A Room with an infinite number of views

There is a moment in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) in which novelist Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) gazes into a scale model of a labyrinth that lies just outside the walls of the Overlook Hotel, the remote ski resort where he and his family are spending the winter. In that model he sees the real thing, and in that real thing he will eventually become lost and perish. The labyrinth is a trap. The movie is a labyrinth. The trap is the movie.

Based on the novel by Stephen King, The Shining was Kubrick’s one stab at horror. It’s a story of familial collapse, writer’s block and cabin fever. (It may also be a ghost story, though that’s up for debate.) But after you see Rodney Ascher’s remarkable essay film Room 237, named after an especially troublesome room at the Overlook, you might start to believe that The Shining is also about the Holocaust, the colonization of the Americas, and how NASA faked the moon landing. The film is structured around interviews with five subjects who each have exceedingly elaborate theories about the film’s real meanings, theories based on architectural inconsistencies, typewriters, canned foods, posters, carpeting and the number of vehicles in a parking lot. Ascher weaves these interviews into a symphony of fringe scholarship and film clips, a beguiling, immersive homage to obsessive interpretation and the looming power of a work of art in which no seemingly inexplicable detail can possibly be the result of mere accident.

Producer Tim Kirk and director Rodney Ascher

I spoke with Ascher and producer Tim Kirk during last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where Room 237 screened to the delight of the city’s most ardent cinephiles. We met at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, which, though located in the heart of Canada’s biggest city, retains just enough aging luxury to evoke the appropriate creepiness.

JB: In the press notes for Room 237 you mention how you guys would take walks with your children to discuss The Shining. There’s something creepy about that. I guess because, amongst the apparently infinite number of readings one can apply to the film, it is also parable about families falling apart.

Rodney Ascher: Absolutely. One of the interesting things about re-watching The Shining over the course of 30 years is noting how your relationship to it changes. As a kid, Danny is your surrogate. Yet as we enter other stages of our lives, Jack becomes this cautionary figure. Perhaps in another 30 years I’ll be identifying with the ghosts.

Tim Kirk: What makes that idea of us walking with our children even creepier is that when you’re with your kids the goal is to be present, yet Rodney and I would be there, several layers of theory in—that Aztec reading, how does that align with the reading involving Native Americans?

JB: Your roles in this project seem primarily curatorial. But as you began compiling these different readings, were there any that you were especially persuaded by?

TK: We had moments with almost everyone where suddenly the hairs would go up on the back of the neck and you’d think, “Oh my god, are they right? And if so, what does that mean with regards to this film and the universe and how I understand life?”

RA: As you watch Room 237 you’re spending five or six minutes with each of these people at a time. Making the film, I listened to these interviews for hours. I didn’t always understand what the subjects were talking about when we were conducting the interviews. But then I would bring it into the computer and start lining it up with the footage, and suddenly think, “Right on the money.” I should add that I was making this movie after my kids’ bedtime, so it’s three in the morning when I’m putting scenes together. I would almost always believe everything while I was working on it.

JB: You spend enough time immersed in something and you start to demand to a consistent logic. You want the mirror world to make sense in the way the real world is supposed to make sense. So by the time Juli Kearns is addressing the geography of the Overlook Hotel and these windows that shouldn’t be there, I’m thinking, “I know this is fiction, but still, if those windows aren’t logical then there must be a reason!”

RA: That’s because other movies don’t have as concrete a sense of space as The Shining. Perhaps they’re shot with long lenses and the background is often just a blur.  But here you have this film shot with wide-angle lenses and long takes that are snaking through hallways, so you get such a strong sense of this being a real space.

TK: I’m really drawn to your thought there, that as a viewer entering a cinema, especially with someone like Kubrick, who has a reputation of being in control of every frame, you feel like there’s this unwritten contract that this world is going to make sense in the way that you understand the real world. So that Kubrick messes with that contract is one of the things that’s so compelling about The Shining.

JB: Someone in Room 237 makes a point of saying that intentionality is not an essential component of any reading of a work of art. But Kubrick being the kind of artist that he was makes it impossible not to see intention everywhere—there surely can’t be such a thing as a continuity error. And someone else points out that The Shining is, for the most part, a barely supernatural story, so we can’t simply chalk things up to sheer inexplicability.

