Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)

In Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963), Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an ambitious and ruthless journalist, tries to get himself admitted into a mental institution in order to be able to investigate the murder of an inmate, which to him seems the only sure-fire way to win a Pulitzer. Fuller, who along with Otto Preminger and Nicholas Ray remains one of the underrated American film masters, doesn't care much for exposition; the opening sequence throws the viewer right into the lurid narrative: Johnny is rehearsing his routine with a psychiatrist, Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn), as his editor, Swanee (Bill Zuckert), and girlfriend, Cathy (Constance Towers), quietly observe. Cathy, a striptease artist who dreams of a "normal" life, is having second thoughts about the role she'll have to play in Johnny's plan, which consists in going to the police pretending to be his sister and filing a complaint detailing Johnny's incestuous feelings and sexually aggressive behavior towards her. At first, Johnny's plan works just as he and Dr. Fong had predicted. He gets admitted to the mental institution and even makes some progress in his investigation. In the process of trying to get information from the three witnesses to the murder--one a young soldier who fancies himself a Confederate general, another a student who has been so shaken by the experience of being the only black at his university in South Carolina that he has assumed the identity of a Ku Klux Klan member, the last a nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb but who now has the mental capacity of a six-year-old--Johnny himself begins to have doubts regarding his own sanity and whether he'll even be able to crack the case, for he is only able to get anything from the patients in their fleeting lucid moments. The scenes that take place in the mental institution, which make up the heart of the film, are unrestrainedly disturbing and among the most powerful in any Fuller film. While filming some of the recollections of the patients, he inserts some color footage which provides a marked contrast with the claustrophobic mood of the rest of the film, conditioned as it is by the pale walls, shiny floors, and unending corridors of the mental institution. By cataloguing one man's immersion into the fragmented and subconscious side of life, Fuller also taps into the psyche of a nation whose very foundation was (and, to the extent that the film is still an accurate portrait of modern industrial society, continues to be) threatened by countless evils of its own making.

On Certainty (Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1969)

There are, I suppose, certain inherent dangers in trying to write anything (even something as flimsy as a blog post) about Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially for someone who is just getting interested in philosophy. Nevertheless, perhaps I can mitigate some of these pitfalls by stating as simply as possible the reason I happen to be setting down some thoughts about this most venerable of philosophers: I like the guy. I mean, I'm still working my way through the Philosophical Investigations (1953) and I couldn't very well venture to say that I've got anything like a firm grasp on all of his ideas (most of them directly dealing with the philosophy of language and mind but by extension with the whole of philosophy, from metaphysics to aesthetics), but I must say he is a very intriguing figure. Instead of trying to back up this claim with something of a summary, I will direct you to two very diferent sources: the first is a forty-minute TV program in which John Searle gives a succint overview of Wittgenstein's philosophy; the second, and much more interesting for the purposes at hand, is Derek Jarman's 1993 film Wittgenstein, which in its glorious seventy-two minutes manages not only to paint a fascinating and touching portrait of Ludwig (both as a precocious young boy and later as a troubled genius finding his way in and out of Cambridge) but also features various actors (among them Tilda Swinton) portraying the important figures in his life, namely Betrand Russell, Lady Ottoline Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and of course the whole Wittgenstein clan. (As a sidenote I should mention that I look forward to reading Alexander Waugh's recently-published The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.)

Finally, I'll conclude with some of my favorite excerpts from Wittgenstein's On Certainty (1969):

383. The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well - and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."

471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.

La invención de Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1940)

ONGOING

My indecisiveness rears its ugly head yet again. Since writing the previous post, I've changed my mind regarding the subject of my final essay. It was set to be on Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963), but, partly inspired by my recent revisiting of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), I've decided to take on Adolfo Bioy Casares' 1940 novella La invención de Morel (The Invention of Morel is the English title) instead. I'll still finish reading Rayuela and probably post something about it along the way (the book's length sort of lends itself to that). For now I haven't got much else to say, so I'll just direct you to the worthy introduction [PDF] by Suzanne Jill Levine from the 2003 New York Review of Books edition. And here is an essay from Senses of Cinema written by Thomas Beltzer on the possible connection between La invención de Morel and Last Year at Marienbad. Oh, and given that I just discovered Louise Brooks' work not long ago, I find it really interesting that Bioy Casares based one of the characters of his novella on her. (And I commend the NYRB for choosing an image of her for their cover.) Not that I blame him; she's really something.

Rayuela (Julio Cortázar, 1963)

ONGOING

I'm writing (or, more accurately, attempting to write) about Julio Cortázar's 1963 novel Rayuela (Hopscotch is the English title) for the final essay of my literature class. I'm only twelve chapters in so far, each being only a few pages long, and I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts I was having about it before I forget them.

First of all, Cortázar gives his readers two options for reading his book: they can either read the first fifty-six chapters in order and leave the remaining ninety-nine alone or go through it in the order he suggests, which jumps back-and-forth between different parts of the novel. Right now I'm taking the first route--and these fifty-six chapters are themselves divided into two sections, "Del lado de allá" and "Del lado de acá"--and more than likely I will read through the parts of the third section ("De otros lados") in the same manner. Second, the two epigraphs deal with the idea of imparting a lesson before it's too late for it to mean anything, which ties in with Cortázar's temporal preoccupations and rather specific ideas about the nature of time. The first twelve chapters themselves are quite enjoyable, some of them narrated in the first person by, presumably, Oliveira, an Argentine expatriate living in Paris in the late-1950s (Cortázar himself having made the same trip in 1951); others are told by a more detached nameless narrator who recounts the activities of Oliveira, La Maga, the Uruguayan girl he's involved with, and his group of friends that call themselves el Club de la Serpiente. Traces of the fantastic abound in certain chapters of Rayuela, as in the part that seems to equate Oliveira and La Maga's lovemaking with something like W. B. Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" (1928).

