New England Review

J. M. Tyree

Unsuitable for Literature: An exchange with NER author Lou Mathews

Nonfiction Editor J. M. Tyree interviews Lou Mathews about his new book, Shaky Town, taking a sidelong look at LA and suggesting that “laughter is the only reasonable response to a hopeless position.”

The stories Lou Mathews has contributed to NER over the years often take up the dark underbelly of Hollywood, in which writers live on scraps from the studio system. They tell hilarious but heartbreaking stories of not making it big in La La Land. In “Tutorial” (41.2) an adjunct screenwriting prof attends an awards ceremony for a rich ex-student at a Malibu college campus from which he himself had been banned. His “Some Animals Are More Equal than Others” (35.2) transpires amidst the madness of a disastrous location shoot in Nicaragua that sometimes resembles a cross between Alex Cox’s Walker and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Lou has also tirelessly aided other writers throughout his career as a creative writing teacher and mentor, and has sent many writers our way, including Kate Kaplan (39.1), Ella Martinson Gorham (39.4), Chelika Yapa (37.3), Marilyn Manolakas (40.4), and Emily Hunt Kivel (41.4), some of whose stories were selected for Best Americans and Pushcart Prizes. He also hosted and helped arrange our first-ever Los Angeles reading, in 2014 (photos here). And his red enchilada sauce, jars of which are highly sought after in the NER offices, is a joyful elixir.

I caught up with Lou after reading an advance copy of his new book, Shaky Town, from Tiger Van Books. Lou’s interconnected stories here delve into the complexities of working-class LA, exploring the lives and worlds of teachers, shopkeepers, Lorca-loving janitors, and retired park-bench storytellers.

In the moving “A Curse on Chavez Ravine,” the narrator relates the story of his Aunt Lupe’s one-woman battle against the redevelopment of her neighborhood to make way for Dodger Stadium. After going to court and chaining herself to her house during the demolition, she commissions a spell to be placed on the players that will last for generations.

The story is characteristic of Mathews’s wry, compassionate, and deeply felt writing, but it stands as much more than a local rebuke to the film-industry version of Los Angeles promoted by that company town. His refreshing vision is ultimately restorative and recuperative of a different image-bank entirely, by avoiding much mention of Hollywood at all.

JMT: The interconnected stories in Shaky Town explore a more real LA. Hollywood really only appears as the location of the DMV and a liquor store, I think! Here, you’re focused on working people and communities of color. How do you meld your personal and artistic connections to your material?

LM: These stories are personal. As Carolyn Chute once said, of writing The Beans of Egypt, Maine, “this book was involuntarily researched.” That’s the best way I know to explain Shaky Town. That neighborhood was where I grew up, and how I grew up. Nobody was writing about my family, my neighbors, my classmates, where we lived and how we lived.  We were not considered suitable material for literature. I didn’t learn that until later, so I wrote the stories.

I also didn’t understand that we were poor, and that was one of the benefits of growing up in southern California. My mother was a widow, raising five boys on a Catholic school teacher’s salary, but when you lived most of your life outside, and the city you lived in had great parks and libraries, it didn’t register in the way it would if you were living in Chicago, ten floors up with a broken elevator. Years later, I read an essay by Albert Camus, on growing up in Oran.  He wrote about the sun, the beach, the waves, the water. Those cost nothing.  “I lived in destitution,” Camus said, “ but also in a kind of sensual delight.”

JMT: I think my favorite section of the book is about Aunt Lupe’s “curse” on the Dodgers as a result of having been evicted to make way for the building of the baseball stadium. I sense that hidden history—the violence inflicted on people and the land—lies at the heart of the book. But also a sense of potential recuperation through memory and storytelling. What do you think all this says about the city, the Golden State, and (for lack of a better shorthand) American dreams of various kinds?

LM: Most religions, political systems, and personal philosophies can be reduced to a single concept: Some day my prince will come. Your talents will be recognized. Movies, TV, advertising, our historical myths feed this dream. After a while you figure out that not only is there no prince, but if he did exist, he wouldn’t give you or yours a second glance. I think storytelling is the only way that the working poor, the landless, taxpayers but not participants, the voiceless, ever get to win. That’s probably why storytelling has a long history among all peoples.

