Last year my friend Tom Nissley appeared on Jeopardy!, winning eight straight games, which allowed him to quit his job as a Books editor at Amazon …more

I’ve been writing this column off and on for a few years now and I thought I’d shake it up a bit by turning it into a dialogue. …more

I’m midway through teaching a course at Antioch University Seattle called Unreal Fiction and Film. Every week we pair a film or selection of shorts with a short story. The class is scheduled from 7-10 PM on Mondays, a brutal slot, but every week I’ve left invigorated by the discussion. While recognizing that the very nature of cinema is “unreal,” and that what we think of as “realism” is a codified system of contrivances, I’ve sought to present films that in some way challenge conventional representational of physical reality and time.

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In July, 2010, I delivered a keynote address at Goddard College’s MFA Writing residency in Port Townsend, Washington, on the theme “Composing the Wilderness.” This essay is included in an anthology of addresses given by Goddard College MFA faculty, to be published in early 2011. Following is the essay in full. …more

Last week for my Hugo House class on using experimental films as writing prompts we spent 88 glorious minutes with House, the 1977 Japanese haunted pajama party freak-out directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. This week we puzzled ourselves with three stop-motion animated shorts. …more

Session four of my six-part class on using experimental films as writing prompts commenced last night at Richard Hugo House.

In previous weeks we viewed films by Buñuel, Brakhage, and Anger, moving westward from Spain to Colorado to Los Angeles. This week we hopped across the Pacific to Japan, where we encountered Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, quite possibly the most psychedelic movie ever to come out of Asia. This week I came prepared. I brought my students beer. …more

Are there some films you have to take drugs to enjoy? I asked this question toward the end of this week’s session of the class on experimental films I’m teaching at Richard Hugo House, after spending two hours with the films of Kenneth Anger. …more

I taught another session of my Experimental Films as Writing Prompts class at Hugo House last night. This one we looked at some films by Stan Brakhage. At the outset of the class I admitted that I had no idea what the hell was going to happen, how they would react to the shorts I was about to show, or whether the session would prove to have any value whatsoever. Essentially our session on Brakhage was an experiment itself, with our brains and eyeballs as test subjects. …more

I’m teaching a class at Richard Hugo House in which we look at experimental films as writing prompts. I’ve always wanted to teach a film class, and marrying writing exercises to viewings of films seemed like a good way to shoehorn this desire into a nonprofit literary arts center. There are aspects of cinema that overlap with fiction (narrative, obviously), but I’m becoming more interested in cinema’s points of divergence from fiction, the points at which it achieves something beyond narrative, where it leaps into a realm that can only be expressed visually.

What better place to start than Un Chien Andalou? …more

What’s going on with Michel Gondry’s career these days? Well, this, for starters… …more

You want to watch an on-demand movie with your wife, something funny, something in which you can become invested in the characters’ problems, something from the “New Arrivals” section, and you keep scrolling back to It’s Complicated, a film starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, and you hate yourself a little bit for even considering it, but …more

If you’re like me, you grew up running various scenarios about what you’d do if the world were to end. Would you go nuts and run around in a stadium wearing a woman’s slip like the guy in The Quiet Earth? Would you give yourself that mohawk you always wanted and drive a dunebuggy around the desert like one of the extras in The Road Warrior? Or would you gravitate to Denver, Colorado to follow Mother Abigail, or to Las Vegas to follow the Walking Dude? Choices, choices.
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On New Year’s Day this year I removed all the bookmarks from my Firefox bookmarks bar. When I mentioned to a couple friends that my resolution was to lay off the political blogs, I got variations on the same response: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular resolution right now. My resolution hasn’t worked out all that well; instead of clicking links I simply type andrewsullivan.com into my browser window to maintain my daily outrage level. I worry that I’m addicted to incredulity, that for some twisted reason I need to seek out the tawdriest filth erupting from the mouths of the Limbaughs and Becks and Palins of the world in order to define myself in opposition. …more

I’ve written about watching movies with my children in this column, about introducing my son Miles to the films of Ray Harryhausen and watching him vomit during a viewing of E.T.. Having an amateur’s enthusiasm for films that span the history of cinema, I’m determined to provide my kids with a young cinephile’s education, steering them to Miyazaki and Melies and away from, say, The Backyardigans. …more

Sure, I like the Beastie Boys as much as any dude of my vintage, having heeded the call to fight for my right to party as a junior high school student then asked to check my head as a college student living in a house called the Punk Rock Pagoda during the peak years of grunge. …more

My family was recently out of town for a five days, leaving me home alone with over 800 pages (no exaggeration) of student work to read and comment upon. My reward for getting through a day of writing about free indirect style and character arcs was to watch a lot of movies, both in the theater and at home, cranked up loud on the home system and with a fuckin’ beer in my hand. Here’s how those five days went.

Saturday:
Inglourious Basterds. By now you’ve probably read lots of commentary on Tarantino’s latest. My two cents is that I could listen to those characters talk all night. It felt like a 5-hour movie in a 2 1/2 hour movie’s body and I wanted it to go on and on. A few weeks ago I happened upon a Sirius/XM radio broadcast in which Tarantino guest-deejayed. He played songs that he’d listened to while making Basterds. Here’s the complete set list.

