Archives for August 2008

Chapter Eleven

As mentioned earlier, there are several books on religious subjects on Diana’s shelf. She tends to concentrate on non-fiction – science books, mostly biology, such as the one by Teilhard de Chardin, but also a few by Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, and others as well. She wants, after all, to get down to the truth about life, and biology, after all, is the study of life. For the most part she hasn’t thought to look for that truth in novels. There is, however, one novel that she really has enjoyed reading, called The Living.

The Living is a novel by Annie Dillard, who is also the author of a number of non-fiction books in Diana’s bookcase. The story takes place in the 19th century in the area of what is now modern day Bellingham in Washington state. The novel is filled with a number of striking characters who populate the community of Whatcom between the 1850s and the 1890s and make their living by fishing, hunting, and trading, and as certainly must have been true (because it has always been true), these people give each other a fair amount of both grief and help along the way. Clare Fishburn is inspired to live a good life by recognizing that he will certainly die one day, a knowledge that is impressed upon him with a threat from the unruly Beal Obenchain (Dillard has some pretty interesting character names). There are many secondary characters as well, and the author informs us on a prefatory page that only a half dozen of them are historical: Chowitzit, the Lummi Indian Chief, Hump Talem, the Nooksack chief, and several other community leaders in business and politics.

But it’s also possible, even probable, that some of the other characters are based on people from real life, even if it’s just a minor trait in a minor character. This only seems reasonable. A detail about someone here or there could have been picked up from reading something in the historical record consulted by Dillard as she wrote the novel. Or a part of a character’s personality may actually have been taken from someone Dillard met in life. It could be the color of someone’s hair, the tone of someone’s voice, or just the way someone listens to the surf and looks at the footprints of birds below the tide line on a beach. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with a particular individual, but in the way two individuals interact. Maybe an author doesn’t even realize what is taken from life for their work; this is simply the nature of creative writing, prefatory remarks along the lines of ‘This is a work of fiction’ notwithstanding.

It’s worth considering that of all the people designated by the title The Living, not one of them really is living. Chief Chowitzit and some of the others were alive at one time, but they aren’t now (in the biological sense of the word), and most of the other characters were never alive at all. And yet Dillard writes about all of them as if they were, and the book can be read as if they were, or even are, with the same willing spirit. It’s possible that Dillard chose the title merely to suggest that back before the turn of the century people living in the north Puget Sound region were a hardier lot and therefore more ‘alive’ than people who live there right now. An implied critique of modern society might be part of her purpose, but that probably isn’t all of it. Dillard’s own essays on fiction suggest that she’s on to something more, and one of the things she seems to be on to is a paradox that lies at the heart of all fiction.

Readers engage themselves with something they know is not true as if were true. This is old hat, really, and most everybody who has considered this paradox has heard or read about the expression suspension of disbelief, that psychological trick by which readers willingly hang up that critical ability to distinguish between what they understand to be real and not real. Of course they don’t throw out this ability altogether. It’s fun to find inconsistencies made by the makers of fiction, or such improbabilities as the tavern scene in the middle of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Unlikely coincidences run throughout Dickens’ Great Expectations as well; better yet, in David Lean’s film of Dickens’ novel, Bernard Miles (the actor playing Joe Gargery) has fake eyebrows that sometimes look like they are about to fall off. “Even Homer nods,” and such mistakes prove their makers mortal, and perhaps also help us reconfirm the sense of reality we had formerly been so eager to give away.

We have a sense of reality and then we let it go for a while, and then we return to our workaday sense of the world, going back and forth between realities with an ease that reveals this psychological trick to be second nature. For all the ease with which we negotiate these transformations of consciousness, there remains a strong desire for one reality, once and for all, and this might be most apparent in the eternal calling of art. Certainly at one time or another most people have thought of devoting themselves to painting, or acting, or becoming a musician or a poet.

Such a desire for one reality once and for all is also an important aspect of religion. What kind of connection is there between stories that are clearly fiction (as described above) and stories we need to be true so as to remain bound together as a coherent people? When is this ‘transformation of consciousness’ welcome, and when is it a problem? In addition to whatever help or hindrance it is for society, this transformation seems to be an important part any our longing for the hereafter. Whatever failures we may experience in life, there remains hope that in the afterlife we may find our different understandings of reality merged in a way we’ve never recognized before. G.K. Chesterton (Diana has one of his books on religion, Orthodoxy, even though she hasn’t read it) seems to have had something like this in mind at the end of his biography of Dickens when he wrote the following:

