Children of the Corn (1984)

One night a long time ago, my Dad and I sat down to watch a film called Village of the Damned. From the moment I first saw the creepy kids, I knew this film was going to terrify me and so I got up to leave the room. My dad stopped me and said, “You should stay and watch the film because what you can imagine will be far more frightening than the actual film.” I thought about it for a moment and decided that what he said made sense and so I stayed. Big mistake. It was very sweet of my dad to give me so much credit, but there is NO WAY I could have imagined so much terror! I didn’t sleep for two weeks. This is all by way of explaining why it took me so long to watch Children of the Corn, the 1984 film adaptation of Stephen King’s short story. I had expected it to be filled with frightening children and I had no wish to repeat that viewing experience from my childhood. It turned out that I had nothing to worry about, partly because the film would be more accurately titled The Young Adults of the Corn. As we all know, blond-haired alien kids are exponentially more terrifying than rural Nebraskan juvenile delinquents in pseudo-Amish garb. The acting is sub-par at best and the special effects are, well, not very special. It just goes to show that nothing can substitute for atmosphere and understatement—if only more film directors today would get that message. And just in case you’re wondering, no, I still haven’t watched Village of the Damned again!

Sherlock, The Empty Hearse

I never thought I would miss Moriarty (or to be more precise, the rather annoying actor who played him) but that’s exactly how I felt after watching 'The Empty Hearse,' the first episode in Season 3 of Sherlock. The competition between the great detective and his nemesis gave the earlier episodes a focus and without that, I felt that this episode was entirely too pleased with itself. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock has always had a high opinion of himself, of course, but in this episode he was positively smug and I couldn’t help but feel that the show itself succumbed to the same smugness, so pleased with its own success that it couldn’t be bothered to come up with a decent plot (a subway car filled with explosives under the Houses of Parliament on Guy Fawkes night? Really?) or to develop the character of Lord Moran AT ALL. Moreover, although on the whole I like the changes that this show makes to the original source material, there’s no getting away from the fact that it gets the relationship between Holmes and Watson all wrong. Anyone who’s read ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ knows that Watson is delighted when Holmes returns. The hissy fit that Sherlock’s Watson throws may be understandable in some ways but it takes too much attention away from the story (what there is of it) and places too much emphasis on the friendship between Sherlock and John. Please, please, please do not let this show become a bromance!
 

Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure

Can I be perfectly honest? Halfway through Gary Shteyngart's memoir, Little Failure, I realized that I much preferred his novels. The wildness of the comic imagination that defines his fiction was largely missing here, even though this book is often very funny (as we might expect from one of the funniest writers working today). And in case you think comparing fiction and memoir is like comparing apples and oranges (which of course it is, at least to some extent) I should mention that one of the things the reader who is familiar with Shteyngart's novels takes away from Little Failure is something we suspected all along, namely, that he is the ultimate subject of his fiction and he has mined his own life extensively for raw materials that he sometimes transforms and sometimes hardly changes at all. Consequently, a feeling of déjà vu haunts the reader until we get to the parts of Shteyngart's life that are not covered in as much detail in his fiction: his time at Oberlin College, his life after graduation, and how he got started as a writer. He treats these times with the same combination of self-effacing humor and uncomfortable honesty that defines the book as a whole, but he saves the best for last. The book concludes with a description of a trip back to St. Petersburg, the city of his birth, that Shteyngart took with his parents in 2011. It's at this point that one realizes that Little Failure, again like his fiction, has always been as much about his parents and his relationship with them as it is about Shteyngart. That balance between humor and pathos, that wonderful ability to write about emotions, above all love, without sentimentality that appears so often in his fiction works to great effect here. As this interview indicates, Little Failure was a huge success and it will hopefully bring even more readers to his fiction. Will this success spoil the 'little failure' Shteyngart? That's the first question I'll ask him when I meet him later this month.

Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

In many respects, Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is very similar to The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan. Once again, Shteyngart’s main protagonist, Lenny Abramov, is a nebbish who seems pitifully underequipped to deal with the world around him. As with his earlier novels, Shteyngart describes that world with what has become his trademark combination of exaggerated humor, absurdity, and biting political satire, a combination that often threatens to exceed the author’s control, but which he in fact pulls off beautifully. And once more, the novel is something of a bildungsroman, as the protagonist, who in many ways is painfully immature (despite being in his late 30s), struggles to grow up and achieve a measure of success, independence, and happiness. With all this said, there are a couple of aspects of this novel that make it a major departure for Shteyngart. For example, locating the novel in a near future where America has been reduced to a virtual subsidiary of China, the only global superpower left on the planet, allows the potential targets of Shteyngart’s satire to grow exponentially: consumerism, our addiction to networked information, the way that information defines who we are and how we relate to other people, the dominance of global corporations, the violence that underpins social order, and our overweening narcissism all come in for their fair share of criticism.Typically for the incurably romantic Shteyngart, the one potential bulwark against the escalating chaos that he portrays so vividly might seem to be love, but this is where he makes another major innovation in his writing. In his previous novels, Shteyngart’s protagonists hog the entire stage in first person narratives that reduce everyone else (even their love interests) to bit parts. In Super Sad, however, Lenny must share the stage with Eunice Park, his Korean girlfriend, as the novel alternates between Lenny’s diary entries and Eunice’s social media outpourings to her friends and family. This gives the reader a distance from the male protagonist that Shteyngart's other novels do not possess (or not to the same extent), thus lending a very interesting new dimension to his work. Some readers may feel that Shteyngart is more successful at realizing one character than the other (no prizes for guessing which!), but doubling the narrative voice in this way makes this novel, at least for this reader, the most enjoyable and ambitious undertaking of Shteyngart’s career thus far.

Jackie Chan, Dragon Lord

Jackie Chan’s 1982 Hong Kong martial arts movie Dragon Lord is strictly for the aficionados. When it works, Chan’s trademark blend of comedy and action is a welcome change from the overheated melodrama of Bruce Lee, but the comedy elements of this film are so puerile as to be embarrassing. There are a couple of stand-out fight sequences, as you might expect, and fans looking for a transition film between Chan’s early kung fu comedies and his later action-oriented movies might find it interesting. On the whole, though, this film is memorable for two pieces of movie nerd trivia: the opening scene (involving a pyramid fight) set a new world record for the number of takes needed for a single scene (2900!!) and this is the first of Chan’s films to feature a ‘blooper reel’ at the end (an idea Chan supposedly took from The Cannonball Run). The trailer features some interesting behind the scenes glimpses of Chan at work.

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

One of my favorite moments in Gary Shteyngart’s second novel, Absurdistan (2006), comes when he makes fun of himself and his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook: “Let me give you an idea of this Jerry Shteynfarb. He had been a schoolmate of mine at Accidental College, a perfectly Americanized Russian émigré (he came to the States as a seven-year-old) who managed to use his dubious Russian credentials to rise through the ranks of the Accidental creative writing department and to sleep with half the campus in the process. After graduation, he made good on his threat to write a novel, a sad little dirge about his immigrant life, which seems to me the luckiest kind of life imaginable. I think it was called The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job or something of the sort. The Americans, naturally, lapped it up.” The joke is funny partly because the two novels have so much in common: a schlemiel as a protagonist; over-the-top humor; larger-than-life characters, and an obsessive concern with the various meanings of Jewishness in both multicultural America and a thoroughly globalized 21^st century. With all this said, there are significant differences between the two novels, too. Whereas the subject of Shteyngart’s first novel was, to a large extent, America, and its problematic and overdetermined embrace of the immigrant, this novel’s protagonist, Misha Vainberg, is in a state of exile from the United States, even though he yearns to return. Given this fact, the type of fictional central Asian republic that formed only part of the setting of Debutante’s is front and center in this novel. Through the titular Absurdistan, Shteyngart conveys his complex feelings about Russia, his country of origin, the experience of displacement from both one’s home and adopted cultures, and the murky depths of realpolitik, a subject that is explored with an uneasy combination of pathos and comedy. I say ‘uneasy,’ because initially the move from comedy to violence, as the situation in Absurdistan worsens rapidly, seems awkward and jarring. But this is where the concept of ‘absurdity’ does such important work for Shteyngart and it’s in this respect that I kept thinking of Chester Himes as I was reading Absurdistan. Although they’re very different writers, both use absurdity to achieve similar ends: to combine comedy and violence in such a way that their readers can feel what it means to be buffeted by history and randomness in a way that’s both tragic and ridiculous at the same time. It’s this paradoxical combination of emotions that Shteyngart makes his own.

