or an unexpected reference to contemporary videographer Mark Rappaport, or to Welles’s unmade first-person-camera Heart of Darkness results in immersion in stirring discussions of the influence of censorship and McCarthyism on key noirs, or a welcome refutation of the myth of the “B” movie (a majority of the essential noirs were anything but). Only a chapter entitled “The Other Side of the Street,” which gestures towards noir’s love/hate compulsion towards the racial Other, seems too brisk. “Asia” and “Latin America” are cursory, and “Africa”—up to and including Charles Burnett’s The Glass Shield and Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress—is only a little more than cursory. Here I wished for that entire book on the subject Naremore didn’t manage to write. Maybe next time.

  Elsewhere Naremore dissects the lighting tricks, camera-angles and costuming styles which became the common denominator of noir image, parodied by Fred Astaire and Bob Hope a decade before French critics had made their identific
ation widely known. Our culture seems to have recognized that noir was both silly and crucial, even threatening, without any help from Surrealists or Existentialists. “The Noir Mediascape,” Night’s final chapter, gracefully extends Naremore’s argument to celebrated contemporary films. In a few deft pages he shows how Pulp Fiction’s strengths work within an almost suffocatingly narrow range, demolishes L.A. Confidential, and proposes a reconsideration of the overlooked Lost Highway—in each case persuasively. That persuasiveness is a side-benefit of Naremore’s generosity with his historical research, and the contextualizing force it lends.

  In his updated reissue of Within the Context of No Context, George Trow suggests that the cure for the cultural amnesia induced by the mediascape is individual and specific. “Perhaps you will need a motto,” he says. “I suggest this one: Wounded by the Million; Healed—One by One.” More Than Night is a splendid offer of such healing. Naremore permits us to understand that film noir’s iconographies and stylistics exist to be appropriated endlessly (and too often hollowly) by advertising and “high art” alike because they continually and energetically issue not from a single center of real meaning, but a whole host of them.

  —Bookforum, 1998

  You Talkin’ to Me?

  Are we satisfied with Martin Scorsese as “the greatest living American director?” Not until Billy Wilder enjoys his last cigar, thank you. Still, in the context of his Easy Riders and Raging Bulls generation he’s looking pretty respectable, even if it’s partly due the relatively high floor on his failures. There’s no Peggy Sue Got Married or Bonfire of the Vanities on his résumé, let alone a Robin Williams vehicle. His compromises and flops bear contemplation as mistakes only he could have made, lame in an auteurish way. And his masterpieces hardly bunch at the start of his career—Goodfellas (1990) gets him into the ’90s, while Casino (1995) and Kundun (1998) may come into better focus on repeat viewings, as have New York, New York (1977) and The King of Comedy (1983). So where’s that nagging voice coming from, persistently suggesting that we should have wanted more? Why, it’s Martin Scorsese himself, in the University of Mississippi Press’s latest entry in their “Conversations with Filmmakers” series, here edited by Peter Brunette. “I think a lot of the pictures I’ve made are good,” he tells Premiere in 1991. “But they’re not The Searchers. They’re not 8½. The Red Shoes. The Leopard.”

  Elsewhere in this unvarnished and overlapping compilation of magazine interviews spanning Scorsese’s career, the director pokes holes in the reputation of all but his most seminal films. Catch him in the right mood and he’ll defer completely to audience disregard for commercial flops like After Hours (1985) and New York, New York—while in the same breath distancing himself guiltily from successful commercial tradeoffs like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and The Color of Money (1986). An undisguised fan of classic Hollywood, he pines for the traditional storytelling skills he reveres in Hitchcock, Samuel Fuller, and Jacques Tourneur, but concludes, “as far as a straight narrative story, I came close to that in Cape Fear…I really tried and I found that I don’t really have the talent for it.”

  Great American film directors, those who make long careers in (or out of) Hollywood, usually conform to the John Huston/John Ford/Howard Hawks personality type: big, encompassing egos, willing to dominate circumstances and engulf collaborators, prone to brushing off analysis or introspection. Not so Scorsese, who surpasses even Woody Allen for torment and self-doubt, and whose modesty, far from seeming a blind for a raging self-regard, is actually pretty persuasive. A director’s biography is usually a catalogue of slighted screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, wives, and others whose contributions have been steamrolled by the myth of omnipotent genius. But here Scorcese does to himself what Pauline Kael did to Orson Welles: “Taxi Driver (1976) is really Paul Schrader’s. We interpreted it.” Then, “King of Comedy and Raging Bull (1980) really stem from Bob [DeNiro].” As Scorsese chips away at himself, it’s possible to lose sight of how singular and vibrant his better work really is, and how many personal and obsessive themes reverberate through even his weakest films. (One tonic is to recall how cloistered and dry Schrader’s self-directed movies can be, and how many of DeNiro’s performances for other directors seem perfunctory or cloned.) The early interviews, before Scorcese had curbed a tendency to confessional ranting, show evidence of some unsurprising sources: childhood sickness, neighborhood violence and racism, and that old white-hot fuel rod of creative expression, Catholic religious training.

  Handwringer or not, Scorsese is a very pure filmmaker at his best, one who’s progressed from the somewhat Cassevetian lo-fi expressionist of Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1968) and Mean Streets (1973) to a technically obsessive anthropological muralist in Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino, and Kundun. The question his most recent films raise—whether Scorsese has misplaced the autobiographical impulse that powered his early work—isn’t answered in the last few interviews in the compilation. Scorsese’s still babbling long replies to questions, but he’s drowned the confessional impulse in formal analysis—180-degree pans, dissolves, and source music. Even a discussion of a shot containing hundreds of slaughtered monks centers on his choice of a digital camera. Then, as Scorsese politely credits various screenwriters, editors, technicians, Philip Glass, and the Dalai Lama for their contributions, come tantalizing mentions of projects you really hope he’ll get to: a Gershwin biopic and a period epic called Gangs of New York. If Scorsese squeaks by as our greatest living active American director, it’s on the chance that his The Searchers or The Leopard still lies ahead.