The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad meeting Nicholas Nickleby or Mr. Pickwick in any of his different guises, but the prospect of spending eternity with Fagin or Skimpole or even Titus Barnacle of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit is a little daunting, to say the least. Most people would probably prefer to have a little say in the matter of who they spend time with in the hereafter, and for that reason it’s worth considering whether Chesterton’s wish is all that desirable. Since death itself is compulsory, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that anything or anyone connected with the afterlife will be compulsory as well. There’s also something vaguely disconcerting about this vision of the hereafter, in that we actually seem to lose that critical ability to distinguish between fiction and what isn’t fiction. Not only is the idea of eternity with Fagin objectionable, but the next world seems like something less than this world if we must lose the ability to understand the categorical difference between Charles Dickens and Mr. Pickwick and all the others. It would be nice to retain our knowledge of the difference between characters from novels and characters from our workaday reality. Of course we naturally suspend our disbelief while engaged with even the most clichéd fictions, so to some extent the hereafter according to Chesterton (or this paragraph of Chesterton) seems a real possibility. And those great flagons can’t really help our lot. After stumbling pie-eyed around a creaky, 19th century inn filled with imaginary characters, even Dickens’ characters, it’s probably time to call for a ride home.

All that aside, the dilemma posed by the paradox of fiction runs deeper than the divide explored thus far, if indeed it is possible for anything to run deeper than our notions about the hereafter. What is paradoxical about fiction seems in fact true about language generally and therefore about any understanding we may reach about the world. The word ‘tree’ and the idea this word generates is not the same thing as an actual tree. And it’s true not just of language, but of any way we choose to represent anything. Consider Magritte’s painting of a pipe, Trahison des Images, in which he conscientiously and rather playfully includes in the picture the words, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). It’s an interesting gag that reverses the logic of another one of his paintings, entitled La Condition Humaine. In it, there is a painting within the painting, placed on an easel in front of a window in such a way that the field that is the subject of the painting blends perfectly with the landscape visible through the window behind it. Both paintings play on our ability to confuse reality with our representation of it, and for that reason they seem both humorous and a little mad.

There are similar paradoxes that don’t involve pictures. The statement ‘All Cretans are liars; I am a Cretan’ and its variations present us with a logical problem we can go round and around with forever. What is interesting is that from this logic problem a great number of ideas and solutions can be generated. But because we will always work with the world through the mediation of language or some other system of signs and symbolic forms, the world will always be more complicated than our ability to judge it with complete precision. The more we know, the more we know we don’t know. By these criteria we must always speak in terms that are incomplete at best and perhaps even dead wrong. This doesn’t mean that truth doesn’t exist (the existence of a falsehood is logically dependant upon truth), but it does indicate our inability to express the truth in words with anything approaching total comprehension. Perhaps all this has some bearing on the fall of Adam, since he was the first one to use words. Maybe he was fine as long as believed in the unity of things with the names he had given to them, but when he and Eve were forced by the serpent to recognize the arbitrary nature of the signs they were using, they felt an abyss open up between the world and their conception of it. Eve gave Adam an apple to prove this, showing him that it was something more than just the sign he had given to it. But Adam had already begun naming the things of the world, and by then there was no turning back.

Perhaps we are saved from the chaos of that abyss by the possibility that words can still point towards a truth that we do not yet fully recognize. In the hereafter perhaps we ourselves may then be called The Living and granted that recognition.

This movie, written and directed by Wong kar-Wai and filmed in Thailand in order to recreate the atmosphere of Hong Kong in the 1960s, manages to marry the claustrophobic mood of illicit, romantic longing to the epic proportions of the cinema of that same decade. Director Wong kar-Wai was first brought to the attention of many American viewers through Quentin Tarantino’s enthusiasm for Chunking Express, a 1994 movie that harbingers some of the techniques employed in Mood For Love but registers nothing near the impact of this melodrama set mostly in the cramped confines of tenement houses and business offices – a setting that makes those epic proportions all the more an achievement.

Chief among these techniques are the slow motion shots and the discreet ruptures of time and sequence to emphasize the confusion inherent to the predicament of the two major characters. Where slow motion sequences in Wai’s previous work were often halting and combined with out-of-focus camera shots, in this movie they are languorous and intensely erotic as they follow swaying hips and swinging arms of characters simply moving from one room to another. These shots are usually close-ups at torso-level (front or back) and encourage in the viewer the kind of obsessive observations made by lovers in close quarters.