Sarah Weinman (ed), Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives

Sarah Weinman’s anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense is one of the best collections of short stories I’ve read in years and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in mystery and suspense fiction. Featuring stories by Charlotte Armstrong, Barbara Callahan,Vera Caspary, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Miriam Allen DeFord, Celia Fremlin, Joyce Harrington, Patricia Highsmith, Elisabeth Saxnay Holding, Dorothy B. Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Millar, Helen Nielsen, and Nedra Tyre, the book focuses on tales originally published between the 1940s and 1970s that are all examples of domestic suspense, i.e., stories that are located in that liminal space between the two extremes of the hard-boiled and the cozy mystery. Weinman’s introduction explains why this type of mystery has fallen from favor, and their reappearance in print is truly a cause for celebration. You’ll find neither private eyes nor female investigators of the Miss Marple type here. Instead, we’re presented with a range of young, middle-aged, and older women (Weinman makes a fascinating decision to order the stories by the age of their protagonist) who all confront examples of violence and conflict, sometimes as witness, sometimes as victim, sometimes as perpetrator, and sometimes as a mixture of all the above. The composite picture that emerges of women’s lives that most other writers would regard as too trivial to write about is gloriously complex in its ambiguity, ambivalence, and open-endedness. Never has the quotidian appeared more vividly than in this collection. Highlights for me included Patricia Highsmith’s first published story, “The Heroine” which demonstrates just how good she was right from the beginning of her career, and “The Purple Shroud,” by Joyce Harrington, a writer I’m embarrassed to say I had never read before but whose work I will be seeking out immediately. And that is another of the pleasures of this book: it opens up a new world of reading even for those who consider themselves aficionados of suspense fiction. We are all in Sarah Weinman’s debt and she is to be congratulated on a magnificent achievement.

56 Up (2012)

There is so much one can say about the Up series of documentaries, but in this post I’ll confine myself to a few observations about the latest installment, 56 Up (2012). This film was the first in the series for quite a while to vary the order in which the participants appeared. For a long time, Neil appeared last while Tony appeared first, and now they are switched. I’m not quite sure what impact these changes have on our perceptions of the participants and their relation to each other (if any), but I liked the change of format. One of my favorite things about the series as a whole is how much the original intention of the series (to show the continued dominance of the class system in contemporary British society) has changed, partly because the nature of class privilege (and the manner in which it is expressed) has changed so much since 1964, but mostly because the series’ participants have insistently talked back to Michael Apted and have resisted his attempts to make them personify one tidy category or another. The self-referential dimensions of the series have increased with each episode, to the point that many of the participants now spend a lot of their time talking about their feelings about participating in this project. 56 Up embraces this fact more than previous episodes, as we see when Suzy and Nick are brought together and talk about their experiences with the show. My favorite moment in this particular episode comes right at the end when Apted remarks that Tony seems quite racist, something that Tony vehemently denies. It’s such a symptomatic moment because race is so rarely mentioned in the series at any time. The sea change in Britain’s population since the 1960s, the extent to which it’s become a multicultural society, is what has blindsided the Up series most since it began (even though it was underway in 1964). In that respect, this series is, in many ways, increasingly a memorial to a Britain that was, rather than the Britain that exists today.

Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante's Handbook

In a few weeks, I’ll be hosting a conversation with writer Gary Shteyngart as part of the Buffalo Humanities Festival. In preparation for that event, I'm rereading his work, beginning with his first novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook, published in 2003. Shteyngart is an amazingly inventive and original winter and this coming of age story featuring his unprepossessing protagonist, Vladimir Girshkin, showcases the full range of his talents. It's a big book in every way--over 400 pages long, with multiple locations, and a dizzying array of characters--and yet at its heart the book's concerns are quite simple: what does it mean to be an American for an immigrant? Can an immigrant ever feel at home in America? Or anywhere else, for that matter? Of course, these are deceptively simple questions that have been tackled by dozens upon dozens of writers and Shteyngart does justice to the complexity of his themes. What's most original about the book is his use of humor; this, combined with his incredible eye for detail, make him a master satirist. And yet he's also capable of writing without sentimentality and with genuine pathos about the need to be loved and to belong and in this regard, there's something curiously old-fashioned about his writing. Although the novel maintains a running dialog with the American tradition of immigrant fiction, trying more often than not to make fun of it, the overall impact of RDH is to remind us of the timelessness of the problems and challenges that the expatriate faces when trying to understand her or his adopted country. It's inevitable that in this 'kitchen sink' of a book, into which Shteyngart throws everything, some parts work better than others, but on the whole it's an extraordinary first novel and should encourage anyone to read more of his work.

As you can tell from the gap between this post and the previous one, the reality principle showed up and kicked me in the head! With everything else going on in my life, posting every day is clearly not going to happen, so I will confine myself to posting whenever I can. Hopefully, this will prevent further kicks to the head. I've decided to keep the original blog title and description as a reminder of the temptations and dangers of hubris!

