To Sleep So As to Dream

 Notes that I wrote while watching Kaizo Hayashi's To Sleep So As To Dream (1986) are decorated with small sketches that I made of shots that particularly impressed me.  Hayashi's black-and-white film, shot cheaply in 16 mm, is spectacularly beautiful.  As in classic American film noir, the picture uses shadows and pinpoints of light to conceal the paucity of its means.  In terms of composition and lighting, the movie is as beautiful as anything ever made and its pictorial authority is undeniable.  But the movie is so eccentric that it's a bit difficult to appreciate.  The film's plot involves strange loops, after the manner of Pirandello, in which the inside and the outside of the narrative switch places -- in the film's final ten minutes, the distinction between the movie's various levels of frame and narrative are so entirely blurred that some critics have equated the movie to a Moebius strip.  Hayashi made the film when he was 27, his first picture without any apprentice work in the movies and two-thirds of the picture is miraculously confident and self-assured.  (There's a long episode involving a gyroscope that manages to be both tedious and incomprehensible -- I watched the film twice and had much trouble figuring out what was going on in that part of the movie.)  The movie's oddity and affectations are rebarbative but, I found, that sticking with the film has rewards and the picture's baffling, involuted ending is even moving in an abstract sort of way.  It's important to observe that To Sleep... is a silent movie.  There are sound effects but, with one exception, no recorded dialogue -- the effect is that things that make noises that we hear in the film are, often, more lively, it seems, more animate than the characters who are pigeon-holed into various stereotypes and caricatures.  (The movie is similar to Mel Brooks 1976 Silent Movie  and  Hazanavicius 2011 The Artist, but, I think much better than those attempts to revive the silent picture format for contemporary audiences -- this is because the use of intertitles for dialogue is a thematic element to the Japanese movie's plot and links the detective story events, occurring in some weird version of the present with the film-within-a-film, a silent serial that gradually absorbs the modern day plot into itself.)  The elaborate lighting and camera angles along with the movie's silent film affectations give the project something of the feeling of a German expressionist picture -- this stuff can become cloying and overly precious and, although the movie is short (87 minutes), I still think it is a bit tedious and would profit by being cut to about an hour.  (This isn't too extreme for a thirties Universal horror film, for instance, many of which clock in at about 65 minutes.)

