I'd Still Own The Film Rights And Be Working on The Sequel

Here's a long post about some elements of the culture I encountered this weekend while my kids were either sleeping or napping (which, I know, amount to the same thing, but if you have young kids you'll understand the distinction):

Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution is a surprisingly suspenseful and fun examination of the five Best Picture nominees from the 1968 Academy Awards: Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? I only recall seeing one of these -- The Graduate -- although the others have since been added to my Netflix queue (excepting the Rex Harrison version of Dolittle, which Harris' book makes out to be a total disaster.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the book is to imagine the alternate universe in which different choices were made for particular film roles (Jane Fonda as Bonnie, for example, or Ronald Reagan and Doris Day as the Robinsons, or Robert Redford as Benjamin). These movies, as treated by Harris, also come to embody aspects of the changing American culture in the late '60s, with the old Hollywood (evidenced in the studio system that put forward Dolittle, or Hepburn and Tracy in Coming to Dinner) brushing up against new Hollywood (the Nouveau Vague-influenced Bonnie and Clyde, the disaffected youth in The Graduate).

The most interesting, and surprising element, of the book for me was its focus on Sidney Poitier, who starred in both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Coming into 1967, Poitier was the Oscar-winning sole representative of African-American maleness, someone who in movie after movie portrayed the sort of polite and well-spoken Negro who could rise above racial prejudice by the sheer force of his manners and diction. Essentially, Hollywood movies demonstrated that racism would be overcome by the willingness of black males to behave in the way that privileged whites imagined themselves behaving -- stoic, persistent, upstanding, and ultimately asexual. By the end of 1968, even before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the culture had changed -- Poitier's characters were insufficiently angry, and his career waned (at least partially by his own intention) throughout the 70's and he's rarely appeared in front of a camera since the 1980's.

Pictures at a Revolution would be an excellent companion piece to Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968: The Year That Rocked The World. Both books demonstrate what promise existed for real cultural change in 1968, a promise almost entirely ignored by tuned-out hippies and self-centered baby boomers in the -- let me check my watch -- four decades since. The idea that change can erupt from the actions and ideals of young people is one that is now used only for the marketing of sneakers and soda pop.

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I read David Shields' autobiographical novels Dead Languages and A Handbook for Drowning while still an undergraduate, and both were hugely influential for me as novels that represent a struggle to come of age despite (or even because of) relative affluence and liberal, attentive parents. Along with the works of Salinger and Fitzgerald and Camus, these two contemporary novels helped explain why I felt angst and despair when (in the grand view) I had little to angst or despair about.

Since those novels -- which appeared respectively in 1989 and 1992 -- Shields has turned entirely to non-fiction, crafting a form that weaves between the culturally-focused essay and the memoir. It's a form that can have interesting results -- an essay on Bill Murray that appears in Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography (from 2002) is chiefly concerned with what we (including Shields) respond to so positively in Murray, why he seems so watchable and funny, and does this largely by Shields investigating his own response to Murray. There's huge potential in Shields style to reveal the way we think, and the way a specific life (Shields') reflects the larger culture. It seems tricky to do without falling into a solipsistic morass of egotism, but -- for the most part -- Shield avoids those potholes through yet more examination of his own doubts and faults and losses.

Enough About You comes in well under 200 pages, and I read it in an afternoon, and sometimes I come to mistrust books that I can read so quickly. Too often, Shields uses a kind of collage technique -- short vignettes that have some thematic connection -- in place of developing ideas and drawing those points towards the connections were left to imagine. And yet, Shields' ability to illustrate his own life and connect it -- even through ellipses -- to ours is
strangely fun and alluring.

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Pan's Labyrinth. Great movie. So great, I watched the director's commentary, too, which made me like the movie even more. When I first got a DVD player, I re-watched a whole lot of movies with the director's commentary track, but ultimately found that few are worth the time investment. Between those that are too technically-focused and those that seem to constitute listening to the movie's creators watching the movie, there were only a very few that seemed interesting to a casual fan. Guillermo del Toro, however, really illuminates his movie, which intersects between a story of a fascist captain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War with a dark fairy tale. Del Toro reveals, for example, the similarity between the tree featured on the movie poster at left, and the shape of fallopian tubes. He also draws a connection between the movie's stories and his reaction to the rise of the age of the War on Terror in an incredibly interesting way.

It's good fun just to listen to Del Toro talk. He's got that Spanish way of turning "t"s into "d"s, and he refers to a group of horses he's employed in the movie as "psycopathic homicidal motherf*ckers."

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All this, and I got to leave my orthopedic boot behind. I'm limping along in two shoes!