Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/31/21

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, December 31, 2021

Evil Is as Evil Does

Movie: Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973) (TCM).
Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.
TV: Station Eleven: Survival Is Insufficient; Goodbye My Damaged Home (HBO Max); Only Murders in the Building: True Crime (Hulu).

Badlands is almost the only Terrence Malick movie I can watch without squirming (and sometimes snoozing). It was also his first, before he yielded to his inclination toward profundity and made movies like The Thin Red Line (1998) and The Tree of Life (2011), which take conventional genres like the war movie and the family drama and infuse them with metaphysics and cosmological speculation. In Badlands he stuck to the two main characters, the psychotic Kit (Martin Sheen) and his morally blank girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), and left the philosophical import of their stories alone -- or better yet, left them for us to ponder. For the movie is in its essence a fable about the nature of evil. Kit is, in the cliché parlance, a "cold-blooded killer," one who doesn't reflect on his actions, whether it's picking up the girl he takes a fancy to, or casually gunning down anyone who stands in his way. There's mercifully little in the way of backstory psychology -- we take Kit and Holly for what they are. We can surmise about Holly's emotional blankness, since we see a little of her father (Warren Oates) who is an inept and even cruel parent (he kills her dog to punish her), but we see and learn almost nothing about what shaped Kit. The tendency of some would be to fault the environment in which the two grow up: the bleak, opportunity-starved small towns of the American heartland. But Malick lets his cinematographers -- Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner, and Brian Probyn -- seek out the spare beauty of the region. We're left to surmise that perhaps this kind of evil -- the kind we see often in the cruel gun stories of our day -- can find its nourishment anywhere.

Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Two more Station Eleven episodes last night, one of them a continuation of the story of the Traveling Symphony, in which they meet up with the survivors of the Severn City airport and we learn that the Prophet (Daniel Zovatto) is Arthur Leander's son, Tyler, grown up. Whether he's good or bad is still up in the air. The more successful episode, to my mind, is the one that takes us back to the Chicago high-rise where the young Kirsten waited out the first months of the plague with Jeevan and his brother, Frank. Except that this time, the grownup Kirsten is present as a kind of interpreter of events, talking with her younger self, guiding her through her memories, which culminate in the young girl's putting on a play based on the Station Eleven graphic novel and with the death of Frank. This is a beautifully written and directed episode: I'd be surprised if it didn't win a lot of awards for Kim Steele's adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel and the direction by Hiro Murai and Lucy Tcherniak.

I started Only Murders in the Building last night mainly because I was looking for something not overlong that would get me to my usual bedtime. A pleasant surprise: an intriguing story about three people (Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez) who discover they're all addicted to the same true crime podcast and wind up trying to solve a murder in their own Manhattan apartment building. I'll keep tuning in.