Dial "M" for Musicology

MERMin' high

Thanks to Musicology/Matters, I have been enjoying -- and meaning to write about -- Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I know that there's a huge contingent of Whedon fans out there for whom Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest work of the human spirit since, like, ever, but for whatever reason I've never really cared about it. Dr. Horrible, on the other hand, I love. It's an internet-only mini-musical with Neil Patrick Harris and some other people associated with the Joss Whedon Experience (doubtless very familiar to Whedon fans but new to me) about a likable supervillain, a dislikable superhero, and the girl they're both after.

The post at Musicology/Matters points out a number of things about this musical, mainly that it seems to be a bellwether of the good overall health of the medium, inasmuch as Dr. Horrible (and several other revisionist musicals for the stage) owes its effectiveness to its knowing manipulation of generic conventions that are clearly not dead yet, inasmuch as people can still make jokes about them. But one thing that strikes me about Dr. Horrible is its medium. It bears comparison with film musicals like, say, Babes in Arms, because it is filmed rather than staged. But then again, Dr. Horrible was released for a different medium (i.e., your computer, not a movie screen). Now, there are some obvious effects of this, like the fact that you're watching a small image on your own at close range in domestic (or, if you're being naughty and unproductive, work) space, with maybe crappy little speakers or possibly headphones. The comparison that works is probably TV rather than film; a TV director has to plan effects that will work on a wide variety of playback systems, and so (one would imagine) would someone shooting an internet episode.*

Whedon makes an obvious nod to the medium through his clever framing conceit -- most of the plot exposition is done by way of Dr. Horrible's video blog.** But the camera doesn't stay there: in the first act, Dr. Horrible answers his email and then, inspired to reflect on the cute girl at the laundromat, begins to sing and we start moving through space and time and across real and imaginary states in the fluid way we are familiar with from the classic Hollywood musicals. And this is the thing about musicals that, more than anything else, makes people hate them. There isn't a band playing to explain where the musical accompaniment is coming from, and yet a character is singing along to it; and anyway, who just bursts into song like that? And sings a whole song? And does a mass-choreographed dance number? And where did all those swing sets and teeter-totters come from?

Are Judy, Mickey, and the gang just imagining they're singing? No, not really; but then the reality of scenes like this is not the same as the plain vanilla reality immediately before and after. (There's always an audible and visible jerk as we transition from the one state to another.) Raymond Knapp calls this MERM -- Musically Enhanced Reality Mode.*** It's not reality and it's not unreality -- this number from Babes in Arms isn't a dream sequences or anything. It's musically-enhanced reality.

Anyway, one thing that seems surprising and really cool to me about Dr. Horrible is that it is so casually unembarrassed about its MERM. At a certain point film directors realized they couldn't do straightforward MERM anymore, because most of their audience wasn't going to suspend disbelief for it. Recent movie musicals do MERM, but with conditions: either the musical is a cartoon (anything can happen in a cartoon), or presents songs from the audience's experience -- either it's a filmed version of a stage show like Sweeney Todd or a collection of songs everybody's already familiar with (like Moulin Rouge). When's the last time someone made a proper theatrical-release movie with a straight MERM scene? It's been a while. But Dr. Horrible does MERM with the best of them. My thought here (sorry it took so long, and for such a small payoff) is that this is another effect of the medium. Our scruples about seeing MERM on the big screen don't apply to the intimate scale of an internet broadcast. Or a TV show, for that matter -- think of High School Musical. I'm not sure why this should be, but the computer screen seems to be another place where anything can happen. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but whatever, it's good to see some unapologetic MERM again. As Whedon shows at the end (I won't spoil it), it can be used with surprising emotional force.

*David Lynch has apparently sworn off doing TV for good, partly because he keeps getting jerked around by the networks and partly because he hates this loss of control -- he wants to plan sound and visual effects that only work with a big theater sound and projection system, and it maddens him to think that people might be watching his movies -- or anyone else's -- on substandard equipment (like their phones).

**Dr. Horrible suffers from the same problem that academic bloggers do -- he gives away his dastardly plans without realizing that, you know, someone might be watching.