The story of “A Curse on Chavez Ravine” started with a tale from one of my brothers’ padrinas (godmothers), something she’d heard from a friend in Chavez Ravine. Was it true? Probably not, but we wanted it to be.

JMT: Is there a film of LA that called to you while writing this book, or did you feel more defiant towards Tinseltown? I thought of Charles Burnett and Sean Baker, and their films in which the characters struggle to make ends meet and the city is itself a character in the story as well as an oppressive setting that is liable to tragic outcomes…

LM: This city isn’t only about the movies and the manufacture of myths, but if you live in Los Angeles, movies are always in the background. One of the characters in Shaky Town, Emiliano Gonzalez, the self-proclaimed Mayor of Shaky Town, worked for the studios as a skilled carpenter, building balsa wood chairs for John Wayne to break over other actors’ heads. That’s as close as most Angelenos get to the actual business of movie-making.

That said, there are a ton of movies that inform and coincide with my vision of Los Angeles. Like White Heat, with Jimmy Cagney’s transcendent epitaph: “Top of the world, Ma!” Every movie that Charles Burnett has made, but particularly Killer of Sheep. The Exiles (1961), directed by Kent Mackenzie, about the Navajo community living near Bunker Hill, is remarkable. Absolutely uncompromising, gritty, and sad, its uncomfortable honesty has always been a model for me.

Then there is a movie that no one knows by one of my neighbors, Ben Maddow, The Savage Eye. Ben was a blacklisted screenwriter, he did around ten movies using fronts. He’s best known for Asphalt Jungle and Intruder in the Dust. The Savage Eye was a personal project, a movie made over three or four years. It catches downtown LA and its denizens in a way that no one else ever did.

The other movie that needs to be mentioned is Alex Cox’s Repo Man, the only movie to make every top-ten list of movies made about LA. It’s there for a reason. It catches the humor and spirit of the place and focuses on the east side. It’s one of the few times I got to see the places and people I grew up with in the foreground of a movie.

JMT: Speaking of Repo Man, your stories for NER and in this new book share in common the poignancy of living in LA, this supposed paradise where life is ever so slightly less glamorous than advertised. How do you see the role of laughter in coping with the various nightmares of history, family, work, and relationships?

LM: Over the course of his life, Rembrandt painted numerous self-portraits, each one with increasing age demonstrating increasing dignity. Then, shortly before his death, in his final portrait, he shows himself stripped of finery and laughing. Laughter is the only reasonable response to a hopeless position.

Somewhere in his essays, Camus quotes an old Spanish proverb—something to the effect that, if it is nothing that awaits us, let us so act that it is an unjust fate. Laughter is a way to do that. An act of defiance.

JMT: There’s a long novella-like section, from which the book gets its title, devoted to the story of an alcoholic Catholic high school teacher who goes totally off the rails. Your compassion towards your characters doesn’t save them from facing the abyss, but it does evoke a necessary hope that change is possible, however unlikely or implausible. Do I read that right?

LM: “Shaky Town,” the novella devoted to Brother Cyril, a man who has lost his faith when he realizes that the church he has served for decades is covering up the sexual abuse of children, was the hardest part of the book to write. The last section took me more than three years, because I was convinced that Cyril had to die, at his own hand. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill him. When I finally understood that he didn’t have to die, that he understood that he had touched bottom and that some hope might be forthcoming, the last chapter wrote itself in a couple of days.

One reader, my friend Carter Wilson (Crazy February, Treasures on Earth, The Times of Harvey Milk), has compared Cyril to the Consul in Under the Volcano, a character for whom you should have no sympathy: “I was reminded strongly of Under the Volcano, the palpable misery in the still active mind—the mind that won’t shut up —and how we come to care about the fate of Cyril, the way we care about the Consul too.”

I’m not an optimist. But to the extent that we can recognize each other’s humanity, there’s hope. I think any hope on that basis is being tested in the world we live in now, but maybe I’m optimistic on that score and maybe the stories reflect that.