The action begins in 1962 as Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) move in to adjacent rooms with their respective spouses. Since the heart of the story follows their co-discovery and reactions to the adultery committed by these spouses, there is an element of surprise that evokes sympathy for the Chow and Su as they fumble their way through a web of tangled emotions within their private lives. This, even as they struggle out from under the oppression of a society that places more burdens on them than on their sneakier spouses, whose faces are never seen and their voices never heard. No wonder that love soon blooms between them as well. On the pretense of writing a martial arts serial together they begin meeting more frequently, and their growing friendship is characterized in the movie by their unification within single frames, where they had hitherto been more often separated by individual shots. Their intimacy increases even as they remain faithful to their already broken marriages, and the poignancy of their choice is most evident in their efforts to keep their relationship secret.

The importance of secrecy is apparent when Chow shares with a co-worker a fable about confession rather than the details of his life. According to the story, in the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to share, they went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud, and left the secret there forever.

Perhaps a three fourths of the way through the film moves forward: first to 1966, then to, and finally to Cambodia in 1966 following De Gaulle’s visit to Phnom Penh. The era is vividly evoked by a soundtrack that includes Nat King Cole and other standards of the decade. Other staples of the mid-60’s aesthetic are the bee hive hair doos and cheongsam dresses worn by Su.

Compared, say, to Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful, or for that matter, Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman’s Faithless, Wai’s movie seems at once both staid and daring in its treatment of adultery. It isn’t that morality is sacrificed, but rather the full dimension of moral responsibility is explored in such a way that something more than titillation and lacerating guilt is brought to the drama. To pursue the story of the aggrieved partners is an interesting choice, if not totally unheard of. What makes it work as well as it does is Wang’s restraint, which is translated on film as the self-control of Chow and Su. This decision brings its own pain, as when he helps her rehearse for the eventual confrontation and revelation. As viewers we never see this confrontation: we are left to imagine it just as they imagine it. Of course we don’t want to, any more than they do, and soon we are returned to the private life shared by them.

The final sequence observes Chow’s pilgrimage to Angkor Wat, perhaps as a search for love and reconciliation on a religious plane. He’s seen whispering into the hollow space of pillar, confessing his secrets in secret. Though we can’t hear, we understand the significance of those whispers, and of such a mysterious ending to such a mysterious movie we are privileged observers indeed.

Chapter Ten

Helen and Roger had arranged to have a meeting about the state of the business, and of course Tom, under Helen’s careful tutelage, would be sitting in. Helen seemed to like having him around, and Roger didn’t seem to mind. Tom himself wasn’t exactly sure what his role there really was. The fact was that he felt more like a pet around Helen in this environment than anything else, but he wasn’t entirely unhappy in this role either. If he wasn’t entirely happy with his lot in life, he realized that he’d now lost the energy and enthusiasm to find a way out of it.

So one dreary Wednesday morning the three of them were seated at one of Eastlake’s finest establishments, Louisa’s, waiting for their eggs and hash browns and trying to figure out how to remain positive about their prospects.

The problem was simply that business wasn’t going well. It wasn’t going very well at all. As Helen explained, there was simply too much free stuff out there. No longer was it necessary to sign up for one of the various Club Memberships, when college girls were offering streaming videos from there dorm rooms, and sometimes for free. The market doesn’t just get any freer than that, and if they were to make any money at this they needed to find a new angle.

“And this is where I think Tom could really help us out here,” said Helen.

Tom couldn’t hold back his surprise, and said “What?”

For his part, Roger didn’t seem at all surprised or even the least bit resentful that a guy who was there only because he was married to Helen, who’d been in the picture for about six months and about as many shoots, was all of a sudden being offered up as an expert on a subject he knew strictly as an observer. For the truth was that while Roger wasn’t entirely happy with the financial returns of late, he was happy enough with the business itself to go along with just about anything. In fact, he was developing a number of ideas himself that he was anxious to share with Helen. The problem was that people just weren’t buying the stuff anymore – and not because the country had all of a sudden turned into a nation of prigs. As Helen had remarked several times, everyone and their girlfriend was trying to get into the pornography business, while people in the pornography business were still dreaming of a way to get out of it. That’s what this meeting was all about.

Roger looked from Helen to Tom, and when Tom didn’t say anything, back to Helen. Tom looked at Helen too, and tried to provide an answer that would break the ice.

“Gosh, hon, I appreciate that and all, but I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do about the company problems. It seems like you and Roger have a pretty good handle on that. I’m more at home in the store.” He fiddled with the napkin in his hands, weaving it between the tines of his fork.

“What I think you don’t understand, Tom, is just how much all of us in the porn business really want to go legitimate.”

Roger looked up over a forkful of steaming scrambled eggs. “What do you mean, ‘all of us’?”