***In Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Identity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 65-117.
 

Where is the edge?

Another day, another Oblique Strategy: "Where is the edge?" is the card I pulled this morning. I confess that this isn't the first one I pulled, but it seemed most relevant to the day's business. (Am I doing this wrong?) I'm going over to WFIU later today to do and interview with David Brent Johnson on the 1957 film noir The Sweet Smell of Success for an upcoming Night Lights show. This is one of those miraculous films where absolutely everything went right: a crackling script by Clifford Odets, gritty black-and-white location photography, a great charismatic villain in Burt Lancaster's JJ Hunsecker, Tony Curtis's turn as a corrupt, brilliant, doomed press agent "running a fifty-yard dash with both legs cut off"  -- and, of course, the jazz score, which like I Want To Live had both a crime jazz underscore and a first-rate diegetic jazz performances, here by the Chico Hamilton quintet. So it's an obvious great subject for a jazz show, but there's something less obvious as well. It's a hip movie --  hip in the sense of knowing, but knowing in a particular way. It's not just smart but wised-up, spinning fantasies of hidden power, wheels within wheels, luxuriating in the mechanisms of conspiracies,  finding and following the hidden boundaries and lines of force between things: parts of the city, angles of conscience, connections between people, official stories and secrets. There is an edge to everything, and noir finds it.

More Blue Note covers, since you can never have too many Blue Note covers. How could I have forgotten the inspiration for this blog's name?

I had this cover, not the Hitchcock film, in mind when I came up with "Dial 'M' for Musicology." Its just so cool: Sonny Clark's photo on a desk blotter with a notepad and uncradled phone, like a clue to a crime investigation or a Person of Interest in an ongoing investigation, maybe our source in the street, Our Man In Jazz. Commenter Rootlesscosmo writes that he tends to imagine Blue Note covers "as always including an upward-drifting plume of cigarette smoke under a strong spotlight in a darkened space." I think this says something about the way Blue Note draws noir imagery into its overall aesthetic. The Blue Note look (which is to say, the look Reid Miles created for it -- notice how different the post-Miles, post-1967 albums* look from what we think of as "Blue Note") is a compound of different influences -- black vernacular culture, Bauhausy design modernism, and film noir. Some more noir-ish Blue Note covers:
 

And of course there is the wonderful 'Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia cover in my previous post.

*Generally a sad scene, although this McCoy Tyner album from 1970 makes a rather witty move within the Afrocentric space of the time:

Transcendence and the Wilhelm scream

The other day my son and his friend were playing Lego Star Wars on the computer. At one point their little Lego avatar died and let out a Wilhelm scream. "Hey, that's a Wilhelm scream!" I said, and proceeded to explain. The Wilhelm scream is named after the cowboy who takes an Indian arrow to the thigh in an old horse opera called The Charge at Feather River, though it was originally the sound effect used for a man being eaten by an alligator in the 1951 film Distant Drums. The scream became a stock sound in Warner Bros. pictures and eventually became an inside joke among sound editors. Once you get the sound in your ear you notice it popping up everywhere:

My son thought this was pretty funny.

And this was only my second Wilhelm sighting (if that's the right word) of the week. I was teaching the 1954 musical version of A Star Is Born last week, and as I was preparing for class I was watching the "Someone at Last" sequence. Quick recap: Vickie Lester (Judy Garland) is a star on the rise, recently married to Norman Maine (James Mason), the man who discovered her, who is a big star in slow alcoholic decline. At this point in the movie Norman has been fired by his studio and is stewing in self-loathing in the gilded cage of their coastal mansion. Vickie has come home from the set of her new film and is trying to cheer Norman up by making fun of the over-the-top production number she was filming. Watch the whole thing, but particularly pay attention to the transition to the "Brazil" section at 6:09 (-1:21):