Lou Mathews has written seven books and published two of them, Just Like James and L.A. Breakdown, an LA Times Best Book. He has taught in UCLA Extension’s acclaimed creative writing program since 1989. His stories have been published in ZYZZYVA, New England Review, Short Story, Black Clock , Paperback L.A., and many fiction anthologies. Mathews is also a journalist, playwright, and passionate cook, as well as a former mechanic, street racer, and restaurant critic. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, as well as California Arts Commission and NEA Fiction fellowships, and is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Teacher of the Year and Outstanding Instructor awards.

J. M. Tyree is a nonfiction editor at NER, a contributing editor at Film Quarterly, and teaches at VCUarts. He is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff), an NPR Best Books selection, and BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters). He is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman, Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London, and The Counterforce, from Fiction Advocate.

J. M. Tyree

Editors’ Notebooks—The Counterforce

  • Photo by Ben Walters

Read an excerpt from The Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice—a book publishing tomorrow by Fiction Advocate.

Against Sobriety

Fiction, viewed as a kind of hallucinogenic drug rather than a vitamin supplement, doses our metaphorical pineal gland, that “seat of the soul,” as Descartes called it. In some frogs and sharks such a gland contains a light-sensitive “third eye.” In humans it is connected with the production of melatonin, and, in the 1960s context, it was also associated with research into the effects of psychedelics. Welcome back to Pynchon.

The questions asked in this regard by John N. Bleibtreu (a rather Pynchonian surname) in his 1966 essay in The Atlantic, “LSD and the Third Eye,” remain relevant to the medical, cultural, and literary inheritance of the counterculture in general and the drug culture in particular:

The principal question concerning psychedelic estates remains: How much disruption can the system tolerate? […] The problem of how to maintain a certain madness while at the same time functioning at peak efficiency has now captured the attention of many psychiatrists. There seems to be a point at which “creative” madness becomes degenerative, impeding function rather than stimulating it.

Pynchon wishes to deal out altered states that defamiliarize the world and creatively disrupt how we see. To quote two standard taglines of the 1960s: Another world is possible—all power to the imagination.

 In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas’ disc-jockey husband Wendell “Mucho” Maas sees the light when he takes LSD and listens to rock and roll:

When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the ‘you’ is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.

This way of seeing the world or hearing the voice of the human person could be associated with the paradoxical and slippery notion of “The Counterforce” broached by Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), at least as expanded and writ large in the zeitgeist of the counterculture. The counterforce, viewed in a “lower case” variation, so to speak, can provide a doubled-edge metaphor for the process of creative resistance to various types of oppressive power, while at the same time darkly evoking its mirror image in the world-ending terminology of nuclear strategy.

The counterforce is not actually an organization you can join and it might not even exist (let’s face it). It is both illusory and necessary as a provisional and mobile concept that advances storytelling – fiction – as one way to envision alternatives to the present, and, therefore, for the future. In this specific sense, Pynchon proposes that facts alone cannot save us from our current predicaments – we need better stories.

The Pynchon Wiki usefully lists some of its quotations from Gravity’s Rainbow on the “counterforce” as follows:

“Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable… new life”
“a nova of heart that will … change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are”
“the possibility of another night that could actually … light the path home”
“Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness”
“love, dreams, the spirit”
“love that can even make the oppression seem a failure”
“some promise of event without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find till now”
“the living green, against the dead white”

Here we see the more positive side of Pynchon’s imagination nicely condensed. Love; the fight against oppression, the “dead white” and what Against the Day (2006) calls “the wrong people”; the ecological mythology of Vinland as a fictional Eden in the green New World; the realm of dreams; the possibility of a new or alternative life reached through uncovering the beach—the beach beneath the paving-stones, as the Paris slogan of 1968 had it.

Mucho Maas adds the prospect of mind-altering substances to this book of love, while Doc Sportello, the burn-out private investigator protagonist of Inherent Vice (2014), uses marijuana to see an alternate America that contains his stoned vision of what is described in terms echoing Gravity’s Rainbow‘s counterforce as “the night… about to turn epic….” To be “against the dead white” is to be against the day and for “the living green.” And this flaky eco-sensibility of regeneration and redemption, a “nova of heart,” is perhaps Pynchon’s clearest definition of the counterforce as a perceptual change that carries other potential forms of liberation within it. We need fiction to help us see how to see.

