Week 50 (15)
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Monday, 23:19
So I was shopping for some soup. And I was reminded of those commercials for Progresso. You know the ones: someone goes out of their way to make lunch for a friend, or a relative. They’ve been shopping, or painting a bedroom, or playing in the snow. And the friend or relative asks, whatcha makin’? And the someone says, chicken’n’stars! or tomato soup! or clam chowder! or whatever. And the friend or relative scoffs and says, condensed soup? Snerk. That might have been okay when we was kids, and we didn’t know any better, but now, there’s a better kind of soup! Cue loving shots of fresh ingredients in a savory broth tumbling artfully into hearty, brimming bowls.
Arrogant, ungrateful pricks.
I bought some Campbell’s tomato soup.
—Actually, an amusing sidenote, first: some reviewer of Independence Day somewhere said that there was no subtext in that movie, none at all; in fact, it was all übertext. A good term, I think, to add to one’s critical vocabulary. At any rate: if you haven’t yet seen The Man Who Wasn’t There, a) go; you won’t regret an afternoon matinee, and b) you might want to skip what follows, since I have no idea how much I’ll reveal as I ruminate. So.
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We went with the playboy cartoonist to see some movies yesterday: he used a freebie he’d picked up the last time he’d gone to see a movie, when the film had been stopped halfway through and the theater cleared for a bomb threat, and me and the spouse used the tickets I’d won at the office Halloween party at the last Day Job. We planned a double feature: The Man Who Wasn’t There and Amelie, sneaking from one theater to another between shows, which is astonishingly easy to do at the new chain art house downtown. And up came the lights during Amelie, and off went the alarms; no bomb threat this time, just a popcorn popper that went up in smoke. We were back inside in minutes, with free tickets handed out to all. So. Three movies for the price of none; four, if we pull the same double feature stunt next time. And we got to see the Lord of the Rings preview twice.
I haven’t by any means made a comprehensive study of reviews of The Man Who Wasn’t There; it’s certainly more than possible someone has already mentioned this. Nor do I mean to imply those reviewers who didn’t mention it didn’t spot it. But it’s odd to me that no one seems to have yet brought up what an intensely coded, deeply sympathetic portrait it is of intensely, deeply repressed homosexuality.
—Not, mind you, sympathetic to the idea of repression, or of closeting; sympathetic in the sense of feeling the same as, evoking the experience of it, what it feels like, what it does. Nor is that what the movie is “really” about. I’m not trying to make the mistake of insisting that Ed Crane must literally be gay within the context of the movie for it to be read properly or even for this sympathy, this evocation to be appreciated (Lord knows I’m doubly careful about that sort of mistake with any movie that cites “Fritz” Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), and it is more than possible to read the movie without taking this into account at all. (There’s a lot in there; there’s always a lot in any Coen Brothers flick.) But not taking that into account is, I think, missing a lot of the thrust of the movie, and is (perhaps) why so many reviewers have been rather underwhelmed.
(The Coen Brothers are making some of the best movies around these days—more than that; some of the most humane movies around. They’re pegged and pigeon-holed as cold, heartless formalists by people who haven’t stopped to think about their movies; even their fans tend to see them as goofy, in-jokey cinéastes with cameras and a decent budget. All of which I think is fine with them; they keep doing what they’re doing and like Wallis Simpson or Benjamin Disraeli, they never explain and they never complain. —My tendancy to get churlish when I read a review that accuses them of being all surface, no substance, or of being heartless beasts with no sympathy for their main characters, or of being needlessly complex, spoiled brats, may well explain why I haven’t gone trolling for too many reviews of this one.)
It’s not just the muscle magazines in his jail cell, mind. Or the sexless marriage he shares with Doris. Or the constant cigarettes. (Sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette. But those cigars—) Or the sense of alienation, of being alone in a crowd, that gorgeous shot of him walking down the street in the opposite direction as everyone else. Or even the constant repression, the incredibly tight control. (“Don’t say those words, Ed.”) —It’s the linkage of any hint of sexual desire with death and danger (the shaving of his wife’s legs, their only intimate contact, being linked with the electric chair). It’s Big Dave’s odd, endearing compulsion to confess his affair with Doris to Ed. It’s Doris’s profound dissatisfaction with their relationship, and it’s that odd flashback scene with the tar-macadam salesman (Doris was as suspicious of the homosocial contact between the two of them as she was of whatever he might have been selling; when I get around to seeing it again, I’ve got to watch and see what, if any, reaction she has to his contact with Big Dave). —“What kind of man are you?” he’s asked, in two highly charged scenes. His opposite, his foil, the defense lawyer, is flashy and assertive and loquacious and dandified—and no closer to the truth than he is. It’s those damned aliens—who, as we all know, are going to come and take us all away to a happy planet where we can be ourselves without fear. (Big Dave never touched his wife again after they abducted him outside of Eugene. —He was touching Doris, but never mind that, for now.) Ed ultimately rejects their entreaties, in exchange for something else—well, death, but more than that, a chance to meet Doris again somewhere where he can say those things they don’t have words for here. (“Don’t say those words, Ed.”) —And how the hell did he know Tolliver (drowned, hidden Tolliver, carrying out his own subterfuges; Tolliver, whose uncovery is Ed’s undoing) was making a pass at him, anyway?
We’re so used to subtext being, well, text these days: self-conscious, self-aware, arch and knowing and in your face. It’s startling to see it played straight for once (again)—startling, and powerful.
—As for Amelie: it was beautiful and pretty and giddy and stirring and sexy and it’s glossy pop-colored candy and it made me want to go back to Paris, but. Much less humane. I can’t, for example, excuse the cruel pranks she plays on the grocer. I don’t care how much of a schmuck he is to his assistant. This sort of movie tends to immediately categorize people as Good or Bad and mete out punishments or rewards accordingly, smugly, with the audience cheering it on. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Much less humane than, say, Fargo.
nicholas urfé
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