It was a nice little surprise. It's worth noting that this scene as a whole is a good example of thesis no. 4 from my "Four Theses on Entertainment" post from a few weeks ago: "Entertainment is fully able to reabsorb any revisionist narrative back into its own narratives." The point of this scene is twofold: to poke fun of cheesy movie-musical conventions, of course, and also to give a bit of a lift to a tragic story of a marriage broken by alcoholism and wounded pride. But it turns out not to be much of a lift after all: what's interesting is how this scene turns the usual syntax of the film musical inside-out. A big production number of the sort being parodied here offers a moment of transcendence to the characters in the movie: somehow, mysteriously, miraculously, the gravitational force of logic and causality loosens its grip and the film's characters become free. The can sing in perfect harmony to an orchestra that has materialized out of nowhere and dance in formation without having rehearsed or even voiced the desire to start dancing. It just happens, and the moment it does is the moment the characters in the film can leap free of all the problems in their world -- which is to say, all the problems that the film has stuck them with. If it's a Ruritanian operetta, the problem is who will inherit the throne; if it's Gold Diggers of 1933, it's getting financing for a show; if it's Oklahoma, it's settling the Western frontier, and so on. As Rick Altman has pointed out, the solution to these various problems is mapped onto the romantic fortunes of the lead couple and is worked out in song and dance. So in the narrative world of the film, these moments where everyone breaks into song and dance are moments of transcendence, and in the narrative world of the film, they stick: problems thus solved stay solved. We, the external audience, get a contact high of transcendence -- we feel what it's like to experience this Utopia. As Richard Dyer says, musicals tell us what utopia would feel like, not how it would be organized. But of course, when the lights come up and we walk out of the theater, there are our problems again, in exactly the same place they were before. We know that it was just a movie; we're not like the people we saw break into song. But it was fun while it lasted.

In this scene Norman and Vickie are "putting on a show" in good film-musical style, using props that just happen to be handy to act out a wildly entertaining (and improbable) song-and-dance number. But as I said earlier, this scene turns the usual syntax of the film musical inside-out. The film characters are in the position of the audience: the number comes to an end, something happens to kill to mood (unfortunately not included on the Youtube clip) and the old troubles rush back in. (A delivery boy arrives and calls Norman "Mr. Lester," and Norman goes and drowns his wounded pride in booze, again, as Vickie watches in helpless agony.) The film doesn't just highlight the cheesiness and fakeness of the big film musical production number (the harps and patriotism and jungle drums and whatnot): more drastically, it highlights the fakeness of movie-musical transcendence itself. The film tells us that it's all just a dream; it was always just a dream. Music and dance won't solve your problems. It projects the experience of the external audience (you and me) onto the internal audience (Norman and Vickie) -- a dysphoric collapse of movie musical codes, which normally do the opposite.

Which, when you think about it, is a great new angle. This is what James Hepokoski calls a "generic deformation." A Star Is Born isn't destroying the film musical; it's messing with a well-worn generic form. It's not a "critique" of entertainment or a "deconstruction" of entertainment -- it's just a new kind of entertainment. (Or rather, it's a critique of entertainment as entertainment.) As I said, entertainment can absorb revisionist narratives (in this case, the critique of "escapism") back into itself. Which is either delightful or terrifying, depending on your point of view. It does suggest a Borg-like "resistance is futile: you will be assimilated" kind of thing. You can't kill entertainment; it can turn anything bad you can say about it into entertainment. 

What does any of this have to do with the Wilhelm scream? Nothing, I guess.

Only maybe this. The Wilhelm scream wasn't an in-joke in 1954; when this film was made it was just a useful sound in the Warner catalog. The pleasure I take in the recognition of this rather arcane little detail is a pleasure that comes entirely from outside the film's narrative frame. The moment I hear the scream is a moment where the artifice of film bursts out within a tragic ode to film artifice; it doubles the film's intended meanings and at the same time breaks free of them. It's funny and campy, and at the same time is somehow apt and meaningful. I love this about old movies -- you can play along with them or play against them, but they always invite you to play. There is always too much there -- too much image, too much sound, too much meaning -- for films to stay within the frame.