The counterforce of love is inherently political insofar as it “can even make the oppression seem a failure.” (Note the careful wording here: seem.) And one might add laughter into the mix along with love, since it heralds the promise of embarking on what we hope for and risk on a good trip. The same old world awaits us upon return, of course. It is heartbreaking to consider the failure or pollution of a generation’s optimism about the power of love, music, art, and politics to change the world. But, according to a certain way of thinking, or a certain lens on the potential contained in the subversive elements of the past, that heartbreak suggests the possibility that something like the counterforce cannot ever be eradicated entirely, even if it seems to lie dormant during reactionary eras, like the 1970 of Inherent Vice, or more recent times, for that matter. Pynchon’s novels are highly cognizant of the dangerous collapse of the counterculture and its replacement by forces of exploitation and surveillance, but Pynchon refuses to give up on the failed but perennial ideals of a more loving, less greedy world. Inherent Vice mourns the loss of alternatives in the culture but it doesn’t stop there—like any good private detective, it supports the hopeless cause.

In her fascinating book Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture, Joanna Freer connects the political with the psychedelic in Pynchon’s novels. She champions Against the Day as Pynchon’s “most psychedelic novel” and argues that it “works specifically to problematize the ‘real’,” in the process suggesting “the potential multiplicity of perceivable realities.” Along somewhat similar lines, David Cowart argues in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon that the “visionary moment” so valued by Pynchon is “commonly occulted by sobriety.” As Pynchon critics often note, all this is largely intended in a figurative sense, one that needn’t involve real drugs, necessarily, which in any event are never portrayed by Pynchon as the only answer to the problem, and are as often as not depicted in the novels as adding further tools of exploitation to the arsenal of oppression. (In Inherent Vice, heroin and cocaine, in particular.) This, then, is something more like a wider challenge to the so-called “discourses of sobriety” – history in particular – from the critical perspective of a particular form of historical fiction that foregrounds its own fictional status.

Equally, such trips, whether literal or metaphorical, cannot be reduced to the private, apolitical experiences that seemed to dominate the drug culture when it became detached historically from countercultural radicalism. Instead, consciousness expansion and various forms of political consciousness-raising are inextricably linked for Pynchon in a mode of analysis that exceeds the boundaries of sobriety. So Freer argues productively that there’s “a warning elaborated throughout Pynchon’s oeuvre against allowing imaginative or visionary experience to become an end in itself, dissociated from a critical, interpretative practice aimed at alleviating suffering and escaping oppression.”

Indeed, on this view, imaginative work forms a prelude to other forms of engagement. In order to build a different world, we first must envision that it might be something other than what’s there at the moment, and to cast off the claim that this is how things always must be. Pynchon attempts to re-enchant the everyday mundanities of American life by recasting the New World as a puzzling map whose legends do not point only to exploitation, a map within the map featuring a fictional territory, with treasures open to lovers and losers, loners and flakes, amateur sleuths and paranoiac novelists. Viewed through this powerful fictional lens that both magnifies and distorts, our mental map begins to wobble as we fall under the influence of this spell or drug.

Baudelaire notoriously recommended that one remain “continually drunk,” but, he asked immediately afterwards, “on what?” The answer: “Wine, poetry, or virtue, as you wish.” It’s also true that Baudelaire wrote up his experiences with hashish in his ambiguously titled Artificial Paradises. Is it OK to admit that paradise is always artificial? Does its fictional status make it any less valuable? Is it enough of a consolation to see things in a slightly different way—to imagine those alternative versions of oneself that try harder to love and do better at fighting back? 

No, not quite. On one hand, it’s a start; on the other hand, it can trap us into doing nothing, just as Bleibtreu noted about psychedelics like LSD and their “degenerating” effect of diminishing returns. So, hallucinogens are optional here—all of the above can be taken as metaphorical content about the power of love, ecology, fiction, and good critical prose. In The Crying of Lot 49, it’s Oedipa who points out to her psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius, who wants to hook her on LSD, that “I am having an hallucination now, I don’t need drugs for that.” In a pointed turn, it’s revealed that Hilarius began his career at Buchenwald.

