the Richard Larson blog

Wall-E

Summer movie fare tends to be sorely lacking in depth and certainly deficient in style, but Pixar's new animated feature provides both in spades and functions as an homage to early film history and (perhaps less convincingly) to human history itself, which the film (and Al Gore) would lead you to believe is in dire jeopardy.  I had originally thought that the ongoing critical commentary about the film's Chaplinesque first half was perhaps a bit overblown, but the similarities in tone and execution to Chaplin's Modern Times, for example, are striking, from the protagonist-as-automaton thematic (Wall-E is, after all, a robot designed to endlessly gather and consolidate trash) to the over-simple yet uniquely touching love story, and, ultimately, to the very idea that society is changing irreparably for the worst and that odd, quirky, mostly silent comedy involving a single character interacting with his environment is an appropriate method by which to convey that idea to an audience. 

Wall-E succeeds remarkably.  It is, as the relatively poorly (or perhaps thinly) constructed human characters should imply, the story of two robots... in love.  Their courtship is more touching and fully conceived than one would find in a typical Hollywood romantic comedy between human (speaking) characters, and while their ultimate quest to save the world becomes somewhat rote and certainly inevitable in its conclusion, I would handily conclude that the tradition of visual storytelling has been expanded by what Pixar has achieved with this film.  And while we leave the story presented in Modern Times with a shrug, having been faced with the idiocy of industrial society with little recourse for change, Wall-E at least leaves room for a move towards something better, a resonant call to arms against the threat of human carelessness.  But to think of this film simply in terms of its environmental implications (and a general yet tandential critique of consumer culture) is to simplify an amazing accomplishment of originality in a market handicapped by its own low expectations. 

Story!

My short story, "Good Night," is up in the current issue of ChiZine.

Hannah and Her Sisters

In an earlier film, Interiors (1978), Woody Allen dramatically investigates a group of creative yet troubled sisters as they deal with the dissolution of their parents' marriage and the downfall of their crazy mother.  With Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), the focus is squarely on the sisters and the men who surround them, but there are distinct parallels between the two films which reveal general preoccupations in Allen's work.  The central characters, for example, are both strong women (played by Diane Keaton in Interiors and Mia Farrow in Hannah and Her Sisters) at ease with their creative endeavors but forced to muster continual support of the lesser efforts of their sisters who seem to be engaged in a game of perpetual catch-up, restlessly living in the shadow of their more successful sibling.  And in both films, the husband of the strong central female figure preys upon an arguably more attractive (but come on, let's be serious, we're talking about Keaton and Farrow, two of the most beautiful women ever) younger sister, to varying degrees of success. 

In many ways it feels as though Woody Allen is updating his earlier film with Hannah and Her Sisters, as the outlook provided by the ending here is decidedly more positive, more hopeful; Allen has seemingly decided that there is a way out of these characters' predicament after all.  His own character, Mickey, the ex-husband of Mia Farrow's Hannah, provides the most distinct representation of this updated narrative arc.  A lifelong hypochondriac, he begins having headaches and loss of hearing and visits his doctor who, seemingly for the first time, takes these complaints seriously and subjects Mickey to a series of tests.  It begins to feel inevitable that Mickey will be diagnosed with a brain tumor, and we witness this realization as it seeps into the character, darkening the world around him.  And when we see the doctor come into the room with the final verdict, Allen (as writer/director) first shows us a scenario in which Mickey is indeed given the hopeless diagnosis -- complete with a head-in-hands/the-world-is-ending reaction from the actor -- but then quickly revises the scene, showing us that what we have just seen was in fact a product of Mickey's paranoid imagination and revealing, much to our (and the character's) relief, that Mickey is actually perfectly healthy. 

Interiors actually ends with the characters' collective head firmly in hand, showing us the hopeless diagnosis with no comforting postscript; which is to say, the ending of Interiors -- and thus the outlook provided by the film -- is kind of hopeless.  But it works.  We realize, through the experience of watching the film, that some things just don't end well, and that some situations are just totally and irrevocably impossible.  So for me it is a considerable triumph that the ending of Hannah and Her Sisters (which I won't reveal in detail) also works -- that the same situation could, eight years later in Woody Allen's life, actually end well, and that the situation, complicated and tragic as it may seem at first, was never impossible at all.  People can find hidden talents, they can meet new people, they can come to realize that they've had what they wanted all along.  Parents can reconcile.  Some people may be assholes and the world may not be perfect all the time, but it's a pretty cool place to be, as far as these things go, and Hannah and her sisters show us this with palpable satisfaction.  Last night I finally let out the breath I'd been holding since I saw those poor girls on the beach in Interiors staring off into the distance and wondering how everything had gone so terribly wrong.