Decay

Back in the spring came a revolutionary moment in American culture whose full significance was not quite grasped at the time, although the event itself was widely seen and much commented-upon. I refer, of course, to Blake Lewis's performance of Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" on American Idol:

What Lewis did was to break the fourth wall of audio vérité, something no other AI contestant had ever done. He performed his own purpose -- freshening up an old favorite -- by miming the gestures of someone taking an old LP off the shelf, blowing off the dust, and cuing up the turntable. And (this is the important bit) he then imitated the hiss of a needle in a well-worn groove. The gesture of incorporating audio decay into one's own performance makes audible the passage of years: with this gesture, a song that lives in the eternal present of AOR radio is stripped of its appearance of living outside time. Lewis's performance insisted (gently) that the song lives in history (i.e., old song made new, etc.), and did so by representing it as something with a material existence subject to the ravages of time. Songs are embodied in objects (LPs, cassette tapes, eight-tracks, 45s) that decay, and the decay becomes part of the our hearing of the song: we hear it as the sign of passing time, of history. In truth, Blake wasn't doing anything that hiphop artists hadn't done for decades, but, as I said at the time, this marked the moment that hiphop, and certain of its underlying aesthetic elements, penetrated the widest possible sphere of American pop-cultural consciousness. 

What hiphop does is to make unignorable rock music's rejection of what Theodore Gracyk, in his excellent philosophical study Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetic of Rock, calls realism:

Needing a label for the position that performances always have ontological priority, let us call it recording realism. It is related to an established position concerning photography and cinema: the parent theme is that any mechanical recording is essentially the documentation of some independent reality. Although not himself a realist, William Moylan summarizes its basic aesthetic: "The recording medium is often called upon to be transparent. In these contexts, it is the function of the recording to capture the sound as accurately as possible, to capture the live performance without distortion." Ideally, recording is invisible and the audience should ignore contributions of the recording process.*

Or, one might add, the materiality of recordings. When you do pay attention to the contributions of the recording process, or to the "thinginess" or records, you see them as things in themselves and not simply auditory snapshots of some other, independent reality. They are things with a history, things in time, things that decay. Records are made out of records; records are about other records. Hiphop simply raises this notion to an overt and generally avowed aesthetic principle. (As Gracyk demonstrates, in rock it is overt but generally disavowed.)

Last week I read a paper for the IU musicology department that draws on some of these notions by looking at some very decayed sound recordings and thinking about how their decay is part of their presence. One of our graduate students, Amanda Sewell, told me about a film called Decasia: The State of Decay that does the same thing. Decasia is a wordless art film that sets very old and decayed silent film footage to the music of can-banger Michael Gordon. The film's website has two clips:

Clip 1
Clip 2

When the decay of an expressive object becomes its primary expression, what do we feel? Nostalgia, longing, melancholy, regret, desire, foreboding, fear?

*Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetic of Rock (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 39.

The Company Store

Someone appended a link to one of my previous blogs. Apparently there is documentary film, Note by Note, coming out, and it seems to be a puff piece on Steinway & Sons. I’ve fallen in love with Steinways in my time, enough to propose marriage to a couple, true. There was a time when I would have given anything for a black T-Shirt with that ampersand, with or without Steinway & Sons below (Men’s Large, please). But—I can’t get over the feeling of Big Brother wagging a finger in my face. There are other fine piano companies, other fine workmen, and so forth. Further, not all Steinways deserve the implied sort of lump-in-the-throat concern and nostalgia; pianists all know that there have been years when they produced substandard product, for all the multi-kazillion dollar price tag, that still bore the [sound cue: distant trumpets] Steinway & Sons logo. Like all big companies, S & S is a mixed bag—in the early 1990s one of their people (a business guy, not a piano guy) openly lied to me on the phone about what was happening on a service matter. Call me old school, but I don’t shrug and go on after something like that; if you think a bald-faced lie to me either doesn’t or shouldn’t matter, then I’m clearly in the wrong neighborhood. Exit, stage right.

Needless to say, I’m not going to be in New York to see the premiere of this thing. Someone can keep us posted. I guess my problem with Steinway is like my problem with RCA Red Label and the NY Phil and the Met: when you’re the Company Store, not only are you no longer trying, you resent the implication that you even should, because you’ve been accustomed to a diet of paeans, prestige, and price-fixing.