RA: There are many supernatural events in the novel, but in the movie, the only time when something clearly supernatural occurs is when the door gets unlocked. And even there, John Fell Ryan came up with a logical explanation as to how that happened. So while there are a lot of bizarre tableaus, what’s physically happening is not so strange. Many have suggested that Jack is simply talking to himself. One theory we weren’t able to use points out that whenever Jack is talking to the ghosts there’s always a mirror opposite him.

JB: Because Kubrick seemed to have no special interest in horror or the supernatural, I wonder if part of the reason why The Shining is especially magnetic has to do with that tension between the material and the director’s MO. As I watched Room 237 I kept asking myself if your movie could be about another movie, if you could apply a similar tack to any number of works.

RA: Our research didn’t yield too many films that generated a body of exegesis to rival that of The Shining’s.   

TK: Though I’m surprised that there’s not as much about 2001. Eyes Wide Shut is a growth industry right now. There’s a lot of writing going on about that one.

JB: Interesting that you mention Eyes Wide Shut, because that and The Shining are both Kubrick films that have never really gained critical consensus.

RA: Several of our commentators talk about not loving The Shinning when they first saw it, yet they felt some strange moth-to-flame attraction that prompted them to go back to it.

TK: That impossible geography had a lot to do with me wanting to go back to The Shining. It felt like a dream. I knew there was something wrong. Juli’s theory was part of the honey that I got stuck in.

RA: She’s taken that theory to a level or two deeper than we get to in Room 237, where she even tracks the paths that characters take through certain rooms in different scenes, and then she superimposes those maps… Every time I mention something that didn’t get in the movie I feel this sting. Some might think that an hour and 40 minutes is a lot of time to talk about metaphors and secret messages in The Shining, but it could have been three hours long and still we would have only grazed the tip of the iceberg.

JB: It could have been longer for me. I think about Zodiac, another movie that deals with obsession and the unanswerable, and is on the long side. I’ve heard people complain about Zodiac’s length, but my response is always “How can you expect to get a strong feeling for the accumulation of suspicion and paranoia and obsessive investment without that duration?”

RA: Such a great sense of time passing in Zodiac.

JB: I felt similar with 237. A prudent 75-minute version would never have the punch of something that, in the best possible sense, is overstaying its welcome just a little. It needs to have that feeling that maybe it could go on forever.

RA: Which is why we tried to end it like a circuit, going back to the beginning. It was clear early in our research that we weren’t going to exhaust every major theory. We wanted to suggest that there’s so much more—and it’s still happening. I was looking at a YouTube video that a friend of Jay Weidner’s had made. There was this moment in The Shining where he’d heard an off-screen voice speaking the word “Shown.” Like “Shinning” in past-tense. This happens two or three times.

TK: And he found that it occurred at key transitional moments for Jack.

RA: Then I revisited Juli Kearns’ website and found that she also heard that “Shown.” I became really intrigued by the notion that if someone watched this movie in a supremely concentrated way, this anomaly would suddenly manifest so that everyone could hear it. [Laughs] It didn’t exist before, but was introduced into the film by sheer force of will.

JB: I think Philip K. Dick would have loved that theory.

[Everyone laughs]

JB: Going back to the way The Shining changes over time, when I first saw the film I was a small child and it scared the hell out of me. Coming back to it as an adult the effect is very different. It’s a common enough complaint, but it started to bother me that Nicholson already seems bonkers at the beginning of the film, and thus there’s no real suspense. Yet after seeing 237 I came to the conclusion that maybe that’s why The Shining is one of those films that you obsessively re-watch, because you’re not watching to experience a dynamic narrative arc—you’re watching it as an ambient experience. The backwards-forwards screening you included in 237 supports this idea. There is no arc, no change. Because Jack’s always been there.

RA: The forwards-backwards thing is so interesting. People think of Kubrick as a symmetrical filmmaker, but they’re usually thinking this with regards to composition. His work is symmetrical in time as well. Full Metal Jacket is a film made of two halves designed to echo each other. But regarding your feeling about the film’s lack of character development, I know people say that Jack seems crazy at the beginning, but every time I watch the film I’m always rooting for him, hoping he’s going to get his act together. [Laughs] This time we’re going to work through things!

JB: Critics have really responded to your film, and I think one reason for this is that, not to be disrespectful to your subjects, but it feels like a parody of film criticism, of how certain critics can get to a point where we’re so determined to stake a claim that we start analyzing minutia as though it’s the essence of the text.