Abbott/Oeler/SerialKillerCulture

Today I finished Megan Abbott’s 2012 novel Dare Me. The second half of the novel was just as good, if not better, than the first. Among Abbott’s achievements here are developing one of the most complex and nuanced fictional renditions of friendships between teenaged girls that I’ve ever read; having three characters all of whom are complicated and detailed enough to be the book’s protagonist, but who all share the stage in a perfectly syncopated, even symbiotic, manner; balancing the requirements of the murder narrative with the other elements of the book, so that the novel finishes with a doubled sense of resolution—one of which is the whodunit, and the other of which consists of the crisis points of the relationships between the main characters, and finally, getting me to take cheerleading seriously! The last point sounds flippant, I know, but I’m quite serious. Abbott is never patronizing toward her cheerleader characters and she communicates vividly and convincingly just why this activity is so important to these characters. And above all, in cheerleading—both its mechanics and its dramatics—Abbott finds a perfect metaphor for conveying the depth and intensity of the emotional investments we make in both ourselves and others.

I also finished Karla Oeler’s A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. In this closing section of the book, Oeler addresses the argument that genre films not only represent violence, they also inevitably “deform the real violence they reference.” Oeler’s answer to this objection is to address the genre pastiche film, concentrating not only on Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man but also, and in some detail, the films of Stanley Kubrick, of whom Oeler says, “we would be hard pressed to find another filmmaker who pushes both violence and stylization…to such extremes.” In the context of discussing The Shining, and in particular the scene where Danny writes the word ‘murder’ in reverse and then his mother recognizes the true form of the word when she sees it in the mirror, Oeler writes “It is in this mirror, where the reversal of the word ‘murder’ is reversed, thus negating a negation, that we can locate an allegory for the mechanics of genre pastiche in terms of the way it registers historical violence. If genres themselves distort and displace the real violence entailed in colonizing the United States or in conducting the cold war, genre pastiche, like the mirror in The Shining, is a negation of that distortion. The pastiche of genre, in other words, does not seek directly to reinscribe the violence that has been excluded, but to represent the occlusion that has taken place.” In her conclusion, Oeler provides a tantalizingly brief discussion of Hitchcock, and my only complaint about this otherwise fascinating and thought-provoking book is that she had said more about a director so central to her project! But it’s always a good sign to finish a book and be left wanting more.

I also watched John Borowski's 2014 documentary Serial Killer Culture. As you can imagine, there are an awful lot of films out there about serial murder, but they focus overwhelmingly on the killers. There are very few films that study murderabilia (or the collecting of serial killer artwork and artifacts) from the point of view of the collector and the broader fascination with serial killers as a whole. Serial Killer Culture is easily the best film made so far on this subject. There are several things that made this film particularly interesting. To begin with, Borowski lets the interviewees speak for themselves. The absence of voiceover is a very smart move on Borowski’s part, not least because it’s so rare to have collectors speaking frankly on film (because they’re so used to being condemned for their interest in serial killers) that you really want to hear what they have to say in their own words. Then there is Borowski’s decision to include himself as one of the film’s subjects. His achievements in the making of serial killer documentaries (on H.H. Holmes, Albert Fish, and Carl Panzram) are considerable and deserve to be acknowledged. But what I really like is the diversity of examples of serial killer culture Borowski includes—not just murderabilia collectors, but also artists, musicians, and even the organizers of a Jeffrey Dahmer walking tour are all part of the film, and although this range inevitably just scratches the surface of what is a huge culture industry, Borowski does more than anyone so far to give us a sense of the diversity of this phenomenon. Finally, Serial Killer Culture is valuable for suggesting directions for further research in this area: we’re told that serial killers are popular all over the world, but why is this? The majority female audience for true crime and serial killer culture is noted at several points in the film, and yet all the collectors and (nearly all the) interviewees in the film are male—why? Borowski’s film is, and will remain, an indispensable reference point in answering these and other questions.