Am I being unfair? I wonder.

You like crazy drums?

I've been meaning to write about The Big Combo for a while. The Big Combo is a 1954 film noir that's now considered a small classic. But when it was made, few would have thought to consider it as anything other than a cheap, nasty, disposable B-picture for drunks to sleep through at the bottom end of a double-feature. Viewers nowadays are more likely to be struck by its expressionistic high-contrast lighting -- The Big Combo is the apotheosis of film noir's characteristic visual style. The man who did more than anyone to cement that style was John Alton, The Big Combo's cinematographer. (This site has a wonderful collection of Alton's high-contrast noir images.) Alton called it "mystery lighting," and it pervades this scene from The Big Combo, where the henchmen of the big boss, Mr. Brown, have kidnapped the hero, Lt. Diamond, and try some "enhanced interrogation techniques" on him. Mr. Brown shows up, though, and shows these amateurs some real technique, with a radio and a hearing aid:

I showed this film in the course on cold war American music that I did a couple of years ago at the University of Texas. I like to use The Big Combo, not for its musical underscore so much as for its use of diegetic music -- notably its use of Chopin's C sharp minor scherzo as the leitmotif of Alicia, a classical pianist who has fallen into the noir sewer and has become Mr. Brown's gun moll. This particular scherzo is famous for its Jekyll/Hyde dualistic character -- the demonic octave passages in C sharp minor bluntly juxtaposed to angelic chorales (with tinkly cascading figures) in the enharmonic major, D flat -- and its repeated appearance in this film (at a concert, on the phonograph) says something about Alicia's character.

And then, of course, there's the use of merry dance-band jazz as a torture device. Noir excels at this sort of thing: the calculated desecration of an emotion, or, rather, desecration of the conventional icon or sign of that emotion. One classic example of this is the opening image from David Lynch's neo-noir Blue Velvet, where the camera pans across blue sky, white picket fence, red roses -- a great icon of suburban contentment -- and we then see the man watering the roses struck down with a heart attack, with the camera sinking down into the dirt beneath the lawn to reveal the seething insect life beneath. Noir always wants to show us what lies beneath. Its technique is (a) to show us something that is not only cheery or wholesome but that also registers on our nervous system as an emblem or sign of cheeriness, and (b) to place that thing in a situation where its emotion is emptied out and what is left is the husk of the sign: the conventional sign is revealed as just that, a convention, a dead letter, the empty mask of a vanished emotion that mocks our sentimentality. You like crazy drums, Lieutenant? Have a good time. Noir makes the sinister out of the sweet, and tells us it was always sinister—only now you see it.

I was thinking about this when I read Suzanne Cusick's recent article on music as an implement of torture. Writes Cusick:

As press reports conflating music’s use on the battlefield with its use in interrogations proliferated, I began desultory research on a phenomenon of the current “global war on terror” that particularly wounds me as a musician -- wounds me in that part of my sensibility that remains residually invested in the notion that music is beautiful, even transcendent -- is a practice whose contemplation would always lead me to contemplation of bodies and pleasures. Not bodies in pain.

But that's the point, isn't it? If music is what lets us feel and express love, then let it serve hate; if it soothes our sore bodies and nerves, then let it hurt; if it lets us feel the humanity of our fellow creatures, and lets us experience our own humanity, then let it dehumanize, brutalize, and degrade. And -- this is the important part, the part that the apologists for torture affect not to understand -- this is a lesson that the state wishes all of us to learn, not only those it tortures. Torture is a pedagogical principle: it teaches us that what we thought was beautiful, or transcendent, or sacred, is in fact as foul as anything else. One of Charles Manson's "family" told John Gilmore that Manson had planned to kill celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Liz Taylor because "that's how you put the fear into people—you butcher what they dream of being. These are all the gilded replicas of fame and happiness, and when you smash them you can go right into the heart of the dark." And this was a philosophy Manson learned in prison: "like a dog that's been whipped and chained and learned only the whip and the chain, there wasn't even a yearning to be free. There was only the whip and the chain."* The state that tortures wants to bring its people to this same condition; like Manson, it wants to teach us that there is nothing but the whip and the chain. If there is no transcendence, in music or anything else, there is nothing left to hope for, nothing to aspire to beyond the whip and the chain, and then whip and chain will become our aspiration; we will have learned our civic lesson, and we, too, will bend to the will of the torturers.