RA: That makes a lot of sense, though it’s not something we talked about.

TK: We wanted to let our subjects present their ideas as best we could.

RA: We tried to get the audience to see the movie through their eyes.

JB: And the choice to not have your subjects appear on camera, was that because you didn’t want to have viewers be distracted by judgments about how these people look or what kind of space they inhabit.

TK: That was one consideration. We also didn’t want real-world credentials. We don’t introduce Bill Blakemore as a journalist; we just use his name.

RA: There’s also something about the essay film style that exists better in the world of imagination than on a couch in somebody’s office. It gets more under your skin.

JB: This approach reminds us of the power of just having a voice in people’s heads. The imagery in 237 is already familiar to its viewers, so what moves the film forward mainly has to do with these ideas, with these voices in the ether—they could even be voices in Jack’s head.

RA: Someone described them as ghosts. I love that idea.

TK: And you can’t always tell who’s talking. That’s pleasingly disorienting as well.

RA: I’ve read some critics who say that idea A is baloney, while idea B is really meaningful. And it seemed that they weren’t aware that both ideas came from the same person.

JB: I suppose the fake moon landing is probably the one that feels closest to conspiracy theory thinking.

RA: And yet its logic is consistent. That one really turned into a rabbit hole for me when I started to watch the special features on the 2001 DVD. I did my own research and it started to become more plausible for me. John Fell Ryan says that this is the great trap: once you start looking for clues, you just keep finding them. And they never stop appearing.  

          

Done with mirrors: The Magician on DVD

In the carriage we find a troupe of traveling showmen: a mute mesmerist in a corny fake beard, a beautiful woman in drag, and a bespectacled, hunched-over crone who claims to be a 200 year-old witch. Call them mystics, entertainers, or businessmen like anyone else, they’re still fugitives the lot, wanted on charges of fraud and blasphemy, which makes you wonder just what it is their audiences were expecting. It’s the middle of the 19th century and all over Europe are towns not big enough for both science and the spirit.


The troupe offers a lift to a fellow thespian found starving in a wood, an alcoholic seemingly on his deathbed. His name is Spiegel, the Swedish word for mirror, so when Vogler (Max Von Sydow) hovers over him closely, smelling the despair on the man’s breath, there’s much to imply that he might as well be looking at himself, or what he’ll become just a few more miles down the road.


The troupe arrives in Stockholm, where they’re to perform for a small, elite audience, among them the chief of police and the royal medical advisor (Gunnar Björnstrand), a righteous rationalist determined to prove irrefutably that their magic show is a sham. Though his more intimate struggles would be dramatized numerous times over the coarse of his long career, The Magician (1958), newly available from Criterion, is probably Ingmar Bergman’s most unabashedly autobiographical film about his professional life, pitting artists and critics against each another to see who can out-humiliate who. Björnstrand’s debunker was based on the critic Harry Schein, who Bergman felt persecuted by. Schein was the husband of actress Ingrid Thulin, and this knowledge injects a delicious audacity into a scene where Björnstrand simultaneously iterates his distaste for the troupe’s hocus-pocus and confesses his attraction to Thulin, who plays Von Sydow’s wife. Björnstrand has a line here that’s terribly on-the-nose yet somehow more potent for it, as though he himself were mesmerized and felt compelled to utter some naked truth: “You represent what I despise most of all: the inexplicable.”


The Magician was made during a transitional point in Bergman’s career: between The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring; between anxiety about death and anxiety about godlessness; between collaborations with cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist; between staging his films as, to some degree, extensions of his theatre practice, and transforming his aesthetic into something more wholly cinematic, driven as much by the characters’ internal states as their external dramas. It’s never been an especially beloved installment in Bergman’s oeuvre, and critics fret every now and then about whether it successfully adopts one genre or another, since some sections are comic, while the climax borrows conventions from horror. I can’t get too worked up about regarding any Bergman film’s genre status, but I find it tremendously interesting to see how The Magician so casually dismantles the obligatory narrative conventions used in every genre. It starts out focused on the troupe and implies that Von Sydow’s the hero. Yet we gradually become more invested in Thulin, who’s character and performance are more sympathetic and dynamic. (Von Sydow, usually so very good in Bergman, is a little hammy here, his character’s silence prompting him to overact with his face and hands. This overcompensation for silence would be memorably corrected some years later by another Vogler: Liv Ullmann in Bergman’s Persona [66].) Regardless, a third of the way into the film we abandon these characters and their adversaries both and pass an extensive digression with two younger, minor characters hungry to bring excitement to their lives: the troupe’s coachman and a servant girl, played by a very sexy yet subtly sad Bibi Andersson, who each drink from an ostensible love potion and await the results with a certain desperation. It’s as though Bergman conceived The Magician not as a propulsive drama or even a character study, but rather a sort of ensemble-driven essay on precarious ambitions under constant threat of having the rug pulled out from under.