That said, Walter Benjamin, responding in part to Baudelaire, connected his own experiments with hashish to his early notion of “genuine aura,” which he described in almost spiritual terms as an inherent bit of magic waiting to be discovered in “all things, not just certain kinds of things, as people imagine.” Inherent Vice‘s Doc Sportello might identify with this experience of expanding one’s consciousness by one means or another, especially since this vision of the fragile, interconnected world is radically opposed to smashing things to pieces. What sounds New Age or proto-hippie is more deeply ecological and philosophical insofar as it places something that might be divine (or something like that?) in a coextensive relationship with everything that exists in our beautiful, sad, hilarious, tragic, bizarre, lonely, hopeful, tender, fucked-up, and fantastic world.

Buy a copy of The Counterforce – Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice from its publisher, Fiction Advocate. The book appears in the Afterwords series featuring new takes on contemporary classics.

J. M. Tyree (Twitter: @textplusimage) is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff, from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum), an NPR Best Books selection, and of BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters), from the British Film Institute and Bloomsbury. He also wrote BFI Film Classics: Salesman and Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London (Redwood/Stanford University Press). His essays and short stories have appeared in Brick, Lapham’s Quarterly, Sight & Sound, Film Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Guernica, and other magazines. He currently serves as a Nonfiction Editor at New England Review and teaches at VCUarts.

Ellen Hinsey

A State of Fog: Making Sense of the Polish (Non)Election

Ellen Hinsey reports on recent developments in Poland during lockdown, where the May 10 presidential election was not officially canceled, nor was it held.

OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS we have seen the progressive rise of authoritarianism in Europe and now also in the United States. Restrictions on the media, limits on freedom of assembly, and the dismantling of the separation of powers have taken different forms in different countries. In Central Europe, over the last two months, countries have used COVID-19 lockdown conditions to pass emergency laws or introduce further repressive measures. In Poland, the governing Law and Justice party attempted to push through legislation that would have resulted in a presidential election that was neither free nor fair. The story suggests a cautionary tale for us all.

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In Europe, the uncertainty brought about by the pandemic comes on the heels of a twelve-year period in which—after the 2008 financial crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the recent rise of anti-democratic sentiment—social and political assurances have steadily been eroded. We are aware that we are facing not only a pandemic of exceptional proportions, but that something even more disruptive, even more dangerous, may await us. We are confronted with the most pressing questions: do we have the resources to maintain our civic decency, address our errors, in short, to save ourselves?

Among the critical tools we possess to counter this moment of pandemic uncertainty—in addition to farsighted medical recommendations and scrupulous crisis management—is that of legal certainty. The last two months in Poland, as the ruling Law and Justice party prepared for a presidential election, have shown us how the basis of a country’s rule of law and legal certainty—as it pertains to the fundamental democratic freedom of free and fair elections—can be dismantled.

Poland’s State of Fog
A review of the facts: like many nations, in the face of the gravity of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Polish government sought to introduce emergency regulations to address the crisis. The Polish Constitution allows for a response to such an emergency situation under its “extraordinary measures,” including a “State of Natural Disaster,” fundamentally suited for the COVID-19 epidemic. However, anxious to carry through with the country’s May presidential elections, the Law and Justice government held off, as enacting this extraordinary measure would have legally triggered the postponement of all elections until the crisis’s end. Moreover, with the incumbent Law and Justice President Andrzej Duda leading in the polls—national confinement having provided him with unequaled campaign visibility—such a step was not deemed advantageous. Instead, on March 13 the Polish Government introduced by decree a “State of Epidemic Emergency” (later changed to “State of Epidemic”). Legal scholars sharply questioned the proportionality of the restrictions introduced under the State of Epidemic (not among the constitution’s extraordinary measures), as well as its indefinite duration, but we leave that debate for another time.

