In Which We Admire Ourselves From Up Close

La Misérable

by ALICE BOLIN

I have, as I write this, an earache and pain in the left side of my neck, symptoms of a sinus infection that was impervious to Amoxicillin. Periods of mild terror have accompanied this sickness, as they have most other physical discomfort I’ve experienced in the last year or so. Something I read or heard once about cancer or meningitis or parasites, about women knowing their bodies, knowing when something is wrong, will couple with any slight symptom in a wave of obsessive thoughts that locks up my stomach and convulses my legs and makes my heart beat in my teeth. The fear of illness has physical symptoms. I know that worrying isn’t helping anything.

And it’s not even a complicated problem. It’s easy to reason out the origins of my recent hypochondria. This nebulous time of my life would explain it — that I’m not sure where I’ll live or what I’ll be doing in a few months, and it’s hard to picture myself moving beyond my current confusion. This sort of anxiety can’t be simply analyzed away — because it is, taken broadly, valid. How do I talk myself out of a fear of what might only be forestalled, but not avoided? Here is dread at its most basic, and most founded: the day will come when I no longer control my body. It controls me.

Still these tricks I play on myself, the counterfeiting of signs and certainty, are not valid. The border between confronting life’s hardest truth and indulging in the most juvenile self-deception is the hypochondriac’s domain. As Antoine, the young soldier of Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7, says to the title character, "Every great feeling is full of little vanities, also the great spirit of silliness."

Death omens disguising themselves as license-plate numbers and offhand remarks are preferable to an unknowable future, promising loss stranger and more painful than I am imagining. Cléo from 5 to 7 is one of the greatest investigations of hypochondria as a modern ailment and fear as a kind of decadence. Cléo meets Antoine in a park after she has spent the day in mental agony, waiting for test results that will tell her whether her stomach illness is something serious. Antoine comments that it is the first day of summer: "It’s the longest day of the year," he says. "Today the sun leaves Gemini for Cancer." "Shut your mouth," Cléo says.

Cléo, a pop star who is remarkable for her vanity and childishness, does what she can to ransom some knowledge of the future from the present — content to exchange good fortune for certainty, she sees calamity at every turn. The first scene of the film shows Cléo visiting a psychic for a tarot reading, one which presages “evil forces,” illness, and even death. “The cards said I was sick,” Cléo sobs to her assistant after the reading. “Is it written on my face?”

Her question is central — what can be known from what can be seen? Just as we attempt to divine the future from the present, we want to read the internal in the external. Cléo regards herself in mirrors constantly, and we often hear her thoughts in voiceover as she does. “Ugliness is a kind of death,” she thinks. “As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.” Her life is distinguished by that most modern activity: to look, to watch. As a pop singer she participates in creating the cultural spectacle, and she either sees or imagines people leering at her everywhere she goes. On the streets of Paris large crowds surround a man swallowing frogs and another piercing his arm with a long piece of wire, the coarsest embodiments of what it is to be public, what it is to be on display.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is not a meta-film, concerned with filmmaking and theory, but in its exploration of spectatorship and consumerism, Varda's film does seem aware of itself as a product. At one point Cléo and her friend Dorothée go to a movie theatre where they watch a silent short featuring French New Wave superstars Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, Eddie Constantine, and Jean-Claude Brialy. Godard plays a man who watches his lover, played by Karina, walk down a flight of stairs and trip on a hose. Godard puts on his signature dark glasses and everything turns black — including Karina’s dress and her complexion. It seems Karina has died in the fall, and a sooty workman, played by Constantine, sprays her corpse with the hose. An undertaker appears in a hearse to remove her body. Godard is inconsolable, but as he removes his sunglasses to wipe his tears, he sees the scene take place another way. After Karina trips, a doctor in an ambulance appears, rather than the undertaker in the hearse. As if she were looking in a mirror, Cléo sees her own problems reflected on the screen. Cléo from 5 to 7 shows the act of watching as directing the self inward, rather than outward. Like hypochondria, it allows for the illusion that everything is about you.