We gradually come to the troupe’s performance, thoroughly pulled apart and laughed at, as promised, and to a series of deaths or seeming deaths, one being that of a man we already thought dead, another being a man we can’t quite believe is dead, and still another being a death already foretold by the crone, who may be the film’s one genuine mystic. These deaths set the stage for a carefully devised haunting meant to shake up Björnstrand. It’s a wonderful display of trickery, much of it dependent on mirrors, shadow and imagination, none of it ultimately capable of persuading Björnstrand that he was wrong in his initial assertions. Not that it matters. The troupe comes and goes and want only to amuse us, and perhaps move us, for the short duration of their stopover. As Bergman himself writes in his memoir Images: My Life in Film, which is excerpted in the booklet that accompanies Criterion’s disc, “I had often felt that I was involved in a continuous, rather joyous prostitution. My job was to beguile the audience.”

Citizen on patrol: A conversation with Jonathan Lethem about work, groups, genre, the movies, and the enduring power of Dick

A subterranean monster-tiger wreaks destruction upon New York below a chocolate-scented cloud that emits ear-piercing drones heard only by select citizens. Somewhere within the city’s labyrinthine clusters of living space, mystically glowing vases attract stupendous bids on eBay. The socio-geographical canvas of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (Vintage, $17.95) is teeming with the fantastic and the hilariously banal. The novel chronicles the friendship of Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth, the former a grown-up child star now semi-famous for being the fiancé of Janice Trumbull, an astronaut trapped indefinitely in the International Space Station, the latter a dandyish, borderline recluse, and cult-legend arts critic with a fondness for burgers, weed, and Marlon Brando. The pleasures of Lethem’s latest are derived from its relentless invention, sense of place, masterful banter, micro-hierarchies, deliciously absurd dinners with pajama-clad millionaires, and luxurious descriptions of characters that are only intermittently realistic yet nearly always suffused with truth and insight. I spoke with Lethem last November in Toronto, lost my record of our conversation, then found it again, just in time for Chronic City’s trade paperback release.


JB: Several critics have noted the unusual blend of density of incident and paucity of classical narrative structure in Chronic City. Were you conscious of nurturing this sort of busy looseness?

Jonathan Lethem: That’s a great term for it. I think of this book as having an extremely somber, morbid background, almost like a giant Hieronymus Bosch mural of New York City in the 21st century, specifically of Manhattan between 9/11 and the financial collapse. In the foreground, it’s really an antic tangle of characters and their day-to-day hanging out. It’s behaviour. It’s not a plot in a classical sense. It’s almost more like a season of Seinfeld. One stupid day spent with this bunch of people after the next. Their self-absorption is thematically linked to the things that are wrong with the city I’m writing about.

JB: It has a fluidity that’s dictated by the ensemble. In a sense it reminds me of certain Robert Altman films.

JL: That’s good! I like that too. That makes sense.


JB: In your last book of stories, as well as in You Don’t Love Me Yet and Chronic City, I’ve been enjoying your sensitivity to social hierarchies and group dynamics, how different personalities negotiate their place in a rock band, a dinner party or some impromptu assembly of previously compartmentalized friends.

JL: I’m very interested in people forming groups, both useful and useless ones. I’m interested in the structures we arrange for ourselves, what we can take from them and how they can become hiding places or worlds unto themselves.

JB: It occurred to me that for all the more identifiably science-fiction genre work you’ve written, Chronic City seems the most directly indebted to Philip K. Dick. I was recently reading A Maze of Death and Ubik and it occurred to me that Dick’s work is also often deeply concerned with group dynamics.

