“Dark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “Beginnings and Endings”
Easily one of the most thematically ambitious dramas Netflix has produced (in any language), and certainly the most narratively complicated one, Dark has returned after a year and a half for a second season of sci-fi and sadness in the woody suburbs of Germany. It does so without making the slightest concession to the notion of jumping-on points for viewers coming to the second season fresh. This is not that kind of show. If you want to get the most out of Dark—if you want to get anything out of Dark—you’d better start from the beginning. This is a journey you have to follow every step of the way.
(NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)
172. Lebowski (III): Korea
Brad Wesley may bear a closer to resemblance to a very different captain of a very different industry from The Big Lewbowski, but in recasting the Korean War as a crucible for personal growth rather than the grotesque slaughter of a country by warring empires he has more in common with Jeffrey Lebowski than with Jackie Treehorn. (As far as we know, anyway; it’s entirely possible Jackie Treehorn froze his dick off in early 1951, leading to his belief that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone.)
When Wesley came to Jasper after Korea, he tells Dalton, there was nothing. His ambition stems, then, from a kind of horror vacui; this would account for his work in the area as a developer, entrepreneur, and establisher of the area’s first Slurpee machine, and it may stem from his experience with privation during that grim time overseas. For the Big Lebowski, Korea afforded him the chance to tell a non-sob-story sob story, about how a gentleman from the People’s Republic cost him his legs, but excuse me sir, spare me the pity and hold back the handouts, everything he’s done since is a testament to his indomitable will to achieve, legs or no.
In both cases the Korean Character-Building Exercise did precisely nothing to make either of these men worth more than a pisshole in a snowbank. Lebowski married into money, and his avant-garde artist daughter Maude allows him the fig leaf of a charitable foundation and a trophy wife to keep him from blowing her late mother’s fortune. Wesley built a mall and some strip-mall stores and hires semi-competent legbreakers to bust up auto-repair shops and dive bars to keep the locals in line. Both men wind up lying on the floor of their own palatial homes in humiliation and defeat by the end of their respective films, though Lebowski at least is still a going concern afterwards, which is more than we can say for Jasper’s JC Penney baron. The paths of glory lead but to Frank Tilghman’s shotgun and Walter Sobchak’s misdiagnosis of paraplegia.
“Too Old to Die Young” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “The Lovers”
Murder? Yes. Illicit sex? You bet. Gross rich criminal father figure? Mmhm. Hot monochromatic and duochromatic lighting? Oh, indeed. Tracking shots and camera pans so slow they should be measured by half-life? Absolutely. Yes, most of what characterized the first episode of Too Old to Die Young shows up in the show’s second outing as well. With one major exception: the main character.
171. The difference
I love Road House, I really do. I don’t think that could be any more obvious at this point. But there’s a difference between a movie like Road House and a movie we’d traditionally describe as a great movie. “Famous bouncer” is a difference. “Four different car/car parts salesmen” is a difference. “Major antagonists killed off-screen” is a difference. “Does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick” is a difference.
But the biggest difference, the difference that matters, is this: In a great movie, the shot of Denise putting her hand to her face to hide her bruises from her abuser’s employees and enemy would be a cornerstone, not a throwaway.
170. Grandpa Wesley
At least I assume it’s Grandpa Wesley; it’s hard to imagine Brad Wesley celebrating his matrilineal anything, even his kindly Pep-Pep. What’s for certain is that the black and white portrait on a table in his breakfast room (at least I assume it’s his breakfast room; a man of Wesley’s pretensions to feudalism almost certainly has a long oak table with high-backed chairs somewhere around that hideous house) is a portrait of his grandfather, as he announces without looking up from his breakfast when Dalton pauses in front of it.
“Looks like an important man,” Dalton says.
“He was an asshole,” Wesley replies.
This is one of my favorite stupid exchanges in the movie for a variety of reasons. Judging from the not just conciliatory but outright deferential tone Dalton adopts when he proclaims Grandfather’s importance—the “looks like” is just a turn of phrase, you can hear in his voice he’s quite certain it must be so—it’s quite possible that this was the last opportunity for peace in our time between the two most lethal men in Jasper, Missouri.