Abbott/Oeler/PacificRim

Today I read the first half of Megan Abbott’s 2012 novel Dare Me. Abbott’s earlier novels, which are uniformly excellent, all take place in earlier time periods (from the 1930s to the 1980s) and most of them have a very clear relationship (usually in that productively liminal space between homage and revision) with noir crime fiction. In this regard, Dare Me represents a distinct shift in Abbott’s writing, both in the sense that it’s set in the present day, and in the sense that its relationship to crime fiction is harder to pin down. Dare Me is much closer to being a suspense or thriller novel than crime fiction, but none of those categories are really adequate ways of capturing what Abbott achieves in this novel. Most readers will probably think of Gillian Flynn when they read Dare Me, but for me the most telling intertext is the work of Patricia Highsmith, not only because of the inadequacy of generic categories that I just mentioned, but also because Abbott’s writing possesses many of what I regard as the hallmarks of Highsmith’s style: the agonizingly incremental build-up of tension and suspense; the gift for dialog; the ability to evoke place in just a few words, and above all, communicating the voice of a character so well that you feel like you’ve know them for ever, even though you may not want to know them! But Abbott also possesses something that Highsmith arguably lacks, something I can only describe as ‘humanity,’ a frustratingly vague word that here refers to Abbott’s sympathetic identification with a character that is combined with a rigorous lack of sentimentality about their shortcomings. It’s a powerful combination that makes for an enthralling reading experience.

I also read the next fifty pages of Karla Oeler’s A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. One of the things I really like about this book is that Oeler does not just draw upon the usual suspects in terms of film critics. In the context of talking about 20^th century American genre film, for example, she spends time discussing the work of critics like Manny Farber, James Agee, and Robert Warshow, all of whom should be read more than they currently are. Still teasing out the relationship between sameness and individuality in genre film, in this section of the book, Oeler discusses genres like war movies, the western, and the crime film. Her case study for the last example is the movie adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, partly because it adds a murder to the film that is not present in the book in order to pull the other elements of the film together. This is a decision that Oeler criticizes: “The tacked-on murder stylizes and gentrifies, transforming a nonviolent melodrama into a murder mystery that reduces its victim to a cipher.” Although I see Oeler’s point of view, I think she overstates her case when she argues that “The catalytic murder scene channels the meaning of every other scene of their lives into information about the origins of the crime.” In my view, the meaning of the film exceeds the instrumentality that Oeler describes, not in the sense that Mildred Pierce ‘transcends’ its genre, but in the sense that its characters cannot be wholly reduced to their roles in the murder narrative.

I also watched Pacific Rim (2013), an enjoyable piece of utter nonsense directed by Guillermo del Toro. A tribute to kaiju and mecha movies that also aims to work as a standalone film, Pacific Rim tells the story of a group of Jaeger, or robot, pilots who are the last line of defense between Kaijus, monsters coming out of a breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and the rest of humanity. That’s the plot out of the way! The only other thing you need to know is that there are lots of spectacular special effects and the usual scattering of types one finds in films of this kind—rebellious individualist leading man, grumpy but ultimately kind-hearted father figure, female ingénue, nerdy scientists, etc., etc. Some slight changes are made to the usual instantiations of these types—for example, Idris Elba plays the main authority figure and it’s unusual to have a black actor in such a role—but in just about every other respect this is exactly what you might expect. My favorite touch was the elimination of the Russian and Chinese Jaeger pilots, leaving the world presumably free to be controlled by the Americans, British, and Japanese. Talk about wishful thinking…Ironically, the film did some of its biggest business in China.

Grant/Oeler/NakedCity

Today I finished Cathryn Grant’s The Demise of the Soccer Moms. In many ways, this is one of the bleakest novels I’ve read in a long time and I mean that as a compliment! Grant builds on her jaundiced portrait of suburbia in the second half of the novel by having her central character, Amy Lewis, become more and more disturbed as her fear and paranoia intensify until the inevitable catastrophic event that the book has been haunted by since its opening pages finally takes place. What’s impressive about Grant’s writing is that even though Amy is a character who could easily become an overblown caricature, there is enough justification for her fear, no matter how over the top it becomes, that she never becomes unconvincing. By the end of the novel, one has a horrifically cloying sense of the emptiness and superficiality of suburban life and culture that is just close enough to reality to be truly haunting. The threat of violence permeates the book to such an extent that there’s a good chance you will feel as paranoid as the characters.