Story sale!

Busy around these parts, but I just received word that ChiZine will be publishing "Good Night," a little story to which I am incredibly attached.  This is wonderful and exciting news.

Now if I could only find time to write something new...

Esther and Esau; or, writing about cats

"The cats, Esther and Esau, lick each other's fur and share a bowl.  They had been two of a litter.  Esther, the mother of more than thirty kittens mostly resembling her brother, but with a persistent black minority vindicating the howled appeal of a neighboring tom, has been 'fixed'; Esau, sentimentally allowed to continue unfixed, now must venture from the house in quest of the bliss that had once been purely domestic.  He returns scratched and battered.  Esther licks his wounds while he leans dazed beside the refrigerator; even his purr is ragged.  Nagging for their supper, they sit like bookends, their backs discreetly touching, an expert old married couple on the dole.  One feels, unexpectedly, that Esau still loves Esther, while she merely accepts him.  She seems scornful of his Platonic attentions.  Is she puzzled by her abrupt surgical lack of what once drastically attracted him?  But it is his big square tomcat's head that seems puzzled, rather than her triangular feminine feline one.  The children feel a difference; both Bean and John cuddle Esau more, now that Esther is sterile.  Perhaps, obscurely, they feel that she has deprived them of a miracle, of the semiannual miracle of her kittens, of drowned miniature piglets wriggling alive from a black orifice more mysterious than a cave.  Richard Jr., as if to demonstrate his superior purchase on manhood and its righteous compassion, makes a point of petting the two cats equally, stroke for stroke.  Judith claims she hates them both; it is her chore to feed them supper, and she hates the smell of horsemeat.  She loves, at least in the abstract, horses."

-- John Updike, "Eros Rampant"

Preview: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Since we're in a Woody Allen mood around here...

Manhattan Murder Mystery

A later film by Woody Allen which maintains two of his stars from Manhattan (himself and Keaton) is Manhattan Murder Mystery, a fluffy and predictable story about marriage cleverly disguised as a murder mystery.  The film has a likeable Rear Window-esque feel; bored New Yorkers spying on neighbors discover a devious plot and singlehandedly bring it out into the open.  But the mystery parts of the film happen to be the least enjoyable, at least for me.  What I found most captivating was the way Allen painted a picture of a marriage mired in routine comfort and demonstrated a way out of that predicament.  The mystery is just a distraction -- for the viewer, I suppose, but mostly for the characters -- which ultimately serves the purpose of enlivening a dying marriage, getting these characters out of a rut.  Early in the film, Carol (Keaton) says to her husband Larry (Allen) something along the lines of "are we just too comfortable in our marriage?"  Then, as the mystery element of the film goes into full throttle, she ends up saying to him, "Isn't this the most exciting thing that's ever happened in our marriage?"  Which is, obviously, a key statement.  Allen has given us more characters (as in Manhattan) who seem vaguely unhappy, but here he offers them a more obvious redemption as they resume their lives with an extra bounce in their step, a little more self-awareness coupled with satisfaction and, maybe, hope that more excitement is just around the corner.  Perhaps the decade-and-change between the two films made all the difference, as Manhattan Murder Mystery is also about aging and figuring out ways to make the old new again, whereas the predicaments in Manhattan were a little more existential, a little more pervasive and seemingly permanent. 

I didn't find Manhattan Murder Mystery as funny as others did, so maybe my complaint that the film spells itself out a little too simply is related to my feeling distracted while watching it, but I infinitely prefer Allen's reluctant, elusive, cautious smile at the end of Manhattan to the portrait of self-satisfied, giggling New Yorkers we meet in Murder Mystery.  It's almost as though, just as Manhattan itself was largely tamed during the period between the films, Allen's view of the city and its relationship with its residents has become much less complicated, much less intriguing.  The stunning exteriors are all here; the characters spend a particularly significant amount of time around Gramercy Park, which I think is one of the most beautiful areas of the city.  But the magic is largely absent.  There are, alas, no fireworks.