Wu Tang Clan, “The Rulez”
KT Tunstall, “Hold On”
Bob Dylan, “Political World”
Barbra Streisand, “Stony End”
Robin McNamara, “Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me”
Sir Douglas Quintet, “Mendocino”
David Bowie, “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” – from Bowie’s Greatest Hits (not Cat People Sdtrk)
Jay Z, “S. Carter”
Roy Orbison, “There Won’t Be Many Coming Home”
Jason Mraz, “I’m Yours (Acoustic)”
Maroon 5, “Wake Up Call”
Steve Poltz, “Waterfalls”
Britney Spears, “My Prerogative”

I happened to tune in at the end of the Roy Orbison tune. I can respect people who like Roy Orbison, though to me he was always little more than an immobile wax dummy who occasionally purred. Wow, rock and roll, man. As someone who lived off the Pulp Fiction soundtrack for years, I am, like a lot of people I suppose, inclined to give Quentin Tarantino the benefit of the doubt when it comes to music. But there’s really no other way to say what I felt except that I thought his playlist sucked. That “Waterfalls” song is an acoustic cover of the TLC hit from the mid-nineties. I’m going to stop writing about this now because it’s starting to make me upset.

Sunday:

Waltz with Bashir. Animation is a great medium in which to explore the elasticity of memory. And even though both Basterds and Bashir are both about war, I think it’s fair to say that only the former one is a cartoon. Waltz with Bashir was a sobering plunge into repressed memories of war, and of the strange juxtapositions of cultures in wartime. Amid animated sequences of bombings and ambushes, the voice of John Lydon suddenly erupted on the soundtrack, singing “This Is Not a Love Song” from his PiL days.

Paprika. Another animated feature, this one from director Satoshi Kon, based on a story by–I didn’t realize this upon renting it–Yasutaka Tsutsui, whose story collection Salmonella Men on Planet Porno I picked up not long ago. While Bashir uses animation to illustrate untrustworthy memories, Paprika seeks to do the same with dreams. There’s so much crammed into the frame with this film, my favorite sequences being a procession of animals and objects marching along through various characters’ subconscious minds.

Monday:
The Holy Mountain, by Alejandro Jodorowsky. I’ve blogged about this film before, and about Jodorowsky in general. For my second viewing of this film I invited my old friend Nate over. We drank Corona and tequila and kept an armchair commentary going through the Chilean auteur’s steady unveiling of wonders. I was impressed again by how ballsy the film is. In my head I’ve been attempting to reverse engineer the directions Jodorowsky must have given his crew. Like, “I want the amputees dressed like Roman soldiers to assemble in the Jesus factory.” Or, “Let’s make sure each toad has a firecracker under it.” Or, “Let’s get some climbing gear for the prostitute and her chimpanzee.”

Tuesday: Death Proof, by Quentin Tarantino. This was the only Tarantino film I hadn’t seen. So I watched it. It was cool, whatever. Great car chase at the end, one of the best I think I’ve ever seen. The bonus features are worth checking out, particularly the featurettes on the stunts and those who performed them.

Wednesday: A Scanner Darkly. My animation streak continued with Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid drug novel. I think this movie helped me figure out what the problem is with Keanu Reeves. In any movie in which he’s required to get all fired up he ends up looking ridiculous. He is not an actor made for big, hysterical speeches. That actor would be John Malkovich. What Keanu does best is simmer and lope through a movie. I’m thinking of his great performance as Scott Fortune in My Own Private Idaho, which he’s never matched in my book.

Man on Wire: My five-day movie binge came to an end with this documentary about Phillipe Petit, that French dude who crossed the chasm between the World Trade Center towers on a tight rope. Completely riveting and unexpectedly emotional, and the perfect note with which to end five days of student fiction and movies.

“The purpose of war is to kill as many of the enemy’s civilians as you can until they surrender.” –Col. John Harbert

John Harbert was my grandfather, my hero, a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. …more

In the past couple years whenever anyone has asked for a movie recommendation, I steer them in the direction of Alejandro Jodorowsky. …more

When you grow up being called a faggot by farm boys because you like to read books, Woody Allen can appear as something of a savior. That’s my story, anyway. Allen’s early films with their broad appeal mean that even small town video rental stores are obliged to carry his work, shelving Interiors beside Bananas in the comedy section.

Woody Allen

The other night I finally slipped in a months-old Netflix copy of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the story of two American beauties abroad. Within the first twenty minutes I resisted the film, thinking I am not in the mood to watch a movie about people who don’t have to worry about paying bills. Perhaps it’s my persistent shame at being relatively untraveled, but I wasn’t all that compelled to follow the romantic intrigues of people who float through Europe on the wings of their charmed life. The characters who do have jobs in these film are shallow, khaki-wearing business schmucks, men ever cognizant of one another’s golf handicaps and bewildered by abstract art. Javier Bardem appears as a chunk of confident sexuality, an artist–of course–whose seduction of Scarlett Johansson’s and Rebecca Hall’s title characters cuts right to the subtext of romantic comedies in general. We just want the characters to get it on.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to accept escapist entertainment on its own terms, which is unusual for me. After all, recently I’ve been perfectly willing to accept the snappy breeziness of Preston Sturges.

I suppose I expect a lot from Woody Allen, while recognizing it’s his prerogative to make a light, enjoyable comedy. It was Allen’s films that suggested to me that the life of the mind might be something a kid like me could aspire to, and Allen’s bespectacled and frizzy-haired presence at the center of those early comedies was a balm to my adolescent anxieties. The post-coital chatter of those films was titilating in a way that a sex scene never could be, implying that by sheer force of wit and intelligence a physically inadequate guy could get a woman to fall in love with him. That’s heady stuff when you’re 14 years old and have never made a basket in a basketball game.