I also read the next fifty pages of Karla Oeler’s A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. Having thus far concentrated overwhelmingly on Eisenstein and montage, Oeler now discusses the film criticism of André Bazin and the work of Jean Renoir in the context of writing about realism. As Oeler points out, “Bazin’s realist theory takes shape, to a significant extent, around murder scenes” and it seems much the same could be said about Renoir’s films of the 1930s. Why? According to Oeler, “Murder, an act that is so often partially elided in film form, and an act that instantiates, within the refracted story world, the starkest forms of elision, is a paradigm of realist narrative.” I wonder, as an aside, and with this comment in mind, what Oeler would make of the myth of the snuff film. In the second part of the book, “Murder and Genre,” Oeler shifts focus dramatically by now concentrating on how genre films, such as the western and the crime drama, represent murder. Oeler defines the fundamental relationship/tension between these two things in the following words: “The murder scene…starkly reflects the predicament which the genre film shares with the mass culture out of which it emerges: any claim to a precarious singularity and indispensability must be made within a system based on disposability and sameness.” Oeler provides an interesting close reading of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948) to demonstrate this tension between sameness and singularity.

Thanks to Oeler, I also watched, surprise, surprise, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. You can see why she chooses it to talk about the tension between sameness and singularity. On the one hand, as the closing lines of the film put it, the events that form the focus of the plot are just one story in a city of eight million people. Nothing makes these events stand out in any particular way from any other story and in this regard they are the epitome of routine. On the other hand, by virtue of the fact that the film pays attention to these particular events, thereby giving us the opportunity to get to know these particular characters, it individuates these events, making them stand out from their background. To put it in generic terms, The Naked City is in many respects a standard crime drama, but at the same time it is particularized not only by these particular actors and these particular characters, but also by the use of unusual techniques—principally the voiceover that bookends the film and that we hear sporadically throughout the rest of the film. Producing an interesting blend of documentary and crime drama, the voiceover sets The Naked City apart.

Grant/Oeler/Eraserhead

I’m writing a piece about the suburb in crime fiction at the moment, and so today I read the first half of Cathryn Grant’s 2011 debut novel The Demise of the Soccer Moms. Grant specializes in what she calls “suburban noir…where the mundane is menacing” and this is a good description of both the setting and the tone of the novel. Moms set in Sunnyvale, CA and its main characters are a group of mothers whose children all attend the same elementary school and play soccer on the same teams. What most of them also have in common is, to one degree or another, what Brian Massumi has called "everyday fear," which manifests itself in various ways and with varying degrees of justification. Whether it’s a generalized fear of impending disaster, fear of sexual assault and violence, fear of losing one’s husband, fear for one’s children, fear that one is unattractive is isolated, this novel is a virtual compendium of the fears that define life for so many in the contemporary United States. As you read through the novel, any doubt one may have had about suburbia being a good setting for a crime novel is replaced by the following question: how can so many writers have neglected such a promising setting for so long?!

I also read the next fifty pages of Karla Oeler’s A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. In this section of the book, Oeler continues her focus on montage but also turns her attention to acting, partly because of her interest in what the nexus between murder and representation suggests for film’s ability to represent subjectivity: “Murder is an allegory of representation: if murder (legally, axiologically) hinges on the stark negation of an individual, cinema, which must represent the victim with discursive techniques that can never fully comprehend a human being, courts complicity with the murders it depicts. But at the same time, murder can paradoxically endow the victim with a referential fullness…Murder scenes are thus poised between reducing and registering the person implied by the storied victim.” A large part of Oeler’s interest in montage in general and Eisenstein in particular, then, derives from the complex ways in which this technique and this director both erase and suggest individual subjective interiority in both actors and characters. “The promise of montage lies in its power to draw attention to, or scrutinize, reifying signification…Scenes of deadly violence can powerfully index the inadequacy of the victim’s representation, aesthetic and political. But when characters are put to death because of their irrevocable placement in an abstract social category, and the scene of their murder does little to shake the historical identity imposed upon them, montage threatens to squander its promise.”

Have you ever had one of those days where you wake up and feel like watching some David Lynch? This happened to me today and so I decided to revisit Eraserhead, his legendary first full-length feature. I first saw this film in 1980 when I was sixteen years old and needless to say I had never seen anything like it. I’m now fifty years old and I’ve still never seen anything like it. I could summarize what happens in the film, but that would do nothing to convey what it’s like to see Eraserhead, which is one of those rare films that needs to be not only seen but also heard; its sound contributes to its meaning and impact just as much as its images. Two things stood out for me on this particular viewing. Firstly, now that I’m a parent, the film’s obsessive and paranoid examination of reproduction and parenthood has a power I could never have anticipated as a teenager. Secondly, thanks to Lynch’s reputation as an auteur, his actors can often receive short shrift, and nowhere in his oeuvre is this more true than in Eraserhead. And yet Jack Nance’s portrayal of Henry is miraculous. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s one of the greatest performances in film history. Of all the unforgettable things in Eraserhead, Nance is the most indelible.