This is why it matters when music becomes an instrument of torture. When the Society of Ethnomusicology published a statement against torture, the response in the right-wing commentariat was, predictably, dismissive: who cares that we made some guy listen to rap against his will? My upstairs neighbor does that to me every day! And: who cares what a bunch of ethnomusicologists think? Even if you oppose torture, you might think that music, compared to waterboarding and cold cells, is a minor concern. But I don't think it is. This is why I respectfully suggest that my own scholarly association, the American Musicological Society, draft its own statement against torture. Granted, this would be a symbolic gesture, but what I've been arguing here is that torture itself is in part a symbolic gesture. If the torturers want to put the fear into us by smashing our icons, we can only resist by insisting that what we love is not yet theirs to destroy. [UPDATE: I changed my mind about this -- see my follow-up post here.]

*These quotes are from Laid Bare, John Gilmore's memoir of Hollywood low life.

Thomson on Astaire

This is turning out to be a pretty good wheeze: have David Thomson write my blog posts. Three is a magic number, so I'll stop with this one, but I'll end with the best: an appreciation of Fred Astaire that becomes, en passant, a perfect encapsulation of the film musical.

There is something very suggestive of Americana in the way a Napoleonic battle is tuned into a name without roots or etymology. Yet how evocative that name is: run the parts together and the result is as rhythmic as Frenesi: separate them and it could be Fred a Star or Fred on a staircase, astride the stair—thus Astaire, l'esprit d'escalier.

It is proper to respond in this way because so much of Astaire is a matter of stylish carriage, and I do not think it accidental that the name evokes some special serene agility. This leads to the questions, is Astaire a movie actor? and what makes for great acting in the cinema? There is a good case for arguing that, in the event of a visit by creatures from a far universe, ignorant of the cinema, one would do best to show them some steps by Astaire as the clinching evidence of the medium's potential. Better that than the noble actors—Olivier, Jannings, Brando, Barrymore, et al. Astaire is the most refined human expression of the musical, which is in turn the extreme manifestation of pure cinema: the lifelike presentation of human beings in magical, dreamlike, and imaginary situations. That might be thought to imply that Astaire's dancing depends on illusion. Not so. He was always the most technically exacting and ambitious of screen dancers, the most eager to perform in uninterrupted setups. In the 1920s, it would have been possible to see him dancing virtuoso routines on stage. The spatial and temporal continuity of theatre would have made clear how difficult the feat was. Cinema wipes away the sense of difficulty and substitutes the ease that permits every transformation needed by the chronic dreamer. Astaire is not a great dancer so much as a great filmed dancer. Nureyev on film is less than in the flesh, because he is himself most stimulated by an actual audience and a real leap. Astaire, like all dreamers, is a perfectionist who loved to work in the feverish secrecy of a studio towards the flawless image of his own grace. He lends himself to the detachment of cinema because he is a rather cold, even indistinct personality who celebrates the spirit of elegance as channeled through rapid, photographed motion.

Awesome. Elsewhere in this small essay Thomson writes what must be one of the best sentences of critical evaluation ever tossed in the direction of the film musical: "Yet once Astaire was asked to partake of earnest melodrama, it was a strain to watch him at all. In play-acting, he is downright shifty: like a philosopher at a bingo session, there is the embarrassing and depleting sense of a man having been caught on the blind side, but gamely trying to be polite." There's a funny moment in The Band Wagon where Vincente Minnelli actually exploits this side of Astaire, when the veteran song-and-dance man tries to serve his director's pretentious vision by hamming it up -- it's a nice self-aware moment.