Manhattan

Woody Allen's Manhattan is populated by people who can't figure out what they want.  They wander the streets, prodded along by the big sounds of Gershwin, looking for something they've never seen which may also be something that they already have.  Isaac (played by Allen) quits his job and leaves his girlfriend, only to end up wanting both of them back.  Michael Murphy's Yale, affluent and highly motivated, becomes bored in his marriage and takes a mistress, then leaves the mistress, only to want her back when she then begins seeing Isaac.  Mary, the mistress, played brilliantly (of course) by Diane Keaton, is a neurotic intellectual who is eternally dissatisfied with her position among New York's elite -- everyone else is "a genius" and "devastating" while she's just "from Philadelphia" -- who bounces between men, responding gratefully to affection from any source even as she constantly contends that "I'm beautiful and deserve something better," always arguing with herself and floundering when her therapist succumbs to an acid-induced coma. 

The only character in the film who seems at all comfortable with her life and the choices she's made is 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), who Isaac is dating at the beginning of the film and who may or may not accept him back at the end.  Mary may giggle when she asks Tracy what she does for a living and the beautiful youth answers "I go to high school," but it is the nonchalant Tracy who knows herself more than these self-obsessed older New Yorkers.  She wants Isaac in the beginning, and she wants him at the end; she also wants to study in London, to grow, to figure out what she's good at and what the world is going to offer her, but she sees no conflict in these desires and is confident that everything can work out.  "Have a little faith in people," she implores Isaac at the end of the film, as this is what she's always done and it's worked out so far for her. 

Writing Tracy as a 17-year-old does two things for Allen's film, and they are distinctly at odds: it makes us doubt the utility of her outlook (what do 17-year-olds know, anyway?) but also simultaneously implicates us in the same process of dismissal that Allen's characters fall into in relation to Tracy's seeming naivete.  We wonder how much weight her words could possibly carry, even as she emerges as the film's voice of reason -- and possibly its savior. 

What is it about New York that muddles our desires into a senseless blob, distancing us irretrievably from what we thought we wanted?  Why, indeed, is a film about being lost and confused given the title Manhattan?  Even as the film visually celebrates the city's impossible beauty -- with fireworks, even -- does Allen blame the city for the characters' misdirection?  And will Tracy end up just like the rest of them, as soon as she is allowed to more extensively test her outlook, or is she somehow immune to the tendency to overthink her desires and decisions? 

The film itself doesn't answer any of these questions.  Woody Allen's smile at the end is possibly ironic (what does it mean to "have faith in people," and was this ever a realistic possibility for him?) or maybe his relationship with a high school student has, improbably, helped him grow up a little bit.  But the city is still there, and as the camera abandons the characters and produces a montage of the topography of the island, we are left to wonder if the people -- and the annoyingly narcissistic minutiae of their daily lives -- ever really mattered at all; whether, indeed, the whole thing has been a trick played by Manhattan itself, a random sampling of stories that ultimately could have happened anywhere.  I wrote a paper on Manhattan as an undergraduate at NYU which made the claim that the city is the protagonist and the narrative arc of the film is a fall from grace, a subsequent desperate floundering, with an ultimate redemption, the "grace" being the fireworks celebration of the film's opening and the "redemption" being the slightly wiser, more elegiac closing montage.  Reading the film this way, the characters themselves are merely an allegory of the journey of this mysterious island. 

And I still think some of that's true.  But I think it's also about Woody Allen's smile, and Mariel Hemingway standing there with her bags, and the cab waiting outside, and not knowing where any of us will go next or whether we'll be happy with ourselves when we get there.

Donations for otherwise free literature!

Strange Horizons, everyone's favorite online 'zine for short stories and reviews (and more!), is having its annual Fund Drive, asking for donations from people who enjoy the work on the website.  If you have read anything there that you have found particularly worthwhile -- or maybe you just have a few extra dollars that you really have no idea what to do with? -- please consider donating something to help keep the project going during the coming year.  I'm not wholly impartial, as I've published several reviews there and I have a short story upcoming in the fall, but hey, if you're reading this post then you must think my words are at least worth something.  So go pay for them!  (And look, there are even prizes!)

Film festival!

NewFest is underway.  Come see something!