On Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino traces the birth of his aesthetic back to the day, many years ago, when he read Pauline Kael’s review of Band of Outsiders. In particular he cites the passage wherein Kael likens Godard’s film to “a reverie of a gangster movie as students in an espresso bar might remember it or plan it….It’s as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines…” “And when I read it,” Tarantino told an interviewer later, “I said that’s my aesthetic, that’s what I want to do, that is what I want to achieve.”

It should be noted that it was in a diner that Tarantino first read this review, since the review compares a film that partially takes place in a diner to something that was first conceived in a diner, and also since Tarantino (who loved to hang out in diners) would make similar diner-inspired movies that also take place partially in diners. (Tarantino’s production company, A Band Apart, is also a vulgarization of the French formulation of the title of Godard’s movie.) One part of Kael’s review that Tarantino doesn’t publicly identify himself with is where she claims that young filmgoers, some of them, “are so proud of how compulsively they see everything in terms of movies and how many times they’ve seen certain movies that there is nothing left for them to relate movies to. They have been soaked up by the screen.” It’s as if she were eloquently stealing the words, preemptively, from the mouths of all of Tarantino’s eventual critics.

It’s true that there not only doesn’t seem to be a terrible film extant that Quentin Tarantino hasn’t seen, but that there doesn’t seem to be a terrible film extant that Tarantino hasn’t admired, and that hasn’t somehow informed his work, in a fundamental way. Each one of his films is a high-gloss tribute to some hackneyed old genre: heist, gangster, grindhouse, blaxploitation, and kung fu. Recently, he even went to war—with the Greatest Generation, no less—and twisted military history until it fit his purposes. There are plenty of other genres left to rescue and elevate, and we can be sure that before he reaches his anticipated retirement age of 60, Tarantino will have stayed up somewhere all night and told us all about them.

On Ted Turner

Even before he became rich, Ted Turner had been rich. He had come from money long before he made money come to him. That was his leg up, but it wasn’t what made him. When his father took his own life, he left his billboard business behind, whereupon Ted immediately converted it into a multimillionaire’s enterprise. After he became so rich that he owned a couple of sports teams, he had to have someplace to put them where the whole country could see. That’s how he got into the TV business, with TBS, and now he owns more land than could fit inside of Delaware and Rhode Island, combined and literally. When he founded CNN and made the news something that happens 24 hours a day, he changed nothing less than the way the world saw itself. By changing journalism, fundamentally, he changed everything. That’s how the world came to have to reckon with what it meant to live in a planet inhabited by Ted Turner.

On Henry Shrapnel

At the time that Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel first started working up his invention—a shell full of fragment shot, carefully packed to find its target when the casing did—he was a British army officer attached to the Royal Artillery. His invention gave him both fame and professional promotion, eventually to the rank of major general, for what it allowed his fellow soldiers to do to their enemies. Because of the “remaining velocity” resultant from the shell’s momentum, a casing that once travelled effectively at a range of 300 meters now travelled at an effective range closer to 1100 meters, and when it reached its object, the increased resultant damage was considerable. In 1852 the shrapnel shell was patented under Henry’s very own name, and although many people improved upon it and refined it from there, all that fragmentary advance emerged from one unified point, with a definitive shape and a definitive name.

On Iron Maiden

The thing about cover art is that it graces only the cover, and you can use it to judge the album no more than you can judge the book by it. That said, sometimes the cover art penetrates deep into the work in insidious ways, and nowhere is this truer than in the case of Iron Maiden’s work. All that heavy-metal cartoonery, their mascot Eddie always inhabiting a different environ consistent with the album’s thematic conception—it goes to show that, contra Kiss, a band can use visual art to enhance good music, not simply as gimmickry to distract from music that is less-than-good.

In grade school in the mid-1980s, all the older kids wore Iron Maiden shirts—it was how one signified one’s edginess as a high-school grown-up. But kids too grow into high-schoolers, and sometimes they graduate, and then, rarer still, they actually behave as if they have graduated. And the appeal of Iron Maiden not only endures but enhances. All those songs based on literature sometimes achieve a state of literature themselves (“Brave New World,” “The Wicker Man,” “Lord of the Flies”). And even when they’re nothing more than mere transcriptions of someone else’s literature (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), they can transcend the literature from which they borrow, because they’re literature set to music. It’s literature that fucking rocks, and that’s a rarer thing altogether to behold. Meanwhile, history goes neither forgotten nor ignored, and the student of the past (high school or otherwise) can learn more from a song like “Alexander the Great” than from all the bloodless lectures ever delivered—to say nothing of an irresponsibly elided film like Oliver Stone’s Alexander.

The cover art wasn’t just neat, cool, or awesome; it was conceptual. It was concept art made to adorn concept albums, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that one particular artifactual representation of it—specifically, that of Powerslave—I’ve found striking enough to wear not only on a T-shirt, for my body, but on a banner-poster, for my wall. There are plenty of examples of this vivid imagery contributing to packaging as an enhancer of content: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Piece of Mind, Somewhere in Time, Fear of the Dark. Just because school’s out doesn’t mean you stop appreciating the high finer things. Usually it can mean the very opposite. What a concept.

On Clancy Martin

It’s not unheard-of for a professor in the hard humanities—the theoretical-logical humanities—to make a jump into the realm of fiction-writing and to succeed there. In our own era, we’ve been blessed with the dense and elaborate puzzle palaces of Stephen L. Carter, professor of law at Yale, whose success, artistic and otherwise, at creative writing would seem to be at odds with the demands of his day job. Now there’s Clancy Martin, a professor of philosophy specializing in existentialism, who’s penned a hard and compact bildungsroman, How to Sell, about coming of age in the luxury-jewelry trade—at just over 300 pages a brief vivid burst of American fever-dreaming by way of Canada. What the hell does any of this have to do with the study of existentialism? As it happens, just about everything.