  —Bookforum, 1999

  New York Characters

  It’s all about what Dr. Zizmor and Bobby Short and The Real Kramer have in common—but before that, it’s about Mister Clean. Mister Clean was a guy on our street in Boerum Hill when I was growing up; he lived in a rooming house, one of several still functioning on the block in the early ’70s. The rooming houses were presumably established when the neighborhood was dominated by steamfitters and longshoremen working on the docks at the end of Atlantic Avenue, and by the Mohawk Indians who built skyscrapers and had chosen this part of Brooklyn to live in, but they were now mostly filled with Puerto Rican bachelors, and Puerto Rican drunks. Mister Clean wore a porkpie hat and had a chipper, vibrant style of hailing his friends on the block. He was legendary for his love of his car—this likely was the source of his name, though I never heard it explained—which was a fancy Dodge Dart with colored side panels, if I remember it right. Mister Clean would, right, clean and polish the car: the hood, the hubcaps, the windshield. And when it was too clean to clean again, he’d stand outside or sit on the stoop and regard it pridefully: Mister Clean’s car. It was weird that he even had a car. Certainly nobody else on the block cleaned theirs. Mister Clean was everybody’s eccentric, everybody’s neighborhood star, but he was a little more mine than anyone else’s after I cracked his windshield with a thrown baseball. Though I was terrified, I confessed to my parents. When my father and I went together to apologize, and to offer to pay for a replacement, Mister Clean not only forgave—he immediately began taking my brother and me to Yankees games. To the bleachers. He’d make us wait by a pillar eating hot dogs while he rushed across to the bars under the subway to place bets; then we’d sit and root for Mickey Rivers and Reggie Jackson. That we were Met fans, Mister Clean couldn’t seem to be made to understand. He spoke little English. Maybe he’d never even understood that I’d ruined his windshield, only that my father was trying to tell him something about baseball.

  Even if Mister Clean were still out there polishing, he’d be a little too local (and too outer-borough) for photographer Gillian Zoe Segal’s sterling little collection of New York Characters, but the point of her book encompasses and implies Mister Clean’s meaning: New York is bloated full of local fame. More than that, in a city founded on a make it here, make it anywhere premise and on an ethos of taking celebrity for granted, local fame often dw
ells on an uninterrupted continuum with the shrug-worthy, Hollywood Squares celebrity junk-stratum, where 15 minutes is being stretched to forever all over the place. Sure, everybody knows that guy, he’s the one who used to—whatever. My brother and I wouldn’t have been that shocked to see Mister Clean show up on Real People, or The Gong Show.

  What makes this book of photograph-and-blurb portraits brilliant is the insight that crushes together Spike Lee, Ed Koch, Yogi Berra, George Plimpton, Comden and Green and the aforementioned Bobby Short with figures like the Oldest Cabbie, Sister Marlane (the Bird Lady), Radio Man, the President of the Polar Bear Club, and the aforementioned Real Kramer. Not to mention Dr. Z. Sure, those in the former group once could (or still can) play Peoria, but basically they’re our own loathed and beloved eccentrics as much as the latter group. By noting that New Yorkers hold a certain clan of luminaries in that special combination of “to their bosom” and “at arm’s length” which characterizes a familial or neighborly relationship, Segal has, seemingly effortlessly, described a rare and elusive aspect of New York City culture. And the proof, the clincher, is in the middle-range figures she also rounds up. Quick, to which camp belongs Al Goldstein? Speed Levitch? Don Imus? Elaine Kaufman? Henry Stern? In another part of the country, would all these figures be only local flakes or charmers—odd uncles or aunts who, when they came for the holidays, could stir up an entire block or neighborhood? Does anyone outside the city really know the name Ron Kuby? Patrick McMullan? Poet-O? Gotcha.

  Plimpton, who is depicted in this volume and also provided a Foreword, squirms at seeing himself put “jowl to jowl…with the likes of David Blaine, who not long ago enclosed himself in a huge block of ice and put himself on display in Times Square.” But George, what did you do except enclose yourself in a huge block of literary celebrity—and a Detroit Lions uniform? The splendid willfulness that wrenched them into the public eye is what links Lauren Ezersky, Curtis Sliwa, John MacEnroe and the Egg Cake Lady (stringing these names together produces poetry every time). That’s true even if, like subway dermatologist Dr. Zizmor, they claim they were only trying to make a buck. Dr. Zizmor explains that he designs those hideous ads himself—a clear, if unconscious, confession of the lust for fame. He also mentions that he treats a lot of cheating husbands who fear they’ve picked up sexually transmitted diseases, which puts a new spin on all those rainbows and “before” and “after” photos in his ads. Which, being a glimpse of the dark side, reminds me of who was, for me, the only outstanding missing piece in Segal’s book (apart from, of course, Mister Clean). Segal explains in her afterword that Woody Allen shined her on, and that she feuded with the Soup Nazi, but I didn’t really miss that overexposed pair. No, my candidate is perfectly typical of the Ed Koch model, the New Yorker who comes home to local prominence after a brief shot into the wider stratosphere: Where’s Bernhard Goetz?