Two weeks later, in early April, a sequence of events began to unfold that would gravely undermine Poland’s legal certainty regarding free and fair elections. Although voices, including the Polish Association of Epidemiologists and four hundred legal experts, increasingly called for the election’s postponement—and despite the fact that the country’s Constitutional Tribunal holds that no electoral law should be modified less than six months prior to an election—on April 6 Law and Justice introduced a special election draft act and pushed it though the Sejm in a single day. Defying growing opposition, the draft act proposed, with now only a month remaining before the presidential election, to organize national postal voting for 30 million citizens, a task never before attempted in Poland. It also included a highly disputed restructuring of the electoral process itself, in particular by transferring the organization of the elections from the country’s independent National Election Commission to the Ministry of State Assets, run by Jacek Sasin, a Law and Justice appointee.

Due to the controversial nature of the proposed changes under pandemic conditions, critics of the legislation contended that if the elections were to go forward, they would effectively be conducted without a genuine competitive campaign, with inadequate assurances for the ballots’ delivery and inviolability, and without requisite provisions for overseas voting. These doubts, and numerous others, were expressed not only by the country’s political opposition, but also by certain key politicians aligned with the leading party, and disagreement over the bill subsequently created a split between the majority Law and Justice party and its coalition partner Agreement, led by Jarosław Gowin, who resigned in protest.

Future legal scholars may well single out May 6, 2020, as a particularly dark day for Poland’s constitutional history. On that day, with chaotic and incomplete postal voting preparations, and only four days to go, party leaders Jarosław Kaczyński and Jarosław Gowin, newly reconciled, issued a joint statement announcing that the presidential election—though constitutionally required to be held on May 10—would not be officially canceled, but neither would it be held (stay with me here), with the understanding that the Polish Supreme Court, which oversees the legitimacy of elections, would consider such a (nonexistent) election invalid, and having invalidated it, empower the Marshall of the Sejm to set a new date.

Here it seems, having left behind legal certainty, one reaches the abyss of the legally absurd.

To further complicate matters, even if it wished to do so, the Polish Supreme Court is only empowered to issue such a verdict on the basis of an election report by the National Election Commission. On election night, the National Election Commission would announce that since there had been no election, there had been no candidates, and no such report would be forthcoming.

Thus, on Sunday, May 10, 2020, the Polish nation awoke mystified, to no ballots, no election, and to candidates who had vanished. In short, fog and uncertainty reigned.

Subsequently (based on the National Election Commission’s legal fiction of nonexistent candidates, a contested fact) it was announced that the Marshall of the Sejm, as if ex nihilo, would set a new election date. After two months of contentious struggle, the opposition parties accepted this proposal.

At this writing, it appears that the Poles will have hybrid postal and in-person elections at the end of June. With the cost, however, of a clear disregard for fundamental principles of rule of law.

Life after COVID-19: Dancing on the Precipice
What can we learn from this cautionary tale? As we remember, a number of other high-stakes presidential elections are approaching—notably in the United States—where human safety and democratic legal certainty are being weighed in the balance of political ambition. The implications of basing one’s reelection on the compromised safety and lives of those one is mandated to serve deserves no comment. In this time of global upheaval, however, what we can know is that either we fight to uphold the integrity of our legal systems—with the hope they will be there for us after the COVID-19 crisis—or we can squander them now. To make such a dangerous trade-off now with our rule of law and legal certainty, to be sure, is at our greatest peril.

This special dispatch is a follow-up to Hinsey’s earlier pieces on Poland, which are available here.

Ellen Hinsey is NER‘s international correspondent. She has lived in Paris since 1987, and witnessed firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. She has extensively reported on the rise of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, Die Welt and Poetry. Her most recent books are Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism and The Illegal Age, a poetic investigation into the twentieth-century’s legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality.

J. M. Tyree

Remote Viewing

Our nonfiction editor reflects on the movies as a binding force for good, and NER offers a sold-out issue for free, including our first film supplement.

On lockdown in the nation’s capital with my novelist wife and our anxiety-ridden tortoiseshell cat, I keep getting e-mails with suggestions for films I ought to watch “while you are bored at home” during the pandemic. Sharing movie ideas with far-flung friends and with my wonderful film students brings me a sense of solace and normalcy when the whole world is going haywire. So here goes my version of “while you are trapped at home and bored/terrified/losing your gourd/wiping down high-touch surfaces/feeling desolated and crazed/trying to stay positive/succumbing to despair/donating to hospital charities/knitting a masterpiece scarf that doubles as a face covering.” I really don’t mean to sound flip—I’m barely holding it together much of the time (refresh, refresh, refresh). And we are the lucky ones privileged enough to stay at home.