Despite enduring multiple physical assaults and murder attempts, despite seeing what Brad Wesley does to the woman in his life, this is Dalton attempting to meet Wesley where he lives, no longer just literally but emotionally as well. Surely, surely he can get this crazy old bastard to wax nostalgic about the lessons Papaw taught him, tough but fair no doubt, thunder in his voice but warmth in his heart, taught me the value of a dollar, when you forgive your enemies you create friends, you and me Dalton we’re not so very different are we?, you can hear it all play out in your mind just as clearly as Dalton could. Who would expect Wesley to grab hold of the proffered conversational life preserver long enough only to stick his ass into the middle and use it as a makeshift floating toilet before sending it bobbing on back? Not even the second greatest cooler in North America, I’ll wager.
Which is why I believe this to be one of the few occasions in which Dalton’s cooler-sense fails him.
Consider: His powers of observation, of sight and sound, of the sixth sense that can tell when trouble has walked through your door in knife-augmented boots, are unmatched at this point in the film.
Then consider: Here is the room he walked through in order to reach Brad Wesley.
What about this picture suggests to you that Brad Wesley uses the dead for decoration because he misses the time when they were alive?
169. No Country for Poptimism
“Will you shut that shit off?!” Brad Wesley yells. The “you” is unidentified, although Tinker and O’Connor snap to and head in the direction of the source of the problem. The problem is the upbeat ’80s dance-pop Wesley’s abused girlfriend Denise is blasting while she exercises, which she does with Fondaesque brio despite the bruises covering her face, neck, and chest, and the ensuing shame that causes her to cover up when Dalton sees. The source of the problem is therefore Denise, who’s playing the music in the first place. “I can’t listen to that crap,” Wesley explains to Dalton as his goons force his girlfriend to turn the brisk, bright, twitterpated tune off. “It’s got no heart!” Or balls, if you prefer, since that’s the body part to which Wesley later refers when he orders a command performance from Cody at the Double Deuce. During that performance, Denise is prompted to get on stage and strip, which she does with talent and enthusiasm. Then it’s Dalton’s turn to complain about Denise’s homage to Euterpe and Terpsichore. He refers to her as a dog who should be kept on a leash.
To the characteristically awful Wesley and the uncharacteristically mean-spirited Dalton, there’s nothing more aggravating than a woman enjoying art on anything approaching her own terms, even if it’s while working out to shake off the beating she received the night before, even if it’s taking off her clothes in front of a room full of baying strangers not for her own sake or her own financial health but to aid her abuser in his weird power trip. Music that lacks roots-rock authenticity, dancing that sexualizes the woman dancing with insufficient deference to the concerns of the man watching—these grave injustices must be stopped.
If Brad Wesley and James Dalton weren’t locked in a life-and-death struggle over a bar, they’d write one hell of a Black Mirror episode.
Music Time: Klaus Nomi – Klaus Nomi
Klaus Nomi is an easy artist to eulogize. The German-born East Village fixture’s striking, self-made look and soaring operatic countertenor—in layman’s terms, he sang really, really high—brought him to the attention of culture vulture supreme David Bowie. Nomi famously performed with the Thin White Duke on “Saturday Night Live,” hoping for a full collaboration that never materialized. A deal with Bowie’s label RCA, however, enabled Nomi to release two albums abroad before his death, from complications due to AIDS, in 1983. From ANOHNI’s angelic warble to Janelle Monáe’s sci-fi tuxedos, it isn’t hard to find Nomi’s legacy in pop’s outer reaches.
Klaus Nomi, his 1981 debut album, affords us an entirely different opportunity: celebrating Nomi’s music rather than his myth. When an album’s repertoire goes from Man Parrish to Chubby Checker to Camille Saint-Saëns, it’s hard to look anywhere but the music. As beautiful as Nomi was, it’s worth peeling your eyes away from the ghost-white makeup, mountain-range hairstyle, and Tristan Tzara tux to see the truly gifted musician beneath.
I reviewed Klaus Nomi’s wonderful self-titled debut album for Pitchfork.
“Too Old to Die Young” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “The Devil”
Here’s a cinematic axiom you can take to the bank: It’s impossible to be pretentious when you’re patient.
At the very least it’s damn difficult. To the extent pretentiousness means anything (other than “this person thinks they’re better than me and my concern is they’re right”) it signals that an artist is rubbing an unearned sense of intellectual or aesthetic superiority in the audience’s face. The last thing a truly pretentious artist would want is to give that audience time to think. For one thing, pretentious artists don’t believe the audience is capable of thinking, at least not on their own level. More importantly, time for the audience to think is time better spent showing off.