The filmmakers of the French New Wave knew that the great unfulfilled promise of spectatorship is escape, and dread lingers on the periphery of every happy distraction. In one scene, Cléo tries on hats, blissfully taking in her face in many mirrors, thinking, “Everything suits me. Trying things on intoxicates me.” Then the camera moves outside, and the cars and passersby on the street are reflected in the window of the hat shop. This is an intrusion: traffic sounds drown out the scene’s romantic music as the real world is superimposed on Cléo’s fantasy world.

Afterward, in a taxi with her assistant, Cléo listens to news dispatches on the radio. She can only hear herself in one item, a story about the singer Edith Piaf recovering from an operation. The rest tell of farmers’ unrest and military tribunals, and they are unwelcome reminders that most of the world does not concern her, and larger troubles than hers exist. Other envoys of the outside world disturb Cléo during the ride — large African sculptures in a window display, a group of art students who descend on their cab wearing masks. These are hints of the specter haunting the film, the true source of dread, the greatest proof in France in 1962 that the world is neither good nor predictable — the Algerian War.

Cléo from 5 to 7 was released in April 1962, a month after a ceasefire was declared between French troops in Algeria and the National Liberation Front (FLN) insurgents, and just two months before Algeria was declared independent. The Algerian War exemplified particular type of modern war: one waged against communist or Muslim insurgencies; one which resists the word “war” (in Algeria, the term of choice was “pacification”); one marked by the use of terrorism and torture; one in which victory is impossible, and anyway, beside the point. (The history class I dropped in my junior year of college on twentieth-century Algeria would probably have been relevant here; I was so depressed then that all I could do was read fashion magazines, and that might also be relevant.) That this kind of warfare gnaws at the liberal western conscience and undermines the security wealthy countries believe they have earned is something any American living in 2012 knows.

For France, this was not merely a far-flung colonial conflict. Cléo’s Paris was shaken by ancillary violence, including the Paris Massacre of 1961 where perhaps hundreds of pro-FLN Algerians were killed by law enforcement. Acts of terrorism known as the Café Wars claimed civilian lives in Paris throughout the war. But the terrorist, like the filmmaker, acts with knowledge of the spectacle, and where apparent comfort still exists, fear is often sublimated to fascination. Cléo listens to news of Algeria on the radio with the partial attention that she listens to her own songs. A crowd surrounds a window shattered by a bullet hole as if it were a man swallowing frogs.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is a covertly political film, and in this way, it is didactic. The viewer is meant to uncomfortably identify with Cléo; she is a sympathetic figure, but not an attractive one. Signs of cruelty and devastation surround her, but her terror manifests itself as self-absorption. Only when Cléo can truly accept the scale of horror and destruction is she able to free herself from some anxiety. Antoine is on leave from Algeria, a visitor from the heart of danger. "I'm afraid of everything," Cléo tells him. "Birds, storms, elevators, needles, and now this great fear of death." "In Algeria, you’d be afraid all the time,” Antoine says.

He has to return to Algeria that night, and he agrees to go to the hospital with her to get the results of her test if she will see him off at the train station. On the hospital grounds, Cléo is overcome by the smallness of her problems. "We've got so little time,” she says. "It's silly to go looking for the doctor. It doesn’t matter. I can phone him later." Her doctor then speeds up in his convertible and tells her blithely that her illness is not serious. "My fear seems to have gone," Cléo says. "I seem to be happy." It is unclear whether she is released from her despair by the diagnosis, or by a realization that the diagnosis is ultimately insignificant.

The entire film depicts Cléo’s journey to find peace in the universe’s indifference. She realizes halfway through the film that everyone is as self-interested as she is, that her feeling of specialness is an illusion. “I thought everyone looked at me,” she thinks to her reflection in the mirror. "I only look at myself." Just as Dorothée explains about her job as a nude model for a sculpture class: "They’re looking at more than just me. A shape, an idea… it’s as if I weren’t there."