This blog post contains my viewing journal for a plague season. I make no apology for my decision to recommend whatever strikes my fancy, whether or not it seems “relevant,” “appropriate,” “relatable,” or any of those other soul-killing terms. Given NER‘s literary mission, it makes some sense to foreground adaptations from the page to the screen. But I am not feeling sensible, so I will not be following that plan. I’ve named this post “Remote Viewing” for obvious reasons, given the circumstances of a world without open cinemas and popcorn machines. That’s one very small and insignificant aspect of this heartbreak and these are my love letters to films that I miss sharing. I enjoy being with other people when they watch a great film for the first time. I like listening to how it affects them to experience art in the same room—and then hearing them fight about it afterwards.

The series to watch right now, if you can bear it, is HBO’s devastating account of nuclear error, Chernobyl. And, if you cannot bear it, then watch the hilarious HBO space farce Avenue 5. Actually both shows are about the same thing, which is precarious oddballs risking their lives to save people who are threatened with imminent death due to the rank incompetence and lies of their leaders during a disaster. In fact, that’s what every film is about now, it seems, from A to Z—from Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Alien (1979, don’t break quarantine, you fools!) to Lucrecia Martel’s latest masterpiece, Zama (2017), which among other things memorably features an outbreak of disease in eighteenth-century colonial Argentina.

I, too, have noticed lately that few characters in cinema, from the denizens of the ship in McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957) and the blue people of Cameron’s Avatar (2009) to the serial killer in Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and the psychedelic desert orgy-goers in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) are practicing responsible social distancing. I suppose the accidental exceptions are Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000) and Tom Hardy in Locke (2013), two films that achieve additional poignancy at the moment, for different reasons. As does J. C. Chandor’s sea-disaster one-man show, All Is Lost (2013), if you can stand a film with that title at the moment. And then there’s the unforgettable isolation of Cuaron’s Gravity (2013).

These movies where mostly solitary figures take up almost all the space and screen time are somewhat rare, although Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1964) fits the bill and the meal-prep scenes of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) perhaps feel closer to resembling the way we live now. And besides, if you are fortunate enough to have the time, this era of self-isolation might well provide a unique opportunity to take in the full power of such films and to see them in a new light, as riveting dramas as driven and compelling in their extraordinary internal poetic logic as the chase scenes in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The big sister, Elsa, in Frozen (2013) also had the right idea—if anyone needs me I’ll be chilling in my ice castle.

Okay, now that I have established myself as a serious critic with a clearly defined set of tastes—sorry/not sorry, I love it all—I’m going to be so bold as to suggest that you watch nothing except what makes you feel most deliciously alive. For me that’s always going to start with Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), with its travels to the four corners of the globe. Marker’s narrator files quasi-fictional reports in the form of letters from the richest areas of Tokyo to the poorest markets of the Cape Verde islands. 

It’s a strange sort of film that seems to be a different movie each time I view it. It’s also a film of films, containing many other movies inside it, and a film about film and about television that “watches you back.” One of the most intriguing sequences records Marker retracing all of the real-life locations of another film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which Marker claimed to have seen nineteen times. Watching Marker tracking down Hitchcock, I always pause and replay the section about the Mission Dolores. This was the fictional location of the burial place of Carlotta Valdes, who is believed to be a possessing spirit from beyond the grave, like Rebecca in the 1940 film named for her and somewhat like the boy’s best friend in Psycho (1960), Norman Bates’s dead mother. Just on the level of daily business, and hopefully not in our mental states, many of us are currently living a little too much like Norman now, cooped up with our ghosts and unable to leave the grounds, “lighting the lights and following the formalities.” We’re the proprietors of empty businesses like the Bates Motel, with its “12 cabins, 12 vacancies.”