“C’mon Roger. You remember telling me how much you wanted to be the next Steven Spielberg when you started,” reminded Helen. “And that you just sort of fell into skin flicks, like all the rest of us.”

“Yeah, but that was a long time ago. Things have changed. I just don’t see …”

“And that’s why Tom is here,” said Helen.

“That’s the part I don’t really get,” said Tom. “The part about why I’m here.”

“Like it or not, Tom, you’re the one who can help us become legitimate.”

“I don’t get that.”

“Only because you don’t want to. You’ve been watching movies, renting movies and screening movies for twenty years or more. You’ve got that viewing thing going, and some pretty big names have been in the store. You’ve got a pretty good idea of how a movie is supposed to look and what it’s supposed to sound like.”

“Well, maybe. But that’s still a long ways from being able to make one.”

“And that’s what Roger is for.”

Roger and Tom both looked at Helen.

“What are you up to here, Helen?” asked Roger.

“Roger, you have all the practical experience. You know how all the equipment is supposed to work – for shooting, for sound, for editing. You’ve done it all. And you’ve got a pretty good feel for the technology of the new stuff. And more than that, you know how to deal with actors.”

“I’m not so sure that strippers really count as actors,” said Roger, sounding the skeptical note. In fact, he sounded a little exasperated. “And besides, I’ve never been in it for the money, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect the money. Are you suggesting that we can finance some sort of independent film project? Like we’re just going to show up at the Sundance festival, win a couple of awards, and then turn into big time movie makers?”

“More or less, yes,” said Helen, nodding her head up and down, ignoring both his skepticism and exasperation. “I mean have you seen some of these movies? They’re total crap.”

And here she pulled out the most recent copy of the Stranger, opened it up to a page filled with movie ads, and began reading from a list of titles for an upcoming film festival. Not the annual Seattle International Film Festival, now becoming its own version of Cannes in the Northwest, but one of the countless other, smaller forums that now occurred with steady regularity throughout the year. This one was dedicated to half a dozen locally and recently produced horror flicks.

“Here’s a remake of The Vivisection of Vera,’ which is sure to be awful. I think there’s something wrong with remaking movies. And ‘Japan’s gift to world cinema’, Hiromitsu Matsuda, is back in the Northwest, introducing one of his gross-out terror flicks.” She read the quotation as sarcastically as possible. Looking over the page from Tom to Roger, and then back to the page she continued, ‘The Minotaur’s Revenge is a cinematic revelation in which East meets West and the resulting offspring runs roughshod over all our misconceived cultural assumptions. Once again he delivers an orgiastic explosion of violence at the end that will leave you feeling about your bedroom the same way you felt about the ocean after seeing Jaws.”

After dramatically letting the paper collapse in her lap, she looked at her two companions and asked, “What the hell is that?” Her two companions stared back at her dumbly.

“I kind of like Matsuda,” said Tom. “But Hama’s the best. Those movies he made with Shishido are great.”

“Orgy explosions are what we do,” said Roger.

At that moment someone called out their number and they stood up to retrieve their food from the pick-up counter. Back at the table Tom and Roger got busy salting and peppering their eggs and bacon while Helen addressed the issues just raised.

“My point is that all these are just dumb horror flicks,” said Helen. “Or cops and robbers. Just trying to earn new credibility by being edgy about sex, but they’re just plain dumb. And for that everybody loves them. Nobody’s as edgy about sex as we are, and yet we get editorials written about how we’re the ones destroying society. Every couple of months somebody starts up a campaign to try to run us out of town, and I’m getting tired of it. From what I see here, all we really need to do is put a few more clothes on, have Tom cook up some artsy-fartsy gangster stories, and we’ll get into all these film festivals ourselves. I’m tired of being a piranha.”

“I think you mean pariah,” said Roger.

“Whatever,” said Helen. “Some kind of fish.”

“Is this why you married me?” asked Tom.

Helen stared right back at Tom for a few seconds of silence. “Of course. Do you want to make movies or don’t you?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Tom. “Of course I want to make movies. And I’m all for making something better than porn. I just never really saw myself as legitimate. I just realized that you do.”

While Helen and Tom were engaged in their little contretemps, Roger was busy pushing the scrambled eggs around on his plate.

“Of course you’re legitimate,” said Helen. “You run Videosyncracy. And all those film forums.”

“No, it’s cool. I like it. It’s nice to hear you say that. So you don’t want to make any more skin flicks?”

“I never thought of myself as illegitimate, either,” mused Roger to himself. “Although strictly speaking, I guess it’s true. Mom never hardly knew Dad.” With his knife and the back of his fork he pushed his eggs into a pile somewhat in the shape of Africa.