JL: Absolutely. Chronic City definitely marks a return for me. Having re-read so many of Dick’s books to put together those Library of America volumes, I renewed what is a very permanent influence, a very permanent engagement for me. I got down to the root level with it again and thought, I can use this stuff, I can make more of this again. Because I’d become a very different writer from when I first set out and was very consciously influenced by Dick. I can transmute these materials in a new way because of things I’ve since learned to do and the way I’ve learned to write about New York City. So I was very aware of bringing him into this one.

JB: Has being a father changed your writing?

JL: Probably. It’s been very good on a mechanical level. It meant that I found an office outside of my house and work on a computer with no internet. So instead of indulging myself in sort of always writing and never writing, working throughout the day in this very princely way, now I go and I’m a worker. I get my job done for a few hours and then I go on to other responsibilities. I like the result of that. The deeper, thematic effects of fatherhood will likely emerge only very slowly. I’m not a journalist on ay level. I’m very slow to reflect parts of my life in my work. It took me 20 years to write about my childhood in Brooklyn.


JB: Do you always find a place for some version of yourself in your books?

JL: I feel I’m everywhere. Even before I was writing in any way autobiographically, I could see that I was turning aspects of myself into various characters. If they live at all it’s because I’ve smuggled something of myself into them. It sounds very solipsistic. The book itself is a virtual hall of mirrors. But it’s also my enthusiasms, my responses, my friends, characters from other people’s books, all of these things.

JB: I suppose writing about art is a way of giving your characters life. I’m thinking of Fortress of Solitude and the sheer number of artists or art enthusiasts in that book.

JL: In that book especially art is a mediating way to dwell on the world. The graffiti artists, the musicians, the science-fiction convention, all of these are different ways that people try to thrive in a difficult universe through the avenue of culture. Even criticism, even Dylan Edbus’ writing about music, is an attempt to build some kind of meaningful place for himself.

JB: Chronic City starts in the offices of the Criterion Collection and features numerous digressions into film culture. You’re obviously a film nut. Have you never entertained the notion of writing for the screen, or even directing?

JL: When I was a kid I wanted to be a director very much, but to do that would be rival commitment to the one I’ve made to writing fiction. I don’t think screenwriting is where the action is. If I cared to make film I’d have to direct it. So I’ve just decided to just enjoy this adjacent relationship where I write books that are very responsive to film and in turn tend to attract filmmakers and get me into all sorts of interesting, sticky bystander situations. That’s just enough to give me the fun of dabbling in that world without the totally intimidating prospect of actually originating something myself. I watch filmmakers. My wife is a filmmaker. It’s not an art to be a dabbler or dilettante in. It’s enormous.

JB: Are there things you’d like to convey without words?

JL: I do think about that. I was a painter for a long time, and even in a very wordy book like Chronic City I’m interested in issues of inexpressibility, conundrums that defy language. But I’m pretty well situated where I am. I get to do a lot of what I want to do.


JB: To speak more generally of the culture-obsessive quality of your books, do you ever think about how this aspect of your work will speak to future generations? I’ve often recommended Fortress of Solitude, but I’ve recommended it most often to people who share some of my own interests in the art, films and music referred to in the text. Do you envision a day when new editions of Fortress of Solitude will require copious footnotes?

JL: God bless that possibility. That would be cool if it rated those footnotes. People always want me to be concerned about this issue, and I sometimes try to be, but when you read Dickens you’re in Dickens’ London, with every immensity of detail, the street names, the commercial jingles that were in the air, the snippets of folk culture dialect and jokes. When you encounter Saul Bellow you’re immersed in his mid-century Chicago, and for better or worse you just have to embrace it. And you do because it’s all emotionally charged for him. I just try to meet that standard. I try to make everything matter on the terms of the book. I try not to let anything be too indulgent and extraneous. If you’re going to write about culture you have to accept that you have one.

JB: Do you read as much as you used to?

JL: Never as much as I did. When I was a teenager and through my 20s I was an insanely voracious reader. I miss that, but I could never reproduce those conditions. Forget having a family, once I really got my habit of writing going, that occupies too much of the same mental space, and even physical space, the sitting still, using your eyes. So I couldn’t read the way I used to, but I try to read a lot.

JB: Do you still have relevatory experiences reading?