Two detectives are hired to find a girl named Bellflower who has been kidnapped and held for ransom.  The senior defendant is called Mr. Uotsuka; he's tough and "hardboiled" as evidenced by the fact that hardboiled eggs are the only thing we see him eat.  His sidekick is younger and named Kobayashi.  Kobayashi is strangely attired -- he's dressed like a kid from a thirties' movie, wearing durable shorts and a news carrier's cap.  (Aspects of the film remind me of Erich Kaestner's Emil and the Detectives, a mystery in which plucky, loyal kids are recruited to help fight crime.)  The two detectives are offered a fortune if they can find the kidnapped girl and save her.  (And they're given wads of cash to pay the million yen ransom.)  Scenes involving the detective are intercut with imagery that is all chiaroscuro showing an elderly woman watching a silent movie.  In the movie, a black-masked Ninja fights some identical-looking bad guys in white masks who have kidnapped a princess named Cherry Blossom.  The old woman seems very ill and may be dying.  She has a sort of butler who screens the silent movie, circa 1916, for her.  Before the action on the screen can be completed, the film sticks in the projector and burns up.  So the captured Cherry Blossom, although on the verge of rescue, is never actually saved -- like the figures on Keat's "Grecian" vase, the brave Ninja threatens her captors but she remains hostage to them, the action of her rescue arrested forever.  The detectives are visited by a mysterious old man who gives them three clues.  The first is a message about a tower and something called "Flower Home".  After various adventures, Mr. Utotsuka figures out that the kidnapers (called M. Pathe & Co.) are holed up in an amusement part attraction called "Flower Home" , a place that can be seen from the Jintan Tower, a bizarre building with a vertiginous Piranesi-style interior full of a soaring lattice-work of aerial catwalks and spindly ladders.  The rescue goes wrong and the detectives are thwarted.  Next, they are told to follow the clue of gyroscope.  This part of the film was completely impenetrable to me and involves much trekking about in warehouses and stylized forests that look like something out of Dr. Caligari.  This rescue also fails and Uotsuka is knocked out.  In a delirium he sees Bellflower who appears to him against a wall on which there are two "ultra-flat" (a Japanese pop art style) faces painted with a great flares of horizontal light delineating the edges of the image.  Uotsuka is told that the third clue involves "The Electric House".  This is the name of Tokyo's first moving picture theater.  An old woman gives Uotsuka a talisman, a tortoise-shell comb apparently once owned by Bellflower.  The "Electric House" previously a place where films made by the Japanese production company "M. Pathe" were shown, is long gone.  But Uuotsuka hallucinates the movie theater and attends a showing.  In this part of the film, the silent movie apparatus goes awry:  Japanese silents were accompanied by a Benshi or professional narrator -- these narrators became "movie stars" in their own right and their improvised narration of the silent films was an integral part of the entertainment.  Hayashi's decision to shoot the movie in silent format, therefore, seems to thwart the important role of the Benshi whose verbal narration of the picture was central to the experience.  But Hayashi decides to allow the Benshi's commentary as an exception to the rule of silence (except for sound effects) imposed on the rest of the movie.  The film shown at "The Electric House" turns out to be the same serial that the mysterious woman has been watching at home.  The bad guys in the silent picture fight off a fierce black-masked Ninja who is attempting to rescue the princess-hostage.  But, as in her home showing, the film suddenly stops before the girl can be saved -- the movie burns in the projector and the cops invade the theater claiming that the exhibition is a violation of Tokyo Film Regulations for 1917.  These statutes provide that women can not appear in movies -- female parts, as in Kabuki, have to be performed by men in drag; this is to protect public morals and, apparently, represents an actual limitation on Japanese films produced by businesses like M. Pathe, at least until the early twenties.  So again the on-screen efforts to rescue the princess fail.   It turns out that Mr. Uotsuka is hallucinating the movie theater in a saloon located where the old movie palace was once located.  The two detectives hurry across town to a shadowy house full of empty rooms and strange artifacts.  In a dark room, the heroes find the dying woman screening the old serial that keeps stalling out during the rescue scene.  Now the gangsters appear, including the two white masks who have kidnapped the Princess.  We understand that the old woman is the actress who played the princess in the 1917 serial; her melancholy-looking butler (like the part played by Von Stroheim in Sunset Blvd.) was the director of the 1917 film and he has contrived the events in our movie to bring all the characters together so that, at the end and fifty years later, the princess can be rescued.  We discover that Uotsuka is the Ninja in the black mask and two gangsters that have been harassing him are the white-masked enemies in the old movie.  After a fight, Uotsuka vanquishes the bad guys, thus effectively saving the princess.  The old man films the fight between the bad guys and the two detectives.  (He has earlier delivered a revolver to them to use in the battle -- in the serial we have seen the Ninja in the black mask pulling out a gun to threaten the villains.)  We see Cherry Blossom or Bellflower or whatever she is called vanishing into a foamy mist of actual falling cherry blossoms.  The old woman dies while the whole film crew and cast apparently look on.  We see another elegiac shot of her in the haze of cherry blossoms.  In a final shot, someone carries the dead woman out of the mansion -- it looks like the old director carrying the old woman on his shoulders.  (The shot defies gravity -- we can't figure out how the dead woman remains perched on his back).  A film production still shows that the man is actually Uotsuka carrying the young Bellflower.  The image in the film is properly, I think, ambiguous.