When I see the Mission Dolores, I am transported back in time to my loveable old haunted sublet on 16th Street, where the Mission bells were a regular aspect of my routine. The place had a ghost cat and the bedroom shivered during smaller earthquakes. I once found a child’s tooth in a drawer that I was convinced had not been there the month before. When I’m watching Vertigo, or Sans Soleil, I fully expect to see an image of myself haunting the edges of the picture, like the extra ghostly space inhabited by otherworldly figures at the margin of the screen in The Ring (2002). 

In another sequence from Sans Soleil set in Japan, Marker quotes Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) as he watches the film on television: “You must make a friend of horror.” Indeed, we must, yet we cannot manage it. This hideous virus attacks everything that makes us human, in particular our need for contact and love and going to the movies. It targets those who gather to mourn and to celebrate, to worship and to dance. We have to deny the horror, to look away, and to watch something else, no matter how trivial or profound. That’s one thing films are good for, but films can be more than distractions, of course. They are mirrors, portals, doors that we can open and pass through into the world and ourselves and the past.

Marker claims Vertigo as the only film that captures what he calls “impossible memory, insane memory.” But Marker is being characteristically modest. His own film is the only one that does that for me, or to me. Now that I cannot go anywhere, I feel like disappearing into this film altogether. Impossible and—yes—slightly mad.

Marker’s heart-stopping opening sequence features an “image of happiness,” three children walking along a road in Iceland holding hands. Later, Marker’s footage returns to Iceland to show how a volcano filled a fishing town with lava, up to the rooftops in some cases.

I’ve never been to Iceland but this form of “remote viewing” or tele-visual “action at a distance” gives me the chills. What makes the film all the more remarkable is that Marker created it without any scripted scenes, actors, lights, dialogue, producer, or studio. It’s a film that presages the whole DIY YouTube/smartphone video upload ethos. Could it or something like it be made today? I think so, if you already had the footage gathered from many years of travel. 

Yet to watch Sans Soleil now is to experience one peculiar heartbreak of our shared moment in which travel is impossible. Making future plans, however banal or luxurious, feels vital at the moment. I promise myself that I will finally visit Iceland when all this is over. Then I consult the pollution charts and see the planet breathing a little bit better now, and I make a vow to travel by cargo ship. Then I remember my horrible tendencies towards seasickness and vertigo. Then I recognize that I’ll likely be inside most of the time from now until . . . who knows when. Right now that’s the definition of a happy problem. Then I realize how everything I’m thinking and feeling today may pale into insignificance tomorrow as the crisis unfolds. The low-key impact of not going anywhere or doing much of anything at least doesn’t add to the problems of first responders. We’re told that staying home saves lives, but it’s difficult not to feel useless or even burdensome, even if doing nothing minimizes harm to others. And expressing gratitude does precious little to change the working conditions of those who must risk their health and safety. But art means there must be a future, and there is more to the belief in movies as a binding force for good. As one great line goes in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), a film that dares to joke courageously at the darkest hour, “A laugh is nothing to be sneezed at.”

I’ve been reading that the Germans (who else) have a term for this feeling I’m having a lot right now, fernweh, a “farsickness” that counterpoints homesickness. As far as I understand the term, fernweh conveys a feeling of yearning for unexplored distant places—and, presumably, an enduring feeling of heartache related to missing all the things and people in those places that we feel we might never encounter. That is how it feels to me to be alive—alive!—in April 2020.

Interested in reading more about film? In summer 2018 we published a feature on Terrence Malick, including ten writers’ and one illustrator’s views on his films, from Badlands to Song to Song. To help you through the time with no movie theaters, we’ll be happy to send it to you for free! Click the following link and download NER 39.2 to your computer or mobile device:
E-pub for your iPad, iPhone, Nook, or computer.
MobiPocket for your Kindle.

J. M. Tyree is a nonfiction editor at NER, a contributing editor at Film Quarterly, and teaches at VCUarts. He is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff), an NPR Best Books selection, and BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters). He is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman and Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London.

Calico cat on a silky striped pillow

Above: The author’s shared working space.

Photo captions for the gallery at the top (left to right, top to bottom):
Vertigo – Hang in there, kitten.
Chris Marker’s “image of happiness.”
From Marker’s Sans Soleil.
The author in a vanished era.

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