“Don’t worry, hon, we need you too,” said Helen, patting the tail end of Roger’s dragon tattoo. “You’re the one who can hold everything together.”

“The thing is, I actually like making porn,” said Roger, getting to the root of the problem. “The money. The girls. The booze. The party never ends.”

“Well the money isn’t what it used to be,” said Helen. “That’s why we’re having this meeting.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got an idea of my own,” said Roger.

Now Tom and Helen looked expectantly at Roger.

“Do you remember all that trouble on the set of the Dentist movie?”

Tom and Helen both grimaced while nodding. They couldn’t help smiling as well.

“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” said Helen. “I ended up laughing until I cried.”

“I just wasn’t sure if I should keep filming,” said Tom. “And then I remember the words of a famous hunter: “When in doubt, shoot it.”

“That’s my point,” said Roger. “We ended up taking most of the accident out of the ending, but I’ve watched those sections while doing the editing, and they are seriously funny.” Now he looked at Helen and Tom expectantly. They waited for more.

“My point is that we should have left it in!” He shook his hands in the cat’s cradle position to emphasize his point.

“Leave it in?” asked Helen. “It was complete humiliation. Dawn wouldn’t come out of the bathroom for hours.”

“That’s the point,” said Roger. “Slapstick Porn!”

“Slapstick porn?”

“Yeah, filled with all kinds of pranks and pratfalls, but the catch is: everybody’s naked!”

Tom and Helen were silent for a moment while they considered the idea.

“I don’t know,” said Helen. “What if somebody gets hurt?”

“Yeah, well, there’s always gonna be risk involved.”

“True,” said Helen.

“Think of water balloons and cream puff pies. That can’t hurt anyone. It’d be a riot!”

“Do you think the actors will go for it?”

“They will if they want to get paid.”

“I dunno. Seems kind of twisted to me. That’s the perspective of a former actress. As a producer I can almost see it.”

Everybody sat and stared at their plates as they pictured flying pies. Roger grabbed the ketsup squeeze bottle and put a pair of dollops in the middle of the eggs he’d piled up on the plate, then added a wavy line below the two dots. Helen looked at Tom while Tom looked at one of the waitresses and tried to imagine her running around the restaurant stark naked, maybe with her apron still on, but in fast motion, as in an old Benny Hill short.

“There’s nothing new under the sun,” said Tom. “But I think it’d be a good idea for about one film, at the absolute tops. It’d have to be a surprise for the actors.”

“I think Tom’s right,” said Helen. “But okay. I think we can do it. We’ll do it as our farewell film to the industry, before we rise again as legitimate movie makers.”

“I really don’t think it’ll be the last. But I’ll take that chance,” said Roger. “Now we just have to come up with a story leading up to it. Do you think Li’l Paul can get us into a bakery?”

“Where would we be without Li’l Paul?” said Helen, shaking her head from side to side before taking a sip of coffee.

“Even one in a grocery store would work. I’m not picky.” said Roger. He’d taken the two pieces of golden brown bacon and criss-crossed them underneath the eggs. Holding up the plate on display for Tom and Helen, he said “Look guys, a Jolly Roger!”

“Very jolly, Roger,” said Helen, dryly.

“It looks like a smiley face, Roger,” said Tom. “Jolly Rogers are supposed to look creepy. He looks happy.”

“I don’t see it that way,” said Roger. “I think we actually like something about Jolly Rogers. Something makes us happy. Something about’m makes me happy, at least.”

“Some of the greatest preachers we’ve had have been our hymn-writers.” He noted that the sermons preached through hymns are heard not only by one audience in one time, but by countless men and women throughout the ages. In this Bernard was no exception, authoring the hymns we know as “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” “O Jesus, King Most Wonderful,” and the variously translated “Jesu, Dulcis Memoria.”

All of these are rich, beautiful, and focused clearly on the adoration of Christ. Which is exactly what liturgical music should be–a supplement to the order of service that lifts our minds to God instead of sinking them back into ourselves.

“Almostgotit” stopped by a little earlier today, read a few items, and left comments. Every good turn deserve a favor, or something like that, so I wandered over to her place to see what was going on. One of the posts was a meme from a couple of months ago, based on the book named above: write your memoir in six words. We at Korrektiv are big on books, and I’m betting Rufus, Henri, F.X., Mr. Burrell, I.C. and Angelmeg will be happy to chime in. Here are a few I came up with:

What goes up must come down.

I owe my success to excess.

Well, what would you have done?

And I haven’t even started yet.

I’ll just pretend I’m not here.

Six words are too many.