The picture is astonishingly audacious and intricate.  Although made with a budget between $50,000 and $100,000 (the cost for a soft-core "pink" porno film), the movie seems lavishly produced.  The camera-work is startlingly beautiful and the set decoration is fascinating to the point of distracting from the film's actors and action.  In one shot, the hero broods over a table covered in symmetrically arranged hard-boiled eggs while Kobayashi, dressed like a cast member of Newsies, rides up and down idly on a carousel horse -- the detectives' office is decorated in lucky horseshoes and dart boards and, in the background, a bubble machine shoots bubbles ala Lawrence Welk into the air.  (In a later scene, the princess stands in a cloud of bubbles that simulate falling cherry blossoms.)  The film is full of strange posters, doodled graffiti on walls, and bizarre furniture -- at one point, Uotsuka is trapped in a sofa suspended high over the gangster's warehouse.  Some shots are simply inexplicable -- when the detectives enter the dying woman's mansion, they find one room full of suits on hangers that begin to spin and dance as if alive.  What?  Why? When this film was released, Hayashi was declared the successor to Seijin Suzuki and thought to be the future of Japanese film.  But his later movies didn't always succeed and, in fact, he has only completed about eight films (several of them documentaries) in a thirty years since To Sleep... was made.  (Hayashi is best known for three movies featuring "Maiku Hama" -- that is, Yokohama Mike or "Mike Hammer" from the Mickey Spillane novels -- these were produced in the mid-nineties; he's also the auteur of a computer game called "Seven Blades" produced by Konami.)  The movie is a master class in Japanese film and its history and preserves the performance of one of Japan's last Benshi.  It's too exotic for most viewers and so elaborate intricate that you have to watch closely or you will lose the gist of the film -- this is a characteristic of American noir such as Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep, a source for some of the pictorial aspects of Hayahi's movie.  On the Arrow Academy Blu-Ray, The movie has a supremely irritating commentary track in which an Australian or British and a Dutch film critic try to one-up one another as to their knowledge of obscure Japanese movies.  A couple times the guy with the British (or Australian accent) talks about how much he enjoyed the Maiku Hama films; the Dutch guy demurs but won't admit that he hasn't seen those pictures.  Finally, the Brit (or Aussie) gets irritated and asks the pompous Dutch guy, who has been correcting him on details completely irrelevant to the Hayashi film, whether he actually saw "Yokohama" Mike pictures -- and his interlocutor has to admit that "no" he hasn't yet been able to see them.  Good stuff.  The movie, To Sleep is silent and if ever a film called out for interpretation and information then this is the movie-- instead, these idiots talk about everything but what we can see on the screen.

Parallel Mothers

 Parallel Mothers is a film by Almodovar. (Like Picasso, the Spanish director uses only his last name to identify his works.)  The movie challenges the viewer to devise thematic or metaphorical (even allegorical) connections between it's two divergent narratives -- clearly the two "parallel" stories are supposed to reflect on one another.  However, the connections between the two plots are abstruse and rather formalist, I think.  The movie is intriguing and boldly designed but not wholly successful.  I remain unconvinced that there is much tying the two plots together other than some arbitrary narrative elements.  But, perhaps, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about modern Spanish history to draw the connections that Almodovar has probably worked into the material.  Fortunately, each of the narratives is sufficiently compelling to stand on its own and the apparent disjunction in mood and theme between the two stories (intended as the title suggests to run freely "parallel" to one another)  isn't an obstacle to understanding Almodovar's intricately crafted and well-appointed melodrama.  One of the narratives involves two plot twists, one of them very obvious to everyone but the poor people trapped in the story, but the other quite surprising.  So proceed here with caution.