Now consider Nicholas Winding Refn, one of Danish cinema’s many enfants terribles. With each film he’s made since his breakthrough Drive—the Ryan Gosling reunion Only God Forgives, the Elle Fanning fashion-horror freakout The Neon Demon, and now Too Old to Die Young, an elephantine miniseries co-created by crime comics writer Ed Brubaker—his willingness to not bum-rush the viewer from one signpost of his ostensible genius to the next has grown to an almost perverse degree.
For all their lurid colors, lurid subject matter, and ultraviolence, Refn’s movies are ssssslllllllloooooooowwwwwwwwwww. Closeups, zooms, pans, tracking shots, exchanges of dialogue, tones from Cliff Martinez’s vibratory scores: They all proceed at the pace of the profoundly stoned, which indeed is the best state in which to watch them. While dazzling, I don’t think their intent is to dazzle, since that implies a reflective surface. If you like a Refn movie it’s because you sink right into it, and can float around inside it with the company of your own thoughts to fill the space, kill the time, and assign meaning to these multicolored worlds full of moral morons.
This is my long-winded way of saying “The Devil,” the feature-length pilot episode of Refn & Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, whips ass. Am I being pretentious? That, dear reader, is for you to decide.
I reviewed the series premiere of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young for Decider. This show is exquisite and disturbing. (NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)
168. At the center of it all
The speech in which Brad Wesley touts his accomplishments as a captain of industry to Dalton over breakfast and a Bloody Mary, revealing all of those accomplishments to involve the local establishment of downscale retail chains, is memorable for the obvious reason that this film’s chief antagonist says the sentence “Christ, JC Penney is comin’ here because of me!”
But that is not the only reason it stands out. Watch how cinematographer Dean Cundey (Jurassic Park, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Back to the Future, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, The Fog, Escape from New York) established Brad Wesley’s centrality to his own narrative by making him the center of the shot in which he spells out that narrative.
As Wesley rattles off his life story—coming up the hard way on the streets of Chicago, arriving in this nothing of a town after Korea, building it up into an empire of Fotomats, amassing both popular acclaim and a fortune in cash—the camera follows Dalton as he walks around Wesley at the perimeter of the round room in which he sits eating at a round table. It focuses on Dalton at the beginning of the journey, shifts to Wesley near the midpoint, and pulls back to Dalton at journey’s end. Their relative positions in the frame shift as well: Wesley starts at the left and winds up at the right, while Dalton does the opposite.
What is the purpose of this perspectival pas de deux, this theater in the roundhouse? To visually convey Wesley’s narcissism and his delusions of grandeur (which in the world of the film can be passed off for actual grandeur in a pinch). To emphasize the wary, hunter/hunted relationship between Dalton and Wesley, with their shifting focus and placement in the frame making it difficult to ascertain who is the predator and who is the prey. To show off the fancy house the locations team secured for the production. To give Ben Gazzara a platform on which to declaim without so much as having to stop eating his scrambled eggs. It is a truly accomplished shot, in the sense that it accomplishes a great deal. Is it any surprise that, depending on how one counts the opening and closing credits rolling over live band performances, it is at or near the exact center of the film?
The 33 Best Industrial Albums of All Time
29. Lords of Acid – Voodoo-U (1994)
Debuting with 1991’s Lust, Lords of Acid were best known for Belgian new-beat bangers with humorously filthy lyrics, the kind of club floor-fillers that hormonal drama club kids could put on their mixtapes. But the rampaging breakbeats, screeching-siren vocals, and double-barreled guitar and keyboard riffs of Voodoo-U were less funny and more frightening. The needles-in-the-red sound was as loud, lewd, and cavernous as the come-hither cover art by the artist COOP, which depicts a fluorescent-orange orgy in the bowels of Hell. Indeed, standouts like “The Crablouse” (a paean to the orgasmic prowess of pubic lice) and the explicitly witchy title track lent the demonic urgency of a summoning ritual to music for people who just really wanted to fuck other people in black mesh tops and vinyl pants. Go ahead, judge this one by its cover.
167. Two pool tables
There are two pool tables in the Double Deuce. There are two pool tables in Wade Garrett’s topless bar. There are two pool tables in Brad Wesley’s foyer. Yes, it seems like you can’t swing an uprooted stop sign in this movie without hitting one of every location’s two matching pool tables.