Cléo is amazed by her friend’s job. "You don't mind posing,” she says to Dorothée. "I’d feel so exposed, afraid people would find a fault." Dorothée replies, “My body makes me happy, not proud." There is some freedom in the body’s impermanence — but I still haven’t found a way to stop grieving it. It would be noble to let go of worrying about my body’s ultimate decline, but there is the illusion of nobility in tormenting myself with the inevitability of death. It reminds me of a line from John Ashbery, that "the agony is permanent,/rather than eternal" — though that is what I have referred to before as a “feelings distinction,” rather than a logical one.

In the most amazing scene of Cléo from 5 to 7, Cléo is practicing new songs with her songwriters. One song, a ballad called “Cri d’Amour” ascends from a simple rehearsal to a full musical number, complete with an accompanying orchestra. Cléo’s performance is affecting — tears stream down her face as she sings of a lost love. The lyrics emphasize how the sorrow has manifested itself physically: “With beauty unseen, exposed to cruel winter,” she sings. “I’m an empty house without you.” After the performance, her songwriters congratulate themselves. “This song will revolutionize the music business,” they say. “What’s a song?” says a sobbing Cléo. “How long can it last?”

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Great Expectations.

"Rubbernecking" - The Big Pink (mp3)

"Future This" - The Big Pink (mp3)

"Lose Your Mind" - The Big Pink (mp3)

In Which Charles Dickens Wanted To Hurt Everybody

Cold Feet

by ALICE BOLIN

Great Expectations
dir. Brian Kirk

What must first be said about the BBC’s latest miniseries adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is that it looks good — it’s this sort of visual pleasure, the care taken toward both beauty and ugliness, that drives reviewers to use words like “sumptuous” or “glorious” or even “delicious.” The marshlands of the series’ beginning are perfect in their lonely beauty, washed out by layers of fog. The director, Brian Kirk, seems to take a painter’s pleasure in the scenery, and we are often treated to shots of the entire misty landscape, including a huge sheet of sky.

It must further be said that gorgeousness here is not gratuitous. Dickens is English literature’s supreme evocateur, and setting dictates mood, or maybe vice versa. Spark Notes informs me that the environment of the marsh connotes ambiguity and alienation, and that seems about right. This is, after all, where our urchin-hero Pip meets and helps Magwitch, the escaped criminal who is to become his mysterious benefactor. But in terms of triggering feeling, the setting de resistance of Great Expectations is Miss Havisham’s Satis House, with its stopped clocks, its cobwebs, its rotting wedding cake. The house has attempted to resist time and is instead overtaken by it, which is, of course, just it.

The parlor of Satis House is filled with plunder from Miss Havisham’s late brother’s exotic adventures: a tiger rug, tiny replicas of whales, horns and shells, globes, stuffed birds in glass cylinders gathering dust. The room’s focal point is a display of butterflies in a huge glass case, slowly growing over with cobwebs—it’s shabby-chic, biology-chic, like a room from the Anthropologie catalog that’s been badly neglected. “He went to the furthest reaches of the earth in his search for the purest specimen of beauty,” Miss Havisham says of her brother’s butterflies. “When he found it he stuck a pin through its heart.” Do you understand? There is a figurative meaning. To the butterflies.

Satis House is an extension of Miss Havisham, and she is its most disturbing relic. Gillian Anderson’s portrayal is brilliantly freaky — she plays her like a frail but erratic animal, speaking in a baby’s sing-song. Her lips are gray and peeling, her hands are bloody from where she has scratched them raw, and she only grows more pale and withered throughout the series, until she is literally skeletal.