A stunningly beautiful fashion photographer, Janis, takes pictures of a famous forensic anthropologist named Arturo, apparently illustrating some kind of Sunday supplement about the the man's adventures.  Arturo is famous for exhuming mass graves and applying his skills to identifying the disinterred skeletons.  Apparently, he investigates war crimes and atrocities, an aspect of the story that is unfortunately more relevant today, while the war in Ukraine is in progress, than when the movie was produced in 2020.   All of rural Spain is apparently a war crime site and various commissions for truth and reconciliation have retained Arturo to exhume the victims of the Civil War and identify them.  As it happens, Janis (played by Penelope Cruz) is aware of a mass grave near the village where she was raised.  She pleads with Arturo to work with authorities to disinter the cadavers in that grave, one of the ten "disappeared", her own grandfather.  One of the pleasures of Almodovar's films is the beauty of his actors.  Arturo is gorgeous and, of course, Janis is fabulously beautiful and, since she works as a fashion photographer, spectacularly dressed and accessorized.  (I've observed that all the performers in Spanish movies and TV are incredibly attractive athletic, and fantastically well-dressed -- it's an expected component in Almodovar movies and obvious even in TV shows like Money Heist.) Of course, Janis and Arturo have a love affair.  Apparently, it takes a long time for forensic disinterment to be conducted in Spain -- full archaeological methodology is employed and, while Janis is waiting for the excavations in her home town, she gets pregnant with Arturo's child and has the baby.  Arturo isn't too excited about the pregnancy -- he's married and his wife is battling cancer.  When he shows reluctance for Janis to have the baby, she breaks off the affair, although remaining in contact with Arturo with respect to the project to disinter the victim's of the Fascists in her home town.  

Janis has her baby at a Madrid maternity ward.  Her roommate is a waif-like teenage girl, a sort of orphan of the storm, named Ana.  (Everyone in the movie seems to be fantastically wealthy and so it is odd that Ana and Janis are sharing a room in the maternity hospital.)  Both women have their babies, each delivering baby girls.  But the two infants are distressed and have to be removed from their mothers for "observation" -- all turns out to be well, but with one serious complication.  The hospital staff mixes up the baby girls -- Ana leaves the hospital with Janis' child; Janis goes home with Ana's baby whom the fashion photographer names Cecelia.  The plot involving the mix-up in the babies is the second strand to this movie's plot and its complications comprise most of the film's running time.  Arturo has a good eye.  When he comes to visit Janis and sees Cecelia, he doesn't think that the baby looks anything like him -- in fact, the infant has very dark skin and a head of black hair.  (Ana, as it happens, was raped by three boys when she was drunk and one of them looksNorth African.)  At first, Janis thinks the baby resembles her mother's boyfriend, a Venezuelan drug dealer who was her father -- Janis' mother died of drug overdose when she was only 27 and seems to have been a lost soul.  (She has named her daughter, the film's heroine, after Janis Joplin and that singer's version of "Summertime" plays an important role in the movie's soundtrack -- first, we hear Joplin's version and, then, the song is echoed in the anxious, twitchy horror film soundtrack as the movie proceeds.)  Arturo's remarks that the baby doesn't look like him lead Janis to undertake some genetic testing and she discovers that, in fact, the child isn't her infant at all.  Janis is shocked, but rather inexplicably doesn't do anything.  Later, she encounters poor Ana, working in a bar and cafe near her home.  Her conversation with Ana leads to the film's unexpected plot twist which I won't reveal here except to say that it is very dire.  Janis has trouble finding a baby-sitter for her child and ends up hiring Ana to care for the little girl (who is, in fact, Ana's daughter).  Janis and Ana become lovers -- Almodovar luxuriates in scenes like this, gratuitous sex but handsomely lensed.  Then, Arturo returns to further complicate the relationship.  Janis remains sexually attracted to Arturo whose wife has now recovered from her cancer sufficiently for the husband, love-smitten with Janis, to divorce her.  The film adjourns to the country where Arturo maps out his planned disinterment of the mass grave.  Surviving relatives of the long-dead men are swabbed for DNA so that the individual skeletons can be identified.  The dry earth is broken open and the bones emerge.  The corpses show wrists tied with barbed wire.  One murdered man had a glass eye:  the dusty prosthetic emerges from the grave.  Another man put his baby daughter's rattle in his pocket when he was hauled away to be killed.  The toy is disinterred with his bones.  The townspeople march to the grave carrying pictures of the dead.  Janis is now once more pregnant with Arturo's child.  In a brief concluding shot, we see the dead men sprawled in the grave as they appeared ninety years before.  