You have to respect the preparedness here, particularly on the part of Brad Wesley. Frank Tilghman and the unseen owner of the strip club might reasonably expect that patrons looking to unwind with a game of skill and chance might want to play pool in numbers sufficient to require parallel pool tables.
Wesley, though? That’s his home. His home! In his foyer where his mistress jazzercises, and his goons come to escort his nemesis. His home. The man has pool parties yes, but of an entirely different variety. And to go back to The Godfather, I can’t figure out a secondary meaning to their presence. Ceci n’est pas une orange.
Yet there they stand, the Jasper Argonath, the Pillars of the Fotomat Kings. They let all who pass between them know they have entered the realm the giver of gifts, the bestower of levity and liquor, the gamesmaster, building his parody of the recreations of every day folk, a grotesque satire, now perfected, the uruk-hai of billiards. Hither came Wesley, gray-haired, sullen-eyed, cigar in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the JC Penneys of the Earth under his sandalled feet.
166. Details
As a visual text, Road House is a chest of wonders. Look at this shot from early on in the film, on the night when Dalton first visits the Double Deuce. There he is at his familiar post, in his familiar shapeless beige jacket. There’s Pat McGurn and The Bartender Who Must Not Be Named behind him, conferring about whatever a sister-son and a working stiff who both happen to have the same job at the same place might confer about. (“So what’s it like working with Exene after the divorce? And this Mortensen kid she’s with, is he cool? Because he seems cool.”)
To the left is a power drinker, passed out on the bar; from this we can infer that Pat, ever conscious of the needs of his uncles liquor distributorship, refuses to cut off even the most obviously inebriated patrons, and most likely pressures the Nameless One into doing the same. Given the behavior of the comparatively sober customers, what does he have to lose, really.
To the right is a detail I’m just now noticing: the dry spongy exposed foam of the bar’s padding, chipped and peeled and torn away by the half-hearted vandalism of the drunk and the fixated. Back in the “everything is padded” days of restaurateurship, such artifacts of idle destructiveness were visible everywhere. I haven’t sat on an upholstered seat at an upholstered table in many a long year, but I can feel the satisfaction of ripping away a chip of covering and pulling at the porous brown stuffing underneath like my hands are doing it right now instead of typing this sentence. For all that Road House is rightfully dinged about its lack of realism, even as regards bar furniture specifically (the price of replacement tables alone from the fight about to ensue would put a normal establishment out of business), that’s some real shit.
And to the right of that? Why, that familiar fellow is none other than Brad Welsey’s own Tinker. Has he come to chat with fellow Wesleyans Pat and Morgan about the art of the goon over a few drinks when they have a moment to spare during their busy evenings of stealing from the cash register and erupting into violence over the slightest provocation? Is he additional muscle to make sure Mr. Wesley’s liquor flows without impediment? Is he simply a fan of the Jeff Healey Band? At another time during this sequence he’s seen chatting up some lovely lady; is the Double Deuce his fern bar, his Regal Beagle? Is this Tinker Tinder?
I’m reminded here of the extensive making-of documentaries included in the Lord of the Rings extended edition sets. I don’t remember the exact wording offered by the heads of the various costume and design and set departments regarding their lunatic attention to detail. I do remember the gist of it, though: They would produce intricate designs for the insides of garments and scabbards or for swords that would only be seen from a distance or for rooms no one would even enter or what have you not because the audience would see them, which they knew they wouldn’t. They did so because they were creating a world for the entire production to inhabit, not just the viewer. A cast or crew member who spent a few seconds admiring the embroidery of their breeches would be that much closer to convincingly conveying the reality of a world of orcs and elves and hobbits and magic rings. Look at the shot above, really look at it, and tell me if he war between the world’s most famous bouncers and the maniac mall devleoper who keeps their bar in Jim Beam seems as much of a stretch as it did before.
“Black Spot” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “The End Is Only the Beginning”
From the start, Black Spot has been a case study in how the whole can be equal or less than the sum of its parts. Lush location filming and thoughtful character work that tells much of the emotional story simply via well lit closeups on their faces, juxtaposed with perfunctory mysteries and recycled horror imagery: The combination frustrates because anyone capable of pulling off the former ought to know better than serving up the latter.
Titled “The End Is Only the Beginning” with almost maddening bluntness, the show’s cliffhanger season finale offers yet more evidence of this irritating tendency. Yet for once, the surprise reveals are—almost—as good as anything else on the show. Making it work in the final hour is a mystery alright, but it’s a happy one despite it all.