Here is an excerpt from the almost incomprehensibly cool "Girl Hunt" ballet from The Band Wagon (a film Thomson calls "fragmented" and "less dramatically necessary," whatever the hell that means). If this isn't Cop Show, I don't know what is.

Thomson on Madonna

More Thomson:

Imagine that you are watching something that especially moves you—your two-year-old eating profiteroles; Joe Montana moving down the field; dawn at the Canyon de Chelly; or the close of Ugetsu Monogatari, whatever. Your communion with this spectacle is suddenly ruptured by what we will call a commercial break. This is all the more disturbing in that you did not know that what you were watching (the medium) was subject to such intrusions. You did not know the technology was yet available to come between you and the entire air and sky at Canyon de Chelly. But "they" have managed it, and the ad zips up every horizon. In that disaster, the ad—I suggest—should be he insolent, in-your-face "attitude" of Ms. Ciccone. There is no need for a product. There is nothing in Madonna to be advertised, except for her ironic, deflecting contempt. She is an ad for advertising; she is the famousness of celebrity; and a fit vehicle for an unusual kind of serial-killing movie—one in which photography poisons the world.

Brutal.

The Punk Aesthetic

I've been a bit absent for the past week or so -- our stuff finally got to Bloomington, and I've been unpacking. I'm still not really here. So as a placeholder, I'll quote something from a book I've been reading lately -- David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film. I picked it up for a few bucks at a used bookstore and have been wolfing down Thomson's brilliant miniature essays like peanuts. I don't always agree with him -- he is one of those people whose aesthetics are basically dualistic, shaped at bottom by a sense that style and content are at times antagonistic and threaten to part company, and that, at such times, we should prefer the latter over the former. (I have written about this idea before. Suffice it to say, I don't completely agree.) But his essays describe various persons and personas vividly and with economy; even more, Thomson in is able to use those person(a)s to illustrate basic historical and aesthetic problems of film -- which are, mutatis mutandis, problems of art more generally.

An entry on Harmony Korine, for instance, becomes a meditation on what Thomson calls "minimalism," by which he means a voluntary poverty of image, an abstention from artifice and ornament. Musicians tend to understand minimalism in terms of repetition -- for example in Robert Fink's masterful book, Repeating Ourselves. The idea of an aesthetic "vow of chastity," explicit in the Dogme 95 movement, is also implicit in punk: there is in both Dogme films and punk records a sense that there is something sinful about artifice, something corrupt in it that mirrors the corruption of society at large. So what Thomson calls minimalism I would rather call the punk aesthetic, but whatever you call it, Thomson's bit on it strikes me as particularly clear-eyed. For one thing, he understands that while the punk aesthetic is usually associated with some variant or other of anarcho-Marxist leftism, it is fundamentally a reactionary stance.

There's no wonder at the appeal of minimalism in an age of budgets over $100 million, of astonishing special effects and a widening gap between the harsh realities in which most people exist and the daft fantasies they are supposed to aspire to. But minimalism can grow out of political anger, a critique of capitalism, stylistic austerity, or a kind of numb, pretentious helplessness that sees the irony in a copy of Vogue floating on the toxic surface of a full latrine. A genuine political dismay would be best advised to go into politics, to change things that way. But the aesthetic response—the urge, say, to make Dogme-like films, or simply to record the passing of unending human disaster—can seem cold and exploitative. In the end, what is the point of minimalism if it only works in the dark?

That said, minimalism can be a desperate attempt to hold on to real place, real time, and nature in the broadest sense against the infernal electronic possibilities of change. There is a great need for movies, or for film, that simply record real like and asks us to attend.

There are astonishing beauties in distance and duration, as Renoir, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, and so many great masters believed.

This is a lot more sympathy -- and therefore much better writing -- than I could have managed on the same topic.

The Savage Eye

At one point in my "music and counterculture" class this semester (now done) I showed Pull My Daisy, a half-hour film from 1959 by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie based on an unpublished theatrical scenario by Jack Kerouac called "The Beat Generation." Music people will be interested to know that David Amram, who composed the title tune, makes an appearance as "Mezz McGillicuddy." The awesome UBUWEB -- the "Youtube of the avant-garde," as it calls itself -- has an Italian-subtitled version of this never-in-print, hard-to-find film here.