Even in the films in which Allen’s presence isn’t in front of the camera, he tends to make an appearance anyway, as with Kenneth Branagh’s channeling of Allen’s neurotic tics in 1998′s Celebrity can attest. My guess is, based on Match Point and now Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen just isn’t interested in directing proxies of himself right now. (I have yet to see the new film with what’s-his-name from that one show, uh, Larry David, who looks like a Woody proxy if there ever was one.) Which is wonderful and opens up a whole new period for his genius. I wonder, though, if the result of this approach is that these films feel more like a product of Allen’s head than his heart.

Years ago I happened upon a series of arresting images on cable. There was a young Mick Jagger cavorting in a bath tub with two svelte beauties. A child wearing a fake mustache. A still image of Jorge Luis Borges rising out of a gunshot wound to the head. …more

Sometimes I just want an actor to take a movie by the fuckin’ balls. I’m thinking of Benicio del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Add to that rogue’s gallery of scenery chewers Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Just look at this shit:

Apologies for the piracy-o-vision, but still, damn.

I just watched the DVD of this film for which Daniel Day Lewis (I can’t bring myself to just refer to him as “Lewis”) earned a Best Actor Oscar. The disc comes with no commentary, but there’s a period documentary about the oil business in California for all you petroleum history nerds.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, watch this clip of Daniel Day Lewis in 1985′s My Beautiful Laundrette, his first film, in which he provides Vanilla Ice with his future look.

These movies pass through our lives, take up two hours of our time, and go along their merry way. Recently I enjoyed Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, Orson Welles’s masterful Touch of Evil, and a collection of Pixar shorts. I watched E.T. with my son and was surprised at how dark that movie was. And at the very moment when the scary astronaut guys apply the defib paddles to E.T.’s lumpy animatronic chest, Miles vomited on the floor. I’m still trying to figure out whether he had the stomach flu or was making his first foray into film criticism.
While watching these films, one question kept intruding into my thoughts: Should I blog about this? I thought about blogging about Sturges’s romantic comedy and my fledgling theory about how all romantic comedies are about the conflict between honesty and intimacy. I considered commenting on how Pixar, from the very beginning, has wed ancient storytelling skills with technological advances. And I had a whole riff in my head about how the most unconvincing Mexican in all of cinema was played by Charlton Heston. But none of these films lingered in my consciousness for days after like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.

I watched Synecdoche in the theater on my birthday last November, catching a 10 PM showing. Stumbling into midnight after that movie was one of those rare, disorienting experiences in which the world outside the movie seems to have been subtly changed, like the time I went to Costco right after watching David Lynch’s Lost Highway and felt like I’d landed on the fucking moon. Or my first Kaufman encounter, walking into a Kenneth Cole after seeing Being John Malkovich and being physically unable to remove the grin on my face for at least half an hour.

I knew Synecdoche was the kind of movie one has a lasting relationship with. So I’m happy to say my second date with the film was better than the first. I bought the DVD, watched the film, the awkward on-stage interview with Kaufman (awkward because the interviewer asked lame questions), the interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and a blogger’s roundtable discussion filmed in someone’s book-lined apartment.

One of the bloggers in the featurette–can’t remember who–made an interesting point that upon repeat viewings of this film, he/she tends to focus on one scene. For me, the scene I mulled over the most was the one in which Caden Cotard (Hoffman) and his adult daughter Olive (Robin Weigert) attempt to resolve their estrangement at her deathbed. Olive has been living in Germany, where she became famous as a 10-year-old with a full body tattoo, an attribute she later used to her advantage as an exotic dancer. She demands that they speak to each other through headset translators, with her speaking in German while Caden responds in English. She reveals that her much-older lover Maria and her mother Adele told her that Caden left her so that he could have anal sex with his lover Eric. The charge is patently ridiculous, but it’s the explanation that Olive holds on to. She demands that Caden ask for her forgiveness. Caden, at first denying the accusation, changes his mind and asks her to forgive something he never even did. Olive then refuses, and the refusal causes both of them to weep bitterly. Olive dies, and a petal of one of her tattoo roses withers and falls off her arm.

What the fuck is going on here? Consider another film in which Hoffman made an appearance, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which came out in 1999, the same year as Being John Malkovich. In Magnolia Hoffman plays a more or less well-adjusted character, a hospice nurse tasked with caring for an old man played by Jason Robards, in his final role. Tom Cruise, in his best role (which some might say isn’t saying much) plays Robard’s character’s estranged son. At the deathbed there are tears, there are recriminations, there are open wounds. We pass through that scene knowing what is being felt and how we’re supposed to feel. We’re being instructed on how to feel as we’re feeling it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, feeling much better now, thank you.

But in the Synecdoche death bed scene, our emotional frame of reference is shifting under our feet. At one moment we snicker at the accusation that Hoffman was off having anal sex with his fictitous lover Eric, at another moment we yearn that these characters will re-establish their love, but then brutally we are denied. This father and daughter are beyond reconciliation. Even though Olive wants to forgive, she doesn’t have the capacity to do so, perhaps due to the fact Caden wasn’t around to teach her how.

Is that it? Maybe? I am still confused by the scene. And I’m sure that the next time I watch it, Synecdoche will yield another puzzle.

The movie has lost money in the box office and is likely considered a failure by the people at Sony Pictures Classics whose job it is to count beans. A creative writing student of mine who is a movie producer once said that the only reason good movies get made is that there are still people in Hollywood who have both money and good taste. I can only hope that Kaufman has the backing he needs to keep giving us these generous, hard-won gifts that we’ll be watching  a hundred years from now.