“Black Spot” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “The End Is Only the Beginning”
Black Spot has a strong, quiet cast that does great work with what they’re given. It’s as good at landscapes and intimate closeups as any show you’d care to name right now. I mean, look at this:
But as long as it keeps both telegraphing and pulling its punches, depending on the episode, it’s never going to feel worthy of the raw material with which it’s working. It will never see the forest for the trees.
165. No hay banda
Essays connect. That is the fundamental aspiration of my writing in the form. Analogy, applicability, juxtaposition, recontextualization, “yes, and…”: When I’ve succeeded as an essayist it’s in using these techniques to draw meaning from the spaces between elements according to the order into which, after plucking them from their preexisting positions, I have arranged them. Essays are cohesive statements, derived from montage.
Every Road House/Mulholland Drive post I’ve put together since the idea first came to me has taken at least as much effort as writing a post does, sometimes more. I say this because I don’t want you to think these are a shortcut or a cheat, though you may anyway, or a joke, which if you know me seems somewhat less likely than the shortcut/cheat possibility. But it’s semantics, really. Even when I’m joking around in here I’m serious.
It may seem, it may be, funny to compare one of the great films ever made to one of the great bad films ever made. But even if it is, my brain doesn’t know it. After the connection first occurred to me I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out.
Both movies are about a beautiful person who is new in town, who discovers love and sex with a beautiful woman with a dangerous past, who unearths corruption and violence under the surface of their new home, who dazzles onlookers with their talent, whose performance in their chosen role are echoed by the performers at the blue-neon nightclub they visit, who are threatened with annihilation by their inability to align the person they purport to be with the person they are. They retell the same myth about self-discovery and self-actualization, the great myth of the West.
Mulholland Drive destroys that myth in the end. Road House does not. Yet Mulholland Drive also lives the myth for the bulk of its length before shattering it. Perhaps Road House is best understood, then, as the adventures Betty and Rita to the Diane and Camilla death dance of our own real lives. It is the eject button, the escape hatch, the panic room for which an overwhelmed mind can reach before it destroys itself. No hay banda! It’s all a tape. Il n’est pas de orquestra! It is an illusion. Listen…
“Black Spot” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “The Secret Behind the Window”
If you’ve watched six episodes of Black Spot so far, it’s a fair bet you can figure out what’s going on in the seventh. For the most part, anyway—and it’s that “for the most part” that’s the key.
While its done-in-one mystery is as simplistic as ever, “The Secret Behind the Window” (note: no windows are involved) is much more concerned with the overarching mysteries—the secret of the woodsman, the disappearance of Marion Steiner, the dirty deeds her father and grandfather are up to—and with the emotions of the main characters. You don’t have to be a great detective to figure out that this is a marked improvement over its predecessors.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Black Spot Season One for Decider.
“Black Spot” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “The Secret Behind the Window”
If you’ve watched six episodes of Black Spot so far, it’s a fair bet you can figure out what’s going on in the seventh. For the most part, anyway—and it’s that “for the most part” that’s the key.
While its done-in-one mystery is as simplistic as ever, “The Secret Behind the Window” (note: no windows are involved) is much more concerned with the overarching mysteries—the secret of the woodsman, the disappearance of Marion Steiner, the dirty deeds her father and grandfather are up to—and with the emotions of the main characters. You don’t have to be a great detective to figure out that this is a marked improvement over its predecessors.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Black Spot Season One for Decider.
“Black Spot” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “Dark Heroes”
How many times can you say the same things about the same show, I wonder. Well, let me see. How many episodes does Black Spot run again? The awkwardly titled “Dark Heroes” is the sixth installment of the most aggressively mixed bag of a Netflix show I’ve seen so far. By now, if you don’t have its like-clockwork rhythms committed to memory, you should probably set your content filter to “Kids” to avoid complex narratives entirely.
“Black Spot” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “Dark Heroes”
How many times can you say the same things about the same show, I wonder. Well, let me see. How many episodes does Black Spot run again? The awkwardly titled “Dark Heroes” is the sixth installment of the most aggressively mixed bag of a Netflix show I’ve seen so far. By now, if you don’t have its like-clockwork rhythms committed to memory, you should probably set your content filter to “Kids” to avoid complex narratives entirely.
I reviewed episode six of Black Spot for Decider.