Miss Havisham is only one of the characters who appear more monster than human. When Magwitch emerges from the marshes, his huge bald head and mud-caked skin make him look like a swamp creature. The evil Orlick, Pip’s brother-in-law Joe’s assistant on the forge, has black cracked teeth and dead eyes and sores covering his face, and he grins and lumbers around like a zombie. Some of these characterizations are small: the way the filmmakers give the foul but well-bred Bentley Drummle a cleft-lip to indicate his inner badness was downright Dickensian. (N.B.: when my younger brother was entering college, I asked him how his freshman orientation had gone. “It was full of dickheads,” he said. “It was dickheads-ian.”)

Pip and his true love, Miss Havisham’s daughter Estella, are, by contrast, immaculate. The actors who play them, Douglas Booth and Vanessa Kirby, both have that fashion-model beauty that is soft and unusual and endlessly compelling. In one scene they are picnicking by a lake, and Estella, overcome with abandon, pulls off her slippers and stockings and wades in the water, scandalously holding her petticoats above her knees. Pip follows her in and they share a tentative kiss. For a moment I was transported out of the series and into a Ralph Lauren perfume ad.

If you don’t remember reading about the tender picnic in your ninth grade English class, that’s because it isn’t in the book. Neither is the scene where Drummle takes Pip to his “other club,” a fancy whorehouse appearing to boast prostitutes from every continent. Thankfully the filmmakers take some liberties. I did regret their choice to omit Biddy, Pip’s childhood confidante and later Joe’s wife, from the miniseries — first because it is all too predictable that they would eliminate the only kind and sensible female character, and second because I wanted Joe to end the story with a lady by his side.

Played by Shaun Dooley, Joe is a big ruddy pillar of pathos, designed to perfectly elicit love, admiration, and pity. When Joe is enlisted by magistrates to repair Magwitch’s shackles, Magwitch claims he has stolen a piece of Pip’s family’s Christmas pie. “Us don’t begrudge you a bit of pie,” Joe says angelically. Miss Havisham finances Pip’s apprenticeship to Joe to become a blacksmith, and Joe signs the contract just “Jo,” and God, he is so strong. It sprains your heart when Pip leaves for London and Joe calls, “Don’t forget about us Pip!” and when Joe shows up at Pip’s club in London and Pip snubs him, it breaks. Your. Heart. Joe is the kind of character that bestirs ovaries, like the Irish cop in Bridesmaids.

In Vanity Fair recently there was a feature on Courtney Love, who, after losing her daughter and all her money, is now obsessed with marrying into British nobility. I thought of Courtney as I watched Miss Havisham, particularly when she pawed at Estella, clutching the letters she had sent from London and crowing, “They’re not detaaailed enough!” Miss Havisham’s desperation has no nuance, and her dialog’s anvil-subtlety supplies countless delights. When little Pip asks if her feet are cold, she replies, “All of me is cold.” “It is the ghost of a wedding cake, and I am the ghost of a bride,” she explains for Pip and anyone else who is a little behind. She vows to make Drummle’s world “a cold and joyless stone” once he marries Estella. “You know nothing about men, Miss Havisham,” Pip says, in the understatement of the nineteenth century.

Thanks to cable television, we now have a word for what Miss Havisham is: a hoarder. The source of the dysfunction at Satis House is as obvious as on an episode of Hoarders — you know, “I started that pile of dirty diapers the day my son died,” etc. Indeed, Miss Havisham and Estella are remarkably contemporary in their ability to psychologize themselves. “How could you be so cold?” Miss Havisham asks Estella. “It is what you trained me to be,” Estella replies. Estella tells Pip, “Everyone’s meant to love me. But I don’t love back,” and then Pip cries pretty-girl tears. “I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to hurt everybody,” Miss Havisham says to Pip at the end of the series. Hurt breeds hurt; you don’t have to consult Oprah to know that. You could have heard it on The Tyra Show.