I recently read on some blog somewhere in the bloggy blog blogosphere a reference to certain movies as “wallpaper.” …more

Remember when The Illusionist and The Prestige both vied to be the winter 2007 movie about magicians? No? Anyway, transport yourself back to those fabled days of January and February 2007. I know what you’re thinking. You were too busy obsessing over the surprising resignation of Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Daniyal Akhmetov and Japan’s incineration of over 10,000 chickens to battle the bird flu to concern yourself with a magician movie-off. And oh how we trembled at the inevitable Giuliani presidency!

The Illusionist is well worth checking out if you missed it, if only for the comfort food presence of Paul Giamatti. Watching Giamatti is like going to a fancy restaurant and ordering the macaroni and cheese. You know it’s just mac and cheese, but damn what do they put in this stuff to make it taste so good? I declared Giamatti my favorite contemporary actor not after Sideways or American Splendor or even Fred Claus but after his starring role in John Adams. The guy can act, and by act I mean he can yell, indignantly and with eyes popping out. And then there’s the aw-shucks Giamatti moment, the I am having a dawning realization facial slackness that makes you notice the pair of cheeks this guy has, and you just want to grab onto those cheeks and say, “Who’s my favorite actor? Who? Who?”

In The Illusionist Giamatti gets to play a chief inspector tasked with maintaining the aristocratic order of things in Victorian-era Vienna. Seems there’s this love triange a-brewing among an illusionist named Eisenheim (Edward Norton), his once-childhood sweetheart now duchess Sophie (Jessica Biel), and a Disney-level asshole of a Crown Prince played from behind a mustache by Rufus Sewell. Immediately we want Eisenheim and Sophie to fulfill the promise of their love, the Crown Prince to receive his comeuppance, and the chief inspector to frustratedly bark something at the other characters. This movie does not disappoint in this regard.

The film takes as its subject the various ways Eisenheim fools his audience’s perceptions and refuses to reveal the secrets of his tricks. This subject matter is mirrored in the gradual delivery of the film’s dramatic elements. We’re led to believe one thing, but by the end all is revealed as an elaborate ruse, and Paul Giamatti once again gets to jerk his head and smile in that incredibly impressed, well-wouldn’t-you-know-it kind of way he does so well. In the last minutes of the movie we’re shown the “trick” that was played on us, the audience, and how not everything was what it seemed.

Usually, this kind of thing really pisses me off. The more I think about the George Clooney Ocean movies, the more I hate them. They’re really meta-movies more than anything. Ask anyone exiting the theater after one of those Ocean movies what Matt Damon’s character’s name was. Or Brad Pitt’s. See? You don’t even know and you’ve seen all three of those celebrity fests. You can easily describe the plot as, “George Clooney and Brad Pitt plot to steal a lot of money from a casino” and no one will be taken aback. No one will challenge you by saying, “Surely Brad Pitt and George Clooney don’t play themselves.”

But what grates more than the starfuck machinery of those movies is how in the last few minutes, we’re finally privy to all sorts of stuff that was happening off-camera while we were otherwise chuckling at the irascibility of the ever-swelling cast. Oh, so they found a way to dress up as a SWAT team to infiltrate the casino. Oh, so there was all this other shit going down that we weren’t in on.

I think of this as the Scooby Doo method of storytelling, where the audience isn’t privy to the actual plot until the very end and it’s revealed the werewolf was the amusement park caretaker the whole time. I nail my creative writing MFA students on this kind of thing, this holding back of important information out of the mistaken belief that not knowing will pull an audience along.

For a counter-example, look no further than Jules Dassin’s 1956 noir Rififi. At the heart of this jewel caper is a 30-minute sequence of zero dialogue in which the thieves carry out their heist. We get to see the planning and execution of the crime in intimate detail, and the effect is riveting. Rather than “spoil” the mystery, such procedural minutiae makes us, the audience, participants in it. Dassin didn’t underestimate our intelligence, but Soderbergh sure seems to.

Which makes Neil Burger’s The Ilusionist all the more complicated, because the movie is about information that is left out, unrevealed. I am willing to excuse the last-reel Scooby Doo revelations of this 2007 sleeper for that reason. Sometimes it is fun to get tricked.

Hey Eyeballers. I haven’t had the patience to watch anything over an hour long recently. I take that back. I watched Babe with my son a couple weekends ago and as always got choked up at the end. I am a total sucker for talking swine who defy expectations.

All my indie cred just went right out the fuckin’ window.

The filmed entertainment I’ve been thinking about most is a short piece, some would call it a “music video” by the band Matt & Kim. It’s them getting naked in Times Square, with all their controversial bits blurred out. It’s not really their nudity that makes this video so compelling so much as their expressions once they’ve disrobed and are staring up in awe at the lights and jumbotrons. These could be the expressions of our homo erectus ancestors had they ever invented a time machine to transport themselves to 21st century New York City. Plus, I like the song.

Another little movie I stumbled across today was this little gem. Also starring a couple, also featuring a 360 camera shot, but fully clothed.

Stop Motion | The Long Haul from DUMAIS on Vimeo.

One weird symptom of watching old movies, for me at least, is that I find myself imagining what the original audiences thought of them. I suppose this goes back to the anecdotes I’ve heard about The Great Train Robbery (1904), which caused viewers to dive under their seats when a bandit points his gun at the camera. The history of cinema is one in which we’re surprised by new vocabularies, then come to understand them to the point where we can mock them with a self-congratulatory sense of ironic remove. Take the Scary Movie franchise, or all those other movies with “Movie” in the title, like this really painful one I suffered through once called Date Movie. The humor of those things arises from our ability to decipher the codes. In Not Another Teen Movie, for instance, there’s a gag about how after a teen makes some sort of emotionally risky public pronouncement, they’re met with a “slow clap” from the crowd.