JL: Yes. Again, they couldn’t come as rapidly as when one week I was discovering Kafka and the next I was discovering Stanislaw Lem and the next Shirley Jackson. I was moving through worlds so rapidly. There are fewer earth-shattering experiences, but when it happens the earth still shatters. Reading Roberto Bolaño the last couple of years did that for me.

JB: Do you read while deep into work?

JL: Yeah, I always do. There’s nothing that I’m trying to protect from influence. It’s great if I get excited about something while working. It reminds me of what it’s for.

JB: I was recently speaking with Paul Auster and was struck by his claim to not read anything, at least not fiction, while he’s working.

JL: He gets more novels written than I do, so perhaps there’s something to be said for that. [Laughs]

What is criticism? Ask David Berry!

David Berry, my plucky young friend and courageous colleague, has written a terrific little piece for Vue Weekly about critics on criticism, what it is, what it isn't, how to do it, and why it might actually be fun. Among those critics David quotes in the piece: tireless Moviegoer Paul Matwychuk, whose blog is a beloved part of my daily nerd-out, and, you guessed it, me! JB! With much wit, insight, and a good helping of unabashed self-interest, David manages to hit an awful lot of great points in a fairly compact space. I urge you all to check it out, which, thanks to the magic of the interweb, you can do right now, with a mere click!

If I were John Carpenter and you were a Satan: revisiting Prince of Darkness

In some dilapidated, out-of-use Los Angeles church sits the ultimate cocktail. It swirls in a cylinder, demon-green, smoky, and capable of inducing a hell of a mean drunk. Donald Pleasence is a priest who enlists Victor Wong’s cockeyed, waddling old professor and his finest PhD physics students to come and investigate the weirdness. According to the promptly decoded accompanying literature the cocktail is actually the Anti-Christ, waiting to materialize and enter the world all decked out in Nosferatu garb. The local homeless population, overdressed and uniformly grotesque, stand around like catatonics apparently waiting to do the evil one’s bidding, whereas the Anti-Christ has to hork loogies into the mouths of the smart middleclass academics to get them playing on his team. One of them turns into a pillar of bugs before collapsing in the parking lot. Another has her skin turned inside out and hangs before a mirror to take Satan by the hand and pull him out. Tachyon transmissions from the future override the dreams of all involved. “Our logic collapses on the subatomic level into ghosts and shadows,” says Wong. It also collapses at the movies, which can invade our subconscious even while our conscious mind knows perfectly well that what we’re watching is very, very silly.


Prince of Darkness screened last night at my neighbourhood second-run/rep cinema. I was eager to revisit the film after having last seen it at least a decade and a half ago—the length of my adult life, basically. I was prompted not only by a voracious appetite for horror, not only by a longing to remember what it was about the film that scared me so intensely as a kid. (For the record, it was the grainy television broadcast dreams from the future, as well as that startlingly despairing image of a woman suddenly finding herself trapped forever on the other side of a mirror with Satan. Plus, well, anything apocalyptic freaked me out as a kid.) What drew me to watch Prince of Darkness again was also my recent reading of Kent Jones’ eloquent 1998 essay on Carpenter, ‘American Movie Classic.’ Jones is one of the very few critics whose work has not only enlightened but actually moved me, and his heartfelt defense of Carpenter’s oeuvre struck a chord, especially since it reminded me of one of the most arrogant things I think I ever wrote in my shambling, accidental career as a critic. It was something to the effect of Carpenter seeming like “kind of a dumb guy.” I won’t try to justify this now rather embarrassing statement other than to say I was reviewing Ghosts of Mars—sorry, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars—I was very young, and I was trying on what I thought might be the critic’s cloak. (Rest assured, a reader did write in to take me to task for this.) The one piece of advice that Paul Matwychuk, my first editor, always stressed when asked was that I should be more opinionated. He was absolutely right to do suggest this to me, but it’s an inherent risk of the trade that sometimes being opinionated winds up making you sound like a nincompoop.


“Carpenter stands completely and utterly alone as the last genre filmmaker in America,” writes Jones. My first response to reading this was, what about Carl Franklin? But my second was a sense of the genuine nobility of this role in the film industry, a role once filled with such dynamicism by the likes of, to use Jones’ examples, Edgar G. Ulmer or Robert Siodmack. Cinema history has taught us repeatedly that working—seemingly—within the dictates of the establishment, within the literal generic, offers filmmakers unique opportunities for subversion, subtlety, sophistication, and signature. But with the exception of Assault of Precinct 13, I confess that all my recent Carpenter viewings—which by means have been complete—have left me questioning again and again the distinction and richness of the filmmaker’s contributions to the various genres he’s dealt in.