It’s understandable that Estella would have some issues with marriage. She is shown hyperventilating under her veil on the day of her wedding, a shot that is echoed moments later when Miss Havisham lowers her own veil, walks downstairs to the dining room, and sets herself on fire. Miss Havisham’s self-immolation was what I was most looking forward to here, and it is worth the price of admission, even if that price were more than zero dollars. She gazes in the mirror with saintly ecstasy as the blaze envelop her body; her form becomes a shadow in the mass of flames. It is Miss Havisham herself who insists that beauty is a destroyer, and her death is the fulfillment of the visual ethic of the series — its most terrible scene is also its most beautiful.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about David Milch's Luck. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Amygdala" - Valets ft. Moral Reef (mp3)

"American Style" - Valets (mp3)

"Lines" - Valets (mp3)

In Which Luck Appears So Slick As To Become Sterile

Running the Numbers

by ALICE BOLIN

Luck
creator David Milch

HBO’s new series Luck is Dustin Hoffman’s crack at the trope of the weary gangster, and he is just as punchy, tired, and insecure as you would, I guess, hope. The show begins as his character, the crooked businessman Chester “Ace” Bernstein, is released from prison after serving three years for unspecified dirty dealings. That same day, he visits a former partner at the man’s swanky nightclub, and during the course of their meeting, Ace moves with weird efficiency through the entire emotional range of the archetypal aging crook.

He is first full of self-doubt — “Sometimes I wonder if I’m still an asset,” he admits. Then in a fit of defensive anger, he leaps from his chair and rips his shirt open, shouting the delightful reproach “You got qualms?” He is instantly sheepish about the tantrum and is considerate enough to explain for the audience what has just happened. “I tore the buttons off my goddamn shirt,” he says. “I make a fool out of myself first day out.” For the rest of the scene, he is sure to remind us that he is old — I can’t think of a more crotchety remark than “My blood pressure is sky-high right now” — and prison has withered him both emotionally and physically. “I shrunk. I’ve got to get new shirts,” he says, awkwardly lying to cover the fact that his shirts are probably all missing buttons from his Incredible Hulk outbursts.

Ace exemplifies Luck’s most striking characteristic, that it is ambiguous and complex at the same time that it avoids any kind of subtlety. The first episode, directed by Heat's Michael Mann, introduces no fewer than sixteen characters, all connected in some way with horse racing at Santa Anita Park in Los Angeles. The audience must keep track of a huge volume of characters, their relationships to one another, and their many concealed interests. This is, I think, the point.

Add to that the difficulty of any story involving gambling: it will eventually require the audience to attempt to comprehend strategy, statistics, and large sums of money. This show with nothing but principal characters, many of whom have no name and only the vaguest of back stories, about the most obscure aspects of an obscure sport, egregiously also includes math.

Much of the first episode revolves around a group of gamblers’ pursuit of a huge Pick Six jackpot and their strategy for winning it, which hinges on betting on a single horse in the fourth race — apparently a pretty bold move. The discussion of “singling the fourth” is the most technical dialogue in the episode, so baffling that I was almost thankful that the characters discussing it are so obvious.

The gamblers are singularly pathetic — their ringleader is confined to a wheelchair, punctuating his conversation by huffing from an oxygen tank. They are of that special breed of loser geniuses who populate the minds of movie and television writers, convinced that smart-but-not-successful is a reliable shortcut to interesting. When one of the gamblers cheerily approaches the others and says, “Got my Social Security, 125 simoleons!” it’s clear that “fresh” isn’t necessarily what Luck is going for.

The show relies on characterizations that are easily shorthanded: The Irish Jockey, The Stuttering Agent, The Handsome Gambler. The most frequent method for this is to give a character an accent or vocal tic, making them more cartoonish while, in true Luck style, making their stories harder to follow. The writing seems aware of this — a jockey with a strong Cajun accent says of the Hispanic horse trainer Escalante, “He foreign. He a little hard to understand.” The show laughs at itself but also at its audience, who are trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. Characters often comment on how overt the characterizations are — Escalante calls The Stuttering Agent "Porky Pig", and Ace calls Escalante "Desi Arnaz". The Handsome Gambler refers to a money-lending racetrack security guard as Shylock, and it’s like, “You might be flattering yourself about your use of archetypes, Luck.”