What were Japanese audiences thinking when they sat down in 1950 to watch Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon for the first time? How did the film resonate for a culture grappling with the aftershocks of wartime propaganda? Now “Rashomon” is simply short-hand for multiple characters telling a story from contradictory points of view. In Kurosawa’s adaptation of a couple stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, we’re treated to the pleasant experience of having the narrative rug pulled out from under us over and over again. We see multiple versions of a single event, a rape and murder in the woods of some indistinct, samurai-era Japan. Before an unseen and unspeaking interogator, the bandit, the rape victim, and (via a medium) the dead husband recount their versions of this horrific event. It’s this last version that made me sit up. Kurosawa does something crazy with the audio here, having his genuinely spooky medium character deliver the dead man’s testimony in the form of a low-fi overdub. Truly freaky.

Rashomon, man. Rashomon.

So what did early audiences of Kurosawa’s film think when the film ended and they stumbled out into the Tokyo night? It’s really the textbook example of unreliable narration. Could Tarantino have been thinking about Rashomon when he directed the scenes in Reservoir Dogs in which Mr. Orange narrates flashbacks in which he simultaneously appears? Are all narrators suspect now? Was Ken Kwapis, who’s directed several episodes of The Office thinking of Rashomon when he delivered 1991′s Kevin Bacon/Elizabeth Perkins vehicle He Said, She Said? Will we ever know?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Guy Maddin, the great Canadian auteur and subject of previous Eyeball posts. We spoke for about an hour and a half; he was so generous and real that I ended up just wanting to be his friend forever. Man crush! I’ll post something when the interview appears in the magazine it’s slated to appear in, but for now I thought I’d mention one of Maddin’s short films, Nude Caboose, shot entirely on a cell phone. According to Maddin, the “director-approved” version is scored by Xavier Cugat’s version of the Zorba the Greek theme, but whenever this version is posted on YouTube, Charo (yes, Charo) has it taken down. So this version will have to suffice. Guy said that the filming of this delightful little short involved him chasing around a bare-assed woman with a cell phone, and that it didn’t resemble a film-making process in any shape or form. A quick warning here–if you can’t view bare butts at the office, the following is NSFW:

Tuesday night I had the pleasure of reading a short story at therumpus.net’s Seattle launch party, prior to a screening of the film Pig Hunt. Director Jim Isaac served up guns, blood, taxidermy, boobs, motor bikes, hippies, wild boars, and weed, and what’s not to love about that? What intrigued me most was the involvement of musician Les Claypool, who plays a murderous redneck priest, carrying around a sort of crossbow shaped like a crucifix. He provided the soundtrack as well, which pulled me away from the film a bit as I recalled Primus shows I’ve seen. I guess I’ve seen them three times. The first time opening for Jane’s Addiction on the Ritual de lo Habitual tour, the second at Lollapalooza, the third headlining at the Paramount in Seattle. There was a time when Primus impressed me, when the number of notes a bass player could cram into a nanosecond seemed the true measure of an artist. Their set opening for Jane’s Addiction blew my high school-aged mind and I rushed out to buy their debut disc the next day. A friend of mine embraced Primus with a ferocity that seemed to increase in proportion to the level of cannabis he consumed.

After the movie, I hopped on a red-eye from Seattle to JFK, then to a connecting flight to Burlington, Vermont (I’m currently teaching at a residency at Goddard College). I intended to sleep on the flight, but instead consumed five straight episodes of Lost Season 4 on my laptop. Confined to a window seat I curled into a chiropractic nightmare for the duration of the flight, injecting this show into my brain. I can’t say it was the most pleasurable way to enjoy Lost, but I am addicted to the show.

That the quality of television has gotten better is a fairly common perception, and I’d attribute this to the very thing that was suppsosedly going to make television shittier–cable. When Bruce Springsteen sang a song in (I think) the late ’80s about “52 channels and nothing on,” many assumed that the proliferation of niche cable networks was going to exponentially spread the already shitty content being slopped out of the big three networks. Perhaps its this very proliferation that has forced networks to concentrate on the one thing that can build a loyal audience–quality writing. While Lost is of a different genus than, say, 2666, I appreciate the way its writers have mastered the art of the story arc. Watching Lost to me is like a car enthusiast looking under the hood of an expertly restored muscle car. I enjoy seeing where the pipes go, how the wires connect, how the flash-forwards hint at developments several episodes down the line.

The crazy thing about writing for television is that the writers have to build in pauses for commercials.  A friend of mine who used to write for shows like Melrose Place (which became something of a tradition for me and my friends in college) has tried to explain the mechanics of beats and pacing and arcs and 45-minute stories to me, and it strikes me as a hyper-disciplined, difficult craft to master. But what happens when a TV show, whose very reason for being is to provide a venue for marketing products to consumers, is stripped of those commercial pauses? The story still has to accomodate those intervals where a commercial for fabric softener would go, but freed from that responsibility the show becomes a process of constant conflict and resolution. The screen goes black for a second just as a new crisis arises–a crisis specifically intended to keep us watching through the commericals. But on DVD, with no commericals to watch, the experience is concentrated, intensified. And since an episode without commericals is only 45 minutes long, it’s not hard to convince one’s self to watch just one more episode.

And now I’m going to quit blogging and go do just that.

