Zack and Miri Make a Porno

One feels odd using the term mature to describe as sophomoric a director as Kevin Smith but a refined crudeness makes Zack and Miri an oddly satisfying film. Smith brings the joy filmmaking to his work, albeit the joy of a thirteen year old who has just discovered a camera. Of course, he also has the scene of humor of a thirteen year old boy. Yet the raw humor is so pleasingly set forth and supported by a strong sense of craft that the film works. The great moments in the movie come from Smith’s ability to support both the awareness that this is film while never throwing it in the viewer’s face. At times the camera lingers on an actor or a scene when cutting away would keep the viewer immersed in the action. This second or two in which the image is held in front of the viewer reinforces the basic pleasure of film, seeing things on the screen. We often make the mistake of thinking that seeing reality or being immersed in a world is the triumph of film. Instead the pleasure of film is its very artifice and Smith loves the artifice of film, recognizes it and uses it. He never teases the audience by jarringly breaking the barrier between film and audience or breaking it simply for the sake of breaking them, rather he sees film as a creative, playful medium whose artifice is its great joy.

Jonathan Lethem. “Lostronaut.” The New Yorker. Nov. 17 2008

Science fiction, as much as it is an exploration of humanity’s relation to technology, is a genre of nostalgia. The reader, entering an alternative reality, experiences a separation from the known world, this distance then inviting an affirmation of one’s relationship to what is around them. We are encouraged to miss what is actual and present. Lethem’s epistolary short story “Lostronaut” takes the nostalgia that hides itself as an unseen force in most science fiction and brings it to the foreground. A female astronaut, trapped with her fellow crew members in earth orbit by Chinese mines, writes to her boyfriend (lover? husband?). Although what plot the story has is about the experiences on the ship, this mostly provides an occasion and context for the letters, which look back to life on earth, to events ordinary and common as seen from the physical and mental distance of space.

Technology is largely absent from the story; instead the use of letters gives the story a distinctly human presence. From the wonderful first sentence (“Dearest Chase, I am trying to ‘feel’ November, yours and mine”) Lethem makes clear that this is a fiction of sentiment. In fact, the story “feels” pleasingly antiquated. The convenient omission of certain technology (no video links here) marks the story as descendant of the sentimental fiction of the eighteenth century. Where Richardson’s Pamela and the like are concerned with social displacement associated with the rise of capitalism, Lethem seems to be pointing us to a replacement or at least reconsideration of our late capitalism values; particularly he is concerned about the relationship to place. The letters of this displaced astronaut gives us pause to place ourselves in the world.

Is Manhattan beautiful? Have they put up the Christmas tree, or is it too soon? (I know you loathe Rockefeller Center.) Do you ever go to the Chinese garden at the Met, with the tiny gurgling waterfall, where we once went and laid our heads together on a stone and fell asleep?

This passage expresses the lost astronaut’s need to locate herself. We move toward the specific and defined from the vastness of space to Earth to Manhattan to Rockefeller Center and the Met to a single stone. The stone of course is in some way a mark of alienation from nature (it is after all the recreation of a natural setting in the space of a museum); nonetheless it suggests basic desire (need?) humans have to be in place, to belong to the Earth.
The movement toward the Earth and toward being “in place” reverses the direction of locating one’s self that young Stephen Dedalus experiences in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

[...]What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything after the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all around everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere.

For Joyce the problem is one of living in a world without God, a world without meaning. Lethem’s story looks for a way to put us back in place; to find meaning in our lives here on earth. The story also wants to suggest that technology does not displace us; rather we choose displacement through the technology we bring upon ourselves.

Gran Torino

I had fun watching Clint Eastwood play a badass, epitaph spewing old codger. The role is a familiar one for Eastwood, a descendent of Dirty Harry and not unlike his character in Million Dollar Baby. But Eastwood is so good at playing the part it doesn’t get old (so to speak). One still marvels at his intensity and cool. I can’t think of another septuagenarian who could pull this part off with the gusto Eastwood brings to it. The rest of the movie, however, is nothing more than a hackneyed piece of garbage. The plot lacks surprises. The other characters have all the depth of those found in after school specials. In scene after scene Eastwood as director trots out one stenotype and cliché after another. The worst moment in the movie comes when Eastwood intervenes in a confrontation between a wannabe white gangster and the three tough black guys who stand on the corner. The white guy trying to pass as black by calling the black guys “bro,” is the best they could come up with? The black guys calling the white guy a pussy? One could say that these characters don’t matter. They are just occasions for Eastwood to be Eastwood. But the scene on the corner and others like it are so formulaic , the characters so flat that they kill the movie. One sees Eastwood trying to give these scenes emotional weight; there is a desire to flesh out the film, which causes some of the worst parts of the movie to get way more time on the screen than they deserve. But the writing leaves these characters as such voids and the scenes so unoriginal that there just isn’t anything there. The blame for this probably lies at the feet of first time script writer Nick Schenk. Which is not to deny that the script has potential; one sees why Eastwood was attracted to the project. But the script needed a serious rewrite, particularly its handling of the gang members. In the end, watching Eastwood in something so bad left me feeling sorry for him and wishing he had found a better vehicle to bring his tough guy persona to the screen for what may be the last time.

Nathan Englander’s Ministry of Special Cases

Nathan Englander is a very fine writer. Ministry of Special Cases is filled with unpretentious writing that flows across the page. For a novel about as difficult a subject as the disappeared of Argentina’s dirty war tone is a challenge: too serious and the reader will enter a void of sorrow and death, but such events are serious and levity must be handled with just the right touch. Englader’s story of Kaddish and his wife Lillian and son Pato set in Buenos Aires in 1976 resonates with the despair but also irony and touches of humor that make the experiences of the family resonate with the reader. Of the three characters, the failure prone Kaddish stands out as a memorable creation, a Job-like character caught in a Kafkaesque world. The other characters in the novel aren’t as vibrant, however, and details about Argentina are integrated cleverly into the plot yet they are on the whole facile choices. Recoleta Cemetery and Argentines’ propensity for cosmetic surgery both are functional to the plot and highly symbolic. Each is representative enough of Argentina but is the sort of things a tourist learns in a few days in Argentina, something any cab driver in Buenos Aires will tell you to explain the Argentine condition to you. A look at the sources Englander mentions in a brief note at the end of the novel seems to confirm a lack of engagement with the subject. The sources Englander cites are the obvious ones, and ones in English at that. My question then, finally, is why did Englander write this novel? For the U.S. reader unfamiliar with the dirty war in Argentina the book will have some value but there is little that is new. Setting the story entirely in the 1970s leaves out the opportunity to give the novel some contemporary relevance, either in relation to Argentina’s current struggles with instability and insecurity or as a means of reflecting on governments and terrorism in a post 9/11 world. As the novel covers well trod ground and offers little in the way of new reflections on its subject Ministry of Special Cases feels like a successful exercise by a talented writer: it fulfills the task it sets out for itself but why this is a story that needed to be told isn’t so clear.