Still, this self-awareness might be the show’s greatest hope to provide its characters with nuance. Ace has bought a racehorse covertly, holding it in the name of his driver, manservant, and main thug whom he calls “the Greek.” When the Greek visits the stables to check on the horse, Escalante flatters and fawns on him, saying “I’ll call you ‘El Natural.’” “I’ll call you ‘El Bullshitter,’” the Greek replies. Other characters also hint that Escalante might be laying it on thick — “He’s serving it up to the Gringo owners and trainers, cold,” says a racetrack official. Escalante is known not only for his talent as a trainer but his savvy; he is able to control people’s expectations of him and his horses. He and others in Luck are consciously performing, playing into their perceived roles as a way of hiding their true motivations.

The show also finds ways to acknowledge how confounding its subject matter can be. One of the gamblers’ backers (a male prostitute who wears a boater hat and brags that his clients call his penis “the Emperor,” I feel compelled to report) is bewildered by the Pick Six scheme. During the climactic eighth race, he says, “I don’t get it. We bet every horse, who do we want?” forcing them to reiterate the stakes of the scene. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” he whines as they are about to win the two million dollar jackpot. His cluelessness provides the audience with a point of connection in a world that is opaque with lingo, calculations, and specialized knowledge. When he speaks our confusion on the screen, it feels like a moment of mercy.

Luck’s other saving grace is its sophisticated visuals. It is shot beautifully and deliberately, with contrasting styles and palettes for the intersecting domains of the show. Ace exists in a silent world of glass, chrome, marble, and granite. The scenes at the racetrack, by contrast, are frenetic and colorful, and the racetrack setting brilliantly incorporates contrasting visual elements. The grimy stands open onto the vibrant scenery that frames the outdoor track: palm trees, hills, the sky and white sunlight. Nick Nolte’s character, the gentle horse trainer just called “the Old Man,” brings a bit of the pastoral with him by force of spirit. We find him in a green space behind the stables saying to his horse in a gravelly coo, “You don’t know how special you are, do you?” The bucolic scene seems distant from the rest of the track, which is shot with such intensity.

But danger lurks in Luck’s temptation toward the music video effect — the reliance on montage editing, slow motion, and loud music cues, especially in the race scenes, can be so slick as to become sterile. There is a gut-turning slow-motion shot of a horse’s leg snapping in the last race, but the scene is so stylized that it is emotionally removed. As I watched the animal being put down with a giant syringe, I wondered to myself, “Are they seriously playing Sigur Rós right now?”

The first episode of Luck abounds with agonizing dramatic irony. In the last scene, when Ace tells the Greek, “I don't trust anyone, not even myself. You, I give a pass,” we get the feeling that a little too much might be hanging on this relationship. “Alls I’m worried is you relying on me when I’m working out past my depth,” says the Greek, and he almost certainly has reason to be worried. The gamblers’ storyline ends with them discussing grand plans for what they will do with their two million dollar jackpot and ominously deciding not to come forward with the winning ticket until the next day. The Handsome Gambler sings “America the Beautiful” as he watches the final race and it’s clear no one should give these fuck-ups two million dollars. The teaser for the rest of the first season, in addition to introducing five new characters (!), promises a yacht, a bloody ashtray, lines of cocaine, and large wads of money. It’s easy to say what will become of Luck’s dozen plus protagonists: nothing good.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Martha Marcy May Marlene. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Golden Touch" - Araab Muzik (mp3)

"Free Spirit" - Araab Muzik (mp3)

"Electronic Dream" - Araab Muzik (mp3)