Yesterday I got laid off from my day job at a tech company. This got me thinking about an unpublished essay I wrote a couple years ago about my relationship to the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Here it is. –Ryan

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil

I woke in the theater to the sound of my own snoring. It was past midnight in the year 2000, and from the projection booth came a stream of light that struck the screen to form Brazil, the 1985 movie by Terry Gilliam. This was the Eqyptian Theater, down the street from my apartment in Seattle, half full of shadowy figures attending a midnight showing. Somewhere around the halfway mark I had fallen asleep, and woke again toward the film’s end with the snoring trick I’d taught myself in college lecture halls. On screen, Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Pryce, had infiltrated the Ministry of Information hoping to get closer to the truth behind the vast and cruel bureaucracy that keeps him from his dream of true love. Suddenly panicking that I had annoyed the rest of the audience with my honking, I slipped out the exit and into the night. I didn’t need to see how the movie turned out; I had watched it before, many times, on video when I was in high school and college, and on the Criterion Collection DVD boxed set, a recent splurge purchase. More than that, though, I had begun to live in it.

I was introduced to Brazil when I was 12 through Starlog, a science fiction magazine I occasionally picked up at the grocery store. Amid articles on the newest products of the Star Trek franchise were stills from Gilliam’s film, which looked nothing like my definition of scifi. In one, Jonathan Pryce appeared to be humping a desk. In another, in the guise of a metallic angel, he battled a gigantic samurai. I sought the movie in my hometown at Video Depot, locating the tape amid the perplexing Emmanuelle titles in the “Foreign” section. I remember mostly a surface amusement of the film on my first viewing. The woman whose face turns to a pliable putty, the strange workers who get bent out of shape about something as silly as duct repair. Brazil appeared to take place both in the future and some strange parallel version of the 1950s. I believe I fell asleep watching it the first time, too.

A few years later, in high school, I was lucky to fall under the influence of a history and philosophy teacher named Dave Cornelius, a Vietnam veteran who also owned Easton’s Books, my home town’s used bookstore. Dave had a poster of Brazil on the wall behind his desk, next to a poster of Bob Dylan. He had a reputation for being the most intellectual teacher at Mount Vernon High, a guy who somehow got away with occasionally dropping the f-word in class. In between history assignments I gave him some of my shitty poems, hoping for feedback. One afternoon he called me to his desk at the end of class.

“You don’t belong in high school,” he said, “You belong in a cafe in San Francisco, smoking pot and talking about poetry.”

My education commenced. I traded my Stephen King hardbacks at Easton’s for City Lights chapbooks and Jerzy Kozinski novels. On Sundays, when the store was officially closed but when Dave did much of his restocking and shelving, I dropped by for coffee and long conversations. While serving in Vietnam, Dave had kept himself sane with Dylan and regular shipments of classic literature sent by a group of women from a church somewhere stateside. He’d read all of Dostoevsky while overseas, and had developed a love for philosophy, particularly Heidegger and Kierkegaard. After I read The Metamorphosis I told him how much I loved Kafka. Dave ripped into me. “Don’t read The Metamorphosis and tell me you love Kafka. You don’t have a right to say you love Kafka after reading one novella. Read ‘In the Penal Colony.’ Read The Trial. Read The Castle. Then tell me what you think about Kafka.”

I was a slightly above average student who never took the coursework too seriously. In Dave’s classes he and I had an unspoken understanding that the assignments were beside the point and that we’d pursue a curriculum based on our own mutual interests. Having become accustomed to blanket praise from my English teachers, I was shocked and provoked when he called bullshit on some of my stories and poems. But I’d never had a champion like Dave Cornelius, who, after my poem about a masturbating George H.W. Bush made it into Xeroxed punk fanzine from Brooklyn, yelled down the hall, “Hey, there’s a published writer!”

Dave’s enthusiasm for Brazil intrigued me. He claimed as his favorite movie. I’m sure spending twenty years in the Mount Vernon School District had given him some hard experience in bureaucratic absurdity, and I imagine his mind had at times felt stultified in the faculty lounge. In his bookstore full of Hegel, Babel, Schulz, and Leibniz, my mentor was a Sam Lowry, too.

***

The Evergreen State College, in the throes of the grunge years. I lived in a six-man apartment on campus, with a communal kitchen, one of the worst architectural blunders a college can make. Get half a dozen twenty year-old guys in an apartment with a kitchen and it will soon be transformed into a bio-weapons lab. Here’s an experiment: take a beer bottle with an inch of beer left in it and leave on the counter for a month. Quickly, the beer will attract fruit flies, who will imbibe, pass out, and die in the bottle. Over time there forms a thick, black layer of fruit fly corpse scum. Or consider a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. Did you realize that this household item can actually generate heat? Just let it turn entirely to mold, then observe as it composts. Quick Tip: Using Elmer’s Glue to adhere beer bottle labels to the refrigerator door for your “art project” is not as sensible as using rubber cement, which doesn’t ruin the enamel when you attempt to peel the labels off at the end of the year, hoping to earn back your damage deposit. Here’s a household suggestion for those who can’t afford a white board and dry erase marker. Just use cooked spaghetti instead and apply it directly to the wall. Spell out messages to your friends. For instance: Fuck You.

The TV set in our apartment was tiny and occupied one of the chairs we would have sat in had we behaved like those students in the college catalog. Instead, sitting and gathering for a communal event like watching a movie involved moving piles of shit–like the industrial fan one of us stole from a Taco Bell construction site–from one part of the room to the other. One of us popped in Brazil and we waded into deconstructionist battle, armed with poststructuralist hoo-hah. It was obvious to anyone with a pulse that the world we lived in was controlled by One Gigantic Corporation. Everyone knew that, from our faculty to the guy I met who chose to litter because Dumpsters were “too corporate.” Fact: capitalism was a way to enslave human beings, make them utterly boring, deny their natural Dionysian drives toward polyamory and chemical experimentation with consciousness, and oppress them with received gender roles and narrowly defined beauty. If only the straight world would listen to us, we who were enlightened on how to live! I started to see elements of Brazil that I had missed before. As a pre-teen I had simply dug it as weird; now I understood it to be a biting social satire, an indictment against selfishness, narcisism, and the blind pursuit of material wealth, a jeremiad against those who would prevent us from following our bliss.