There was a film-studies student in my class whose interest was piqued by this film, which is an example of "alternative film" long before the term the was coined. That is, it is not only "alternative" in the way it was funded and distributed (i.e., outside mainstream networks) but also in its overall aesthetics. (For one thing, all the sound and music is non-diegetic; aside from some musical interludes, which might be called quasi-diegetic, the only sound is Jack Kerouac's slightly drunk voice as it narrates the story we see played out on screen.) Anyway, my student wanted to know if there are any films like it from the same time, and I rattled off a couple: Shirley Clarke's film version of Jack Gelber's The Connection and John Cassavetes's Shadows are the obvious ones.

There's another, more obscure one worth mentioning, though -- a film called The Savage Eye. Like the others, the film has a documentary feel: it's never entirely clear if what you're seeing is staged or not. The Savage Eye follows a bitter, recently-divorced woman as she travels through the nocturnal underworld of 1950s Los Angeles in search of an experience intense enough to leave a mark on her numbed soul. The camera takes her point of view; it is the "savage eye" that records everything she sees. From a strictly musical point of view The Savage Eye is interesting for its rather strident 12-tone score. But for my purposes the film is interesting for the light it throws on the idea of hip perception -- the idea of being a discrete, critical outside observer of the rat-maze in which we are all condemned to run. The hipster doesn't necessarily imagine that he's found a way out of the maze, but he is at least hip to the fact he is in a maze,* unlike the squares whizzing around him, trying to get the cheese.

As a sensibility, hipness places a heavy premium on perception: after all, to be hip to something is to be aware of it. So while The Savage Eye doesn't have the hipster pedigree or subject matter (jazz, drugs, etc.) of the other films I've mentioned, it shares with them a fascination with perception and consciousness. The Savage Eye is an aptly-named film. Its principle is pitiless observation: people are shown from the outside, their actions are stripped of the sense they gain from inner motivation. The camera does not do the human eye’s ordinary job sifting and sorting. It is a documentary eye, not a loving eye. It does not seek the features that please, but alights on everything in equal measure. It does not stay with its subjects for a decorous length of time, but gawks for long after it is seemly. In fact, it doesn't know what's seemly. It doesn't’t know anything at all -- it only records. It transforms objects of desire into sickly things. The camera stares at the bodies of women in a health spa, at the bodies of burlesque dancers, at the spiritual ecstasy of Sunday worshipers at a revival meeting, at items stocked at a department store, at gamblers and drinkers and wrestlers, without lust, without envy, without any fellow feeling at all. At one point the woman says “the touch of human skin makes me sick”  -- what she wants is to kill the humanity inside her, to turn herself into a pitiless recording angel, to make herself into a machine, into a camera.**

And yet the outcome of The Savage Eye is Whitmanesque acceptance. The heroine (anti-heroine?) suffers a devastating car wreck and learns, perhaps too late, the beauty of life, a beauty manifest in all things, even in the repulsive things she has seen. And this, too, is one of the ways the Savage Eye works. It refuses to edit, to pull away from the gross, but it thereby also embraces everything in its field of vision. Alienation of perception and total acceptance of the objects in a field of perception are perhaps the same thing, or two aspects of the same thing. I've always thought that Allen Ginsberg was the odd man out in the generally pessimistic, skeptical cold war dialect of hipness, because his tone of lyrical all-embracing acceptance is so at odds with the icy, clinical observation of, say, William Burroughs. But Ginsberg's embrace of everything is not so very far from Burroughs' cold unreflecting eye. What is different is not the method but the motivation.

*At least he consoles himself in thinking so. As I've written elsewhere, I'm skeptical of the hipster image of society.

**This is reminiscent of Andy Warhol's oft-voiced desire to be a machine. Mary Woronov, one of the more louche denizens of Warhol's factory in the 1960s, wrote of her own disgust of human beings -- what she called "the human skin-package."