Terribly intriguing stuff, I'd say.

An excerpt:

(p. 51)

Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elige y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mí para dibujarla con mi mano en tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.

Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion, 1970)

This being my first entry about a book, I guess I should point out that I'm not trying to write anything resembling serious literary criticism; rather, these will be brief impressions normally written immediately or shortly after having finished a book, and if my movie "reviews" at times seem disorganized and scattered, get ready.

***

Up until now I've only read Joan Didion's nonfiction; I found her 1979 collection of essays The White Album particularly interesting, given the breadth of topics she discusses: everything from migraines to the water system to Doris Lessing, all of it seen through the lens of the 1960s and its aftermath. Her political writing, particularly 1983's Salvador and 2001's Political Fictions, is also worth mentioning. Nevertheless, I think I can safely say that her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays is the best example of Didion's cool intelligence and simply contains some of the finest and most precise prose I've read. Play It As It Lays is a fairly slim book at 214 pages, which are divided mostly into two to three-page chapters, brief snapshots in the life of Maria Wyeth told, as the author described in her Paris Review interview, not by "an omniscient third but a third very close to the mind of the character."

Maria ("pronounced Mar-eye-ah," as she makes clear in the opening section named after and narrated by her) is an actress in Hollywood living in a Beverly Hills home paid for by her director husband Carter Lang. If Didion's scathing indictment of Hollywood and the movie business is every bit as ruthless as Wilder's in Sunset Blvd. (1950), imagine that kind of material as done by L'avventura-era Antonioni and you begin to understand what the author is up to. All in all, it's a powerful, at times frightening read but definitely a major work by one of the most important American writers of the last fifty years.

P. S. I really want to see the 1972 Frank Perry film based on the book. How come it hasn't been released on DVD?

An excerpt:

(p. 210)

Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is "nothing." Now that I have the answer, my plans for the future are these: (1) get Kate, (2) live with Kate alone, (3) do some canning. Damson plums, apricot preserves. Sweet India relish and pickled relish. Apple chutney. Summer squash succotash. There might even be a ready market for such canning: you will note that after everything I remain Harry and Francine Wyeth's daughter and Benny Austin's godchild. For all I know they knew the answer too, and pretended they didn't. You call it as you see it, and stay in the action. BZ thought otherwise. If Carter and Helene aren't careful they'll get the answer too.

Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

Through some mysterious twist of fate, in the last three years since I first saw Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) on the same evening, I’ve seen the sequel something like eight or nine times without revisiting the original even once, the result of this being that, because Sunset has become one of my all-time favorite movies, I began to wrongly suspect that, for all intents and purposes, Sunrise was little more than the charming introduction which allowed Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy to make their real film, an unparalleled and gorgeous exploration on the passage of time. Needless to say, I was sorely mistaken, since it is precisely to the extent that Sunrise is different from its sequel that it can be recognized as a masterpiece on its own right. For one thing, in this film, given that the characters are just beginning to learn about one another, they are not quite as absorbed with their encounter as the reunited lovers of Sunset, so the city of Vienna and its dwellers make their way into their private world in ways that reveal quite a lot about what Linklater and company are up to. I’m referring particularly to the palm reader and the street poet, two characters whose respective scenes wouldn’t be out of place in any number of carefully-conceived romantic works of art, and Linklater lets them play out with beautiful ease and all the emotional weight that they require, but then, in this film so concerned with the nuances of conversation, Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) go on to deconstruct the experience and discuss each other’s reactions. So it’s not as in Waking Life (2001) where we can hear the guy on the bridge with the wild hair talk about Lorca’s advice to dreamers and simply move on to the next sequence, we have to think about the scene’s place in the movie and as a result our own expectations from romance in the real world. It’s a fitting strategy for a film whose protagonists are generally so curious and skeptical. However, this isn’t to say that the film isn’t also achingly romantic; one couldn’t possibly make that claim with all the truly beautiful and intimate moments to be found throughout the Viennese night. All in all, Before Sunrise is more than just a great film. For me it’s an overwhelming experience about what it’s like to be alive in the world; more than that, it’s pure magic.

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

More than any other of Richard Linklater’s films, with the possible exception of Before Sunset (2004), 1993's Dazed and Confused is a great film to revisit. From the opening shots in the school parking lot, set to the tune of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” everything falls into place, and all you can do is go along for the ride. The film covers the last day of the 1976 school year and the night that follows, and it deals with the lives of an assortment of characters, never really settling on a particular storyline. But it must be said that the previous statement is meant as an absolute compliment, as it is when talking about the best of Altman, particularly his 1975 masterpiece Nashville about a weekend in the titular city. If Linklater shares some of Altman’s talent for interweaving the lives of a large number of characters in a natural and altogether cinematic way, he differs from him in the way he approaches the material, which is to say that he lacks some of the older master’s deep cynicism. Dazed and Confused is, no doubt, a film bound to be tinged with nostalgia, at least to some extent, but, like the best works that try to recreate past decades (and I’m really thinking more about a brilliant TV show like Freaks and Geeks rather than George Lucas' highly uneven American Graffiti [1973], a film often mentioned in discussions about this movie), Linklater’s panorama of the 1970s could conceivably work just as well as a movie about young people living in the early 1960s or the late 1980s. There’s something about the way Linklater carefully observes the small moments in people’s lives which goes beyond any specific time and place, the evidence of this being that I, someone who wasn’t even old enough to see Dazed and Confused in theaters, could find so much about my own high school experience on display here. All of this and I haven’t really said anything about the film itself, but it’s probably just as well. See it.