Just then someone came home with a life-size papier-mâché donkey stolen from a nativity scene. Setting it on fire and throwing it from a balcony was one of the more reasonable ideas floated. I’m compelled to come clean that our apartment was full of stolen goods, but want to make it clear that very few of them had been stolen by me personally. I take no responsibility for the two life-sized fiberglass statues of Ronald McDonald. Or the plaster statue of Michelangelo’s David. The gigantic conference room table was not my idea, either. I did assist with the two 75-pound bags of potting soil. These thefts had nothing to do with procuring goods for use or sale, rather they were our juvenile way of spitting in the eye of our corporate oppressors. Okay, no. We weren’t thinking that deeply. We just thought having a statue of Ronald McDonald would be awesome. Meanwhile, in the world of Brazil, the matrons of commerce obliviously continue their lunch as terrorist bombs explode around them.

***

Brazil was one of the first DVDs I ever purchased, with bonus money from my job as a Customer Service Rep at Amazon.com. I had manned the phones and email during the launch of the music store and now the video/DVD store. In the winter of 1998 I noticed that many customers were calling to ask about DVDs, and I came to understand that the Criterion Collection was considered the standard by which all DVDs were measured. When I heard that Brazil was to be released in a three-disc set, I knew I had to have it.

My first stint at Amazon lasted two years, during which I did everything I could to escape Customer Service and join the Editorial team. When a number of editors were laid off, I realized my editorial career wasn’t going to happen at Earth’s Biggest Bookstore and applied for a position at Drugstore.com, where my wife had begun to work her way up from Customer Service herself. Like Sam Lowry applying for the position that would give him access to secret files about the girl of his dreams, I left a place of relative comfort and camaraderie to join a company on the brink of the implosion of the dotcom bubble, in vague hope that it would advance my editorial career.

Drugstore.com’s offices occupied an office park off Interstate 90 in a suburb of Seattle named Factoria, as in utopia crossed with a factory.

My position, Email Communications Editor, had not existed before I went to work on a team of editors who hid in their cubes as if they were bunkers on the battlefront of some hideous, endless military operation. Within a month, everyone who had interviewed me had left the company. Somebody dumped a pile of VB-Script code in my inbox and told me to fix the auto email system. I commuted with my wife, who had a 5 AM phone shift, and ate the cereal provided as a perk while downloading music from Napster and writing product recall emails that were urgent-sounding without being too alarming. The CEO, Kal Raman, a man whose personality had been forged in the economies of India and Wal-Mart, showed up at an editorial meeting to raise an interesting question, “Why do we even need editors when we have Spell-Check?”

Every few months during my short time at Drugstore.com, a number of employees were hooded, tossed into the backs of trucks, and driven to a remote quarry in the Cascades, where they were lined up, forced to kneel, and shot, falling backward into a conveniently-dug mass grave. That’s how it felt at the time, anyway. Soon after one of these layoffs, the managers who’d done the laying off would realize that they’d just let go of someone who was the only person who knew how a particular system worked. So new people would get hired, into newly created positions, provoking a series of turf battles among the existing employees. After a layoff the executive team would pull the remaining employees together in a conference room and try to convince us we shouldn’t flee screaming. One time this involved both Kal Raman’s recitation of passages from the Upanishads and super-investor John Doerr giving us a pep talk about why we shouldn’t worry so much about profitability and the tanking stock price.

By the way, did I mention we also got free soda and Snapple? That was great!

After my boss split, a new boss was hired to replace him, a guy I’ll call Nick. Nick had spent his career writing and editing advertising copy as a contractor for a number of Seattle businesses, and was now ready to join the 9-to-5 working world. He called me into his office a few weeks after he started and said he needed 25 words on a new product called Always Feminine Wipes.

“But you have to be coy about it,” he said, “You can’t use the words ‘pussy’ or ‘stink’.”

“How about the word ‘odor’?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Can I use the word ‘moist’?” I said.

“That may be pushing it.”

“What about ‘fresh’?”

“No, that would imply they’d use these things because they are not ‘fresh.’”

“Can I use ‘clean’?”

“Absolutely not. We don’t want to convey that their pussies are unclean.”

“How about ‘revitalizing’?”

“That’s getting closer, but we use that word too much in relation to shampoo around here.”

Later, since all decisions relating to editorial copy five words or longer had to be signed off by ten people, we sat in the Prozac Conference Room and discussed my copy that was absolutely not about a woman’s need to freshen her malodorous cunt. Once we were happy with those 25 words, we discussed our strategy for communicating Drugstore.com’s new “Sexual Well-Being” store. Vibrators, basically.

“How about this,” Nick said, “‘Relax the muscles and get rid of some of that pent-up tension.’”

One guy with a title I didn’t understand raised his hand. “Not to get off-topic here, but how come we don’t sell anything anal?”

Not only did Nick hope to assist customers with finding ways to release their pent-up tension, he was keen on helping our female co-workers do the same. A humanitarian of sorts, he hoped to do this by offering them rides on the back of his motorcycle. One of the women I worked with who must have seemed particularly tense to Nick was a nineteen year-old intern who, whenever passing Nick in the hall, provoked in him a facial expression similar to that of someone who has just bitten down on a lemon wedge.