The novel’s details, so carefully chosen and perfectly arrayed, come plucked from the tray of Martin’s own hard experience. It was existentialism, as both way of life and academic pursuit, that saved Martin from the jewelry business, which he had entered and re-entered, between stints at school, at the urging of his older brother in Dallas. By the time he was ready to write his doctoral dissertation, under Robert Solomon on Nietzsche’s theory of deception, he had learned more about the subject in practice than perhaps anyone ever should.

That education is the subject of the current novel—which is, after all, just that. The base of Martin’s experience has been melted down into a different kind of alloy, with more than just the narrator-protagonist’s name being altered. Yes, Bobby Clark leaves high school and Canada at age 16 to join his brother in Dallas, whereupon sex, drugs, and violence ensue, but beyond that we’d do ourselves a favor to read the book under the conditions its author has intended. Changes have been made not just to protect the innocent, the semi-innocent, and the not-at-all-innocent, but also to protect the interests of narrative, of story, of the kind of serendipities and suspense that the fiction-writer will lend to his work when he’s writing not to be admired but to be enjoyed—and is hence admired all the more for his efforts.

That’s the kind of novel that How to Sell is, just as it’s the kind of novel that Carter’s are. Seemingly incongruous at first, this phenomenon makes all the sense in the world when considered a certain way. For How to Sell is, of course, not just about how to sell, but about all those metaphorical moments wherein lying, cheating, and stealing stand for the same thing—stand for selling by dire means. Martin’s achievements, as a philosopher and translator, are already substantial—as chair of his department at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, as translator of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, as the author of many existentialist texts respected in their field. There was no move left to make except to tell his story in the best way he knew how, even if that meant telling it in a way that rendered it, in its particulars, a somewhat different story. Existence is what happens when we’re existing, and all the apparatus of post-modern fiction and epistemological philosophy at some point has to come to terms with the pure product of this experience. It’s amazing how many kinds of training are required before we come to this realization.

On David Lynch

When David Lynch writes, in Catching the Big Fish—his meditation on meditation, and the artistic bounties it can bring—that the magic of a film lies in obfuscation and confusion (though not in those words), it’s hard to know if he’s evading his own responsibilities on purpose or by accident. “A film should stand on its own,” he writes. “It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words. The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time they see the film, these things enter into the experience. And then the film becomes different. I think it’s so precious and important to maintain that world and not say certain things that could break the experience.”

It’s almost as if he’s been paying a penance, all these years, for having started life in the cradle of conformity, his father a D.C. bureaucrat and then himself an Eagle Scout who ushered at Kennedy’s inauguration. Adulthood, meanwhile, has been all about making films of defiant incoherence and solipsistic preciosity, as if to put a lucid sequence up on the screen would be a kind of artistic death, a suffocation of the soul. He’d sooner cast a part for a real woman, with qualities distinguishing her from all the other women in his films, and who didn’t get brutalized in the beginning, middle, and end of the picture.

But it’s not the misogyny that’s always bothered so many who admire Lynch’s genius but disdain his incoherence. It’s the dreaming, the surrealism, the bleeding of fantasy into the on-screen actual so that the two become entirely indistinguishable. By refusing George Lucas’s offer to direct Return of the Jedi, he deprived the Star Wars franchise of what could have been only its second, and last, masterpiece. Look at what Irvin Kershner was able to do with Empire. But Lynch foresaw irreconcilable artistic differences and refused to take the plunge. It’s a shame. Someone else would have provided the story—with which Lynch has always been so weak and irresponsible—while all Lynch would have had to provide is the magic. It couldn’t have been any worse than cranking out episodes of Twin Peaks for ABC.

Speaking of which: Where was all his high-minded artistic purity when the network suits came to him demanding that he identify Laura’s killer at the end of season one? Even the hackingest of hacks knows that you don’t give up the murderer after only the first reel. Lynch’s masterpiece—and it was a masterpiece—was ruined. The second season couldn’t even come close to saving it; it only made things worse. Lynch betrayed his own principles when he caved in and gave away so much more than any first-time viewer could possibly want to know. This is the same man who insists that his fellow directors are saying too much when they respect their audience enough to actually let them in on what’s happening in the film he’s put before them. It’s preposterous. It’s absurd. It’s so surreal you have to ask yourself if it’s really happening, or if the whole thing is just one big bad dream sequence. Then you stop asking yourself the question, because eventually, by then, you realize you’ve already stopped caring.

On Ross Perot

America’s chance for a third-party presidential triumph didn’t end with Ross Perot’s loss in 1992. It ended with Ross Perot’s dropping out of the race earlier that same year, before getting right back in it again. How can Americans believe in a phenomenon that doesn’t believe even in itself? And for all those who mourn the damage wrought by Ralph Nader eight years later, it’s important to keep in mind that were it not for a third-wheel spoiler in ‘92, in the form of Perot, America would have gotten a Bush for president again that much sooner. The third-party sword cuts two ways, in other words, and is incredibly dangerous for any interested party not wielding it. But Perot shook things up a little before he left, and that was all to the good. He chose as his running mate one of the few admirable men to ever run for that job, and was the first to buy up a televised forum for his message in blocks. Barack Obama, recent events reveal, understands the importance of both those strategies. We’ve all learned lessons from Perot. If his candidacies in 1992 and 1996 only suggested those lessons, the candidacy of Nader in 2000 would do the rest of the work in confirming them. Right-wingers and left-wingers alike who know what they believe and why they believe it owe a debt of gratitude to these true mavericks. Let’s hope we never have to see their like again.