Prince of Darkness is an interesting case study, written by Carpenter under a pseudonym, featuring no stars to overshadow the general buzz of collaboration under the guidance of a by then highly respected auteur—or to cloud the frequently awkward, faux-banal dialogue, hokey exposition, shrugged-off love story, or somewhat muddled treatise on the limits of science and religion and the ostensible urgency of their marriage. Of course, those TV news footage dreams and that through-the-looking-glass death shot endure, still freaking me out between my spells of hypnosis induced by yet another of Carpenter’s thin, monotonously portentous synth scores, and fits of spontaneous laughter, from myself and my fellow audience members, over Pleasence’s hammy monologues, Alice Cooper’s rather improbable impaling of a guy with a bicycle, Satan’s overwrought messages warning of his wrath, his acrobatic zombie minions, and that guy from Simon & Simon, who actually gives a fairly solid performance but whose moustache dances every time he smiles. (I should add however that Wong is terrific in the film, and the ending is quite nicely timed.) Jones champions Carpenter’s willingness to tell stories where protagonists are confronted with some pure, external evil, but I still question the depth of Carpenter’s investment in evil in Prince of Darkness as much as in Christine, where the car from hell is so inane it demands to take a backseat to the much more stimulating relationships, the nicely rendered air of teen alienation, and the filmmakers’ obsession with the vestiges of the 1950s. If only those elements, all of them worthwhile, could take control of the film rather than finally submit to the cornball, humdrum horror movie plot mechanics.


I’ll keep at this task of watching Carpenter’s films, probably every last one of them, partly out of my attempt to understand Jones’ fascination and respect, and partly because the truth is I have yet to see a single Carpenter film that’s all bad. Each seems to have its charms, the craftsmanship brought to the simplest details especially. The details are as consistently winning as the premises tend to feel negligible, leaving you wondering what does Carpenter really care about? What does he really want to share with us? What in these stories really speaks to him? I remember watching him interviewed on television and hearing him say that movies don’t scare him. So maybe that’s my fantasy John Carpenter movie, the one where we might actually get some glimpse at what really scares, beguiles, or moves John Carpenter.

Closer and closer readings: Farber on Film

An essential volume on any film-lover's shelf, the new Farber on Film: the Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, $40 US/$50 CAN) was edited by Robert Polito, who authored a terrific Jim Thompson biography some years back called Savage Art. Farber died last year at the age of 91. He hadn’t written about film since the 70s, when he dedicated himself full-time to painting. Yet his perspective retains a colossal vitality. He wasn’t bent on prescience. On the contrary, he was rigorous about seeing movies as they played to their moment in time. (It’s why he was wrong about the protagonist’s motivation in Taxi Driver—Travis Bickle’s gnomic personal obsessions have aged better than Farber’s suggestion that he should have been driven by pure need for celebrity.) But Farber immersed himself in films with an observational prowess that the rest of us are still trying to catch up to.

Taxi Driver

As promised in the subtitle, this doorstop delivers the whole course of Farber’s critical career, nearly 800 pages worth. The book has an exhaustive index and lends itself to random browsing, but there’s something cathartic in reading from cover-to-cover, in watching Farber develop his sensibility through the 40s in regular columns for The New Republic or The Nation before seeing that sensibility come to full fruition in the expansive essays that populated his revered late collection Negative Space. As Polito notes in his superb introduction, “Farber is perhaps the only American critic of modernism to write as a modernist.” From the first sentence Farber is cantankerous and muscular and eager to push the language. From the first he’s broad in vision, weaving the state of wartime US politics and culture, the state of film industry and film art, into his arresting, provocative prose. From the first he thwarts the urge toward quick-fix criticism so that you can’t even tell if he likes something, and who cares when he’s drawing us always closer to really seeing and hearing what the movies are doing, what they can do, what they don’t do, what they should.