“So I’m going home to Chicago this weekend to see my mom,” Nick said to me one day during an enforced food-related morale event, “And she has this friend who has a daughter they want to set me up with. All cool, right? So I’m wondering if I should be a gentleman, take this young lady out to a nice dinner, take in a movie, drop her off at home, say goodnight, etc, or if I should just take her straight home and fuck the shit out of her.”

I wrote about toe fungus. I wrote the words “Fresh breath will make her linger longer.” I wrote safety warnings about bath toys. I wrote about Viagra. I wrote “Looking for a nifty gifty?” I wrote about the absorption potential of adult diapers. I thought about writing a novel but couldn’t pull myself together enough to start it. My years as a graduate student honing my fiction were receding behind me as I suffered through a writer’s block that left me feeling forsaken by the muses. I was being punished for taking an email about baby bottle nipples through twenty drafts. I wrote about Q-Tips. 25 words. Or I wrote about the convenience of ordering your Band-Aids online. I entered editorial review meetings in which these upbeat chunks of copy were pulled apart like Thanksgiving turkey by the former sorority sisters responsible for the “customer experience.” Since “words” were part of what customers “experienced,” my words were a source of constant deliberation. That these deliberations involved the best ways to communicate the softness of toilet paper humiliated me. I was feeling more like Sam Lowry every day.

Lowry’s only refuge is his dreams, and when he attempts to pursue his dreams in reality the system in which he lives refuses to tolerate it. Gilliam created a great parable about artistic creation, all the more meaningful considering the struggles he endured to make his vision reach the screen intact. The Criterion edition of the DVD includes two cuts of the film–Gilliam’s cut, and the “Love Conquers All” version in which things end happily ever after for Sam and his ethereal lady friend. Pressured by Universal Studios to leave audiences with an upbeat ending, Gilliam recapitulated Sam’s increasingly disruptive methods by surreptitiously screening his cut of the film to the Los Angeles Film Critics association prior to its theatrical release, resulting in their naming it the best film of the year. When the studio still balked, Gilliam took out a full-page ad in Variety addressed to Universal exec Sid Sheinberg asking why they weren’t releasing his movie as he had created it. Driven to the desperate measure of publicly shaming his opponents, it’s not hard to imagine Gilliam as Lowry, defiantly clutching a mannequin arm as a weapon, squaring off against the gigantic samurai of Hollywood, fighting for his creative vision.

Walking home from Brazil in the early hours of a Saturday, after a week of writing copy about apricot body scrub, I came to understand that a story I had once thought was simply weird, then biting satire, was now one with which I identified completely. The movie had stayed the same over 15 years, but I had changed, and each time I watched Brazil it kept pace with who I was becoming until I found myself a dotcom version of its protagonist, trying to rally the courage to fight for my creative freedom.

One way I attempted to obtain my freedom was by applying for a residency at Yaddo, where I hoped to start my novel. In fall 2000 I submitted my paperwork and writing sample. Weeks later my wife and I were on our way to a Mariners game in which the team had a chance to make it to the playoffs. On the way out I stopped by our mailbox and found the acceptance letter from Yaddo. That night the Mariners made it to the playoffs and I started putting together a list of things I’d need to bring with me to Saratoga Springs. At work the following Monday I didn’t make much effort to mask my ebullience and word quickly spread among the editors that I had gotten invited to this somewhat prestigious artist colony. A few weeks later I lost my job.

This particular layoff was bungled from the start. After previous layoffs Drugstore.com had hired a woman who specialized in post-layoff counseling for remaining employees. She had led sessions where employees wrote angry things on big pieces of butcher paper taped to conference room walls. When I saw this “layoff lady” struggling with the espresso machine in the kitchen one morning I knew we were doomed. Word was we would all get invited to one of two meetings, one at ten o’clock, the other at eleven. As soon as the meeting request popped into my Outlook, my wife called me from her office across the campus.

“Which meeting did you get?” she said.

“The ten o’clock.” I said, “What about you?”

“The eleven.”

I shuffled into the meeting room and allowed them to place the hood over my head.

Nick, naturally, kept his job.

Oscars, whatever.

I had two comfy movie-watching experiences this weekend. On Friday I watched the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading with my wife and yesterday sat down with my son to watch the Brad Bird animated movie The Iron Giant.

Conventional wisdom had it that Burn After Reading was a minor Coen Bros. film, on par with Intolerable Cruelty, and those who admired No Country for Old Men would find it lacking. But I had fun the whole time, appreciating the clockwork storytelling and delivery of droll humor. The movie reminded me how much I like George Clooney and gave me a reason to like Brad Pitt. The Coens make movies the same way the band Cake makes songs, with clearly delineated forces of action pushing one moment into the next, each player doing his or her distinct part to maintain the integrity of the whole. The Coen Brothers. I like those guys.

While watching the Oscars last night I had one of those weird experiences where someone mentions a pretty forgotten movie you just watched. In this case it was America’s most overrated actress Jennifer Anniston remarking on The Iron Giant, a 10-year-old movie directed by the guy who would go on to join Pixar and create The Incredibles. The Iron Giant has long been on my list, as it’s based on a novel by Ted Hughes, and is my friend Doug’s favorite children’s movie. I was curious about how Sylvia Plath’s (husband? boyfriend?) pulled off a robot novel. Good ole Wikipedia. While the novel takes place in the UK, the movie is set in the autumnal richness of Maine. My son and I dug it. Here’s a trailer.

And hey, since I’m on the subject of giant beings from outer space invading the English countryside, check out, if you haven’t, the radio dramatization of War of the Worlds by Jeff Wayne. Imagine, if possible, a prog-rock version of the Orson Welles radio classic as executed by Richard Burton and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy. Oh yeah.

***

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