Routine Pleasures

Routine Pleasures – I have always wanted to brandish the words “simulacru” and “simulacrum”. Unfortunately, I don’t know quite what the words mean, although I think that one is an irregularly formed plural of the other. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s whimsical documentary Routine Pleasures (1986) provides me with the occasion to deploy these notions – I hope that this identifies me as fashionably post-modern. Routine Pleasures is one of Gorin’s “three popular films” and concerns two subjects: a group of train enthusiasts in Del Mar, California who have built a spectacular miniature railroad system and the American film critic, Manny Farber. Gorin’s train hobbyists are mostly old men – some of them wear conductor’s caps. Their trains run through a mountainous western landscape built on trestles in a county fair building. The club house is near real railroad tracks and, sometimes, Gorin shows the old boys standing outside the building gazing with rapt adoration at trains passing in the vicinity. These men are obsessed by trains and have amassed huge catalogues of data about railroads and railroading – they are the kind of men who will spend hours listening to hi-fi recordings of trains scaring barking dogs on “the upgrade on the Burlington-Northern line near Le Havre, Montana”. Manny Farber Gorin acknowledges as a kind of father-figure. He wrote influential essays about films and developed the famous distinction between “termite art” and “white elephant art” in the cinema. At the time that Gorin made the film, Farber seems to have turned away from film studies and was devoting himself to painting. Gorin lovingly shows details of two large paintings made by Farber – they are imaginary landscapes presenting details from Farber’s youth, including his boyhood in Douglas, Arizona, a railroad town. Gorin connects the two themes – Farber and the miniature railroad hobbyists – with references to 1930’s films that celebrated the kind of optimistic, can-do spirit of technological invention that the old men display: Gorin admires the quiet competence and daring of the pilots of Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, the esprit and panache of Jimmy Cagney in William Wellman’s depression-era films, particularly Other Men’s Wives, and suggests that the kind of attention to detail, hard-work and joy of creation shown in those pictures is mirrored by the old men and their fictional, but elaborately detailed, railroad system. The film demonstrates the proposition that any hobby seriously pursued is indistinguishable from work. Farber, the old train enthusiasts, Hawks’ and Wellman’s films, Gorin’s documentary all aspire to conquer reality by reproducing it in a meaningful form in art. Didn’t Orson Welles famously say that a film studio with its technicians “was the best train set a boy could ever wish for.” Gorin’s film is very complex and many different trajectories can be traced through its meanings. Throughout, the picture is a pleasure. (And I note with dismay that I have not used either “simulacra” or “simulacram” anywhere in this note).