Double Indemnity

The title Negative Space is apt: Farber can be pretty damned negative at times—at first blush you might wonder if he actually likes movies—while his roaming senses, trained by painting and photography, not to mention sports, always peruse the whole of the filmic space, digging into corners, probing the cavities, sometimes at the expense of certain elements we often cling to as being essential, like theme. While getting high on his championing of underdog works like Moontide or The Set-Up or anything produced by Val Lewton, my head spun and my jaw dropped when Farber, at times given to contrarianism, laid into Double Indemnity, The Magnificent Ambersons, Laura, My Darling Clementine, The Third Man, Sunset Blvd with such merciless, surgical precision. But Farber's readings feel more alive, more actively wrestling with these films and what they represent—where they fall in the culture—than the vast bulk of comfortably reverential, historically assured writing they’ve generated from hundreds of other writers—myself included. True, Farber’s take on Rashomon feels excessively sharpened by preconceived suspicions about Kurosawa’s flashy technique while basically ignoring the dark tide of uncertainty that undercuts its every scene, just as his dismissal of Billy Wilder’s cynical adoration of tough-talking lowlifes seems the product of Farber’s general repugnance toward Wilder’s employment of gloss. But unlike every other critic who’s ever used that laziest of pejoratives, “arty,” Farber invested the first half of his career in defining precisely what sort of threat studio era “artiness” posed.

High Sierra

While working through Farber’s ongoing reports from the American cinema of the 40s and 50s there were times I wondered if his division of films into the economical/unassuming/action-driven and the pretentious/Oscar-baiting/self-consciously flashy wasn’t too reductive, not to mention highly oriented toward, and more forgiving of, what can’t help but feel like an almost exclusively masculine sensibility. Yet the narrative inherent in Farber on Film, the long and dogged establishing of a perspective, builds in increments, shaping itself through reflection, reassessment, comparison and cultural change, until we arrive at the first definitive statement of Farber’s thesis-in-progress, the 1962 essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.’ “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” White Elephant Art, by contrast, is plagued by “a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film.” Farber zeroes in on something that can manifest as many things for different viewers: spontaneity, abandon, risk, freshness, process-over-product, attentiveness to the full measure of what film can access, openness to accident. It also favours acting that seizes our fascination by being nothing more than, as he writes in ‘The Decline of the Actor,’ “simply curiosity flexing itself,” that prizes the fleeting exhilaration of something as ephemeral as Bogart glancing up at a street sign when he didn’t have to; the way Ida Lupino "works closely and guardedly to the camera, retracting into herself, steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching"; by the presence of Liv Ullman, "one of those rare passive Elegants in acting who can leave the screen to another actor and still score." The Elephant vs. Termite perspective found Farber embracing B-movies, where filmmakers were better able to wriggle free of the front office and quietly produce subversive wonders in the margins of often seemingly negligible material. It found Farber embracing sly supporting performances that could almost function as critiques of the pompous leads surrounding them. From ‘Pish-Tush’: “Movies that have become classics… are never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in the back of the static mannered acting of some great star.” But while Farber’s dichotomy remained in place, what compelled Farber changed radically as the 1960s changed assumptions about what might constitute artiness, termites and elephants. His gradual admiration and rich appreciations for Godard pays off all the more for the insights of his early skepticism. Defenses of Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks became defenses of artists as potentially "arty" as Chantal Ackerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog. He's actually quite friendly to Easy Rider, and to Terrence Malick. And far from cultivating a strictly male perspective, Farber gradually began to co-author essays with his wife Patricia Patterson. Among some of the best late essays are exhaustive assessments of Herzog, Luis Buñuel and Nicolas Roeg.

Farber, with typewriter and white-out

What’s great about Farber on Film is that it emphasizes how good criticism takes nothing for granted. Writing an essay called ‘The Subverters’ in 1966, when film studies departments and popular critics were busy trying to build a canon, “to bring some order and shape to film history,” Farber declared such efforts “doomed to failure because of the subversive nature of the medium: the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of a film.” This persistent unruliness of movies is among the things that make it so seductive to some and infuriating to others. The medium is all about motion, and it refuses to sit still and politely concede to definitive, settled judgments. So Farber moved along with it. His opinions were strong and ruthless—and always open to adjustment. He’s one of the only critics whose reviews the reviewed filmmakers—that all filmmakers—can actually learn from, to say nothing of audiences. I know I’m a better, more fulfilled, more stimulated film watcher for reading him. I only hope it can make me a better film critic, too.