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.