The central narrative involving the switched babies is melodramatic, featuring vehement confrontations, betrayals, and love affairs.  The frame story about the mass grave and the disinterment of the skeletons of the murdered men has a spare, objective documentary tone.  The two stories are pictorially linked by the motif of the DNA swab -- Janis tests herself, and, then, the baby, and Ana by swabbing their cheeks for a saliva sample.  The old women in the rural village are similarly swabbed for DNA samples.  Figuratively, it seems that we think we know who we are, but, in fact, no one knows their true origins nor does anyone know where they are going -- both birth and death are enigmas into which no one can really penetrate.  Similarly, we think we know our present but, in fact, much around us is mysterious.  Furthermore, the young don't know the past and don't even care about it -- Ana has never heard of Janis Joplin.  Things that happened before we were born are profoundly mysterious and, perhaps, it isn't productive to seek the truth about events that occurred ninety years ago.  Ana, at least, doesn't see the utility of digging up mass graves from the Fascist period.  Janis berates her:  "So you don't want to know anything about your country?"  But the mass graves aren't a revelation -- the movie isn't about the surprising discovery of such things.  Rather, everyone in the village knows where the men are buried; they know who died and why.  They just haven't snatched the corpses out of the earth to display them in the light of day.  Does disturbing the dead really serve any useful purpose?  An old lady who is now dying herself says that she wants to see her father's skeleton identified so that he can be buried in the family plot where his widow is interred and where the old woman will soon be laid to rest.  But is this sufficient justification for excavating the corpses.  The film posits that birth and death are equally obscure and unknown and we don't really even know ourselves in the midst of life:  is Janis lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual?  She seems to opt for the latter identity at the end of the film.  But who knows?  Identities are fluid; and people change and the end can't be predicted from the beginning.    

On careful analysis, about a third of the film is a series of contrivances to drive the elaborate and intricate switched identities plot.  Most of the minor characters, all of them women, although vividly drawn, are really just engines to make plot points.  For instance, Ana's mother, an actress who has just achieved a modicum of modest success at age 47, is skillfully acted and has some compelling scenes -- we see her on-stage reciting verse from a Lorca play -- but actually the part is written to give the teenage girl a sounding board and, then, to drive the plot when the woman (who is helping to care for Ana's baby) has to leave Madrid with a touring production of the play in which she stars.  (This isolates Ana and sets the stage for her to re-connect with Janis.)    Almodovar directs the film as if it were a Hitchcock thriller.  He contrives tidy, efficient montages connecting Janis and Ana when the two women give birth.  The film features some disorienting jump cuts -- for instance, a flashback signified by a change in Janis' clothing; she approaches the door wearing one garment but is dressed differently when the door is open in a reverse shot staged in the apartment corridor.  Everyone is stylish -- the film is inhabited by different versions of the cool femme fatale (like Grace Kelly) in Hitchcock's movies -- and the decor is spectacular:  rooms and streets are spotless and look unlived-in, in fact, like movie sets.  Almodovar uses huge inserted close-ups of inanimate objects to make his points:  giant close-ups of bones and cell-phones and documents.  The sound cues are oddly disjunctive, suggestive of suspense and horror that we don't really see on-screen.  The switched babies plot is garish with lurid overtones and luxury items photographed by Janis sometimes crowd the scene -- there's one sequence in which Janis shoots a beautiful fashion model that has lesbian overtones that foreshadow the brief romance between Janis and Ana, but that otherwise doesn't seem to have much function other than to allow Almodovar to focus on a lusciously beautiful model filmed against a post-modern white studio.  The frivolity of the fashion world is made monumental in this movie and contrasts uneasily with the documentary style sequences in the rural village and at the excavation.  Probably, Almodovar's intent is to dramatically chronicle the contradictions that exist in modern Spain, but the parts of the picture don't really fit together well.  Nonetheless, movie is beautifully made and has a gripping plot and, notwithstanding a few tedious scenes (it's slightly too long at 122 minutes), the film retains the viewer's interest.  In the end, the picture suggests a little more than it delivers.  But this isn't necessarily a bad thing -- most movies aren't nearly as ambitious as Parallel Mothers.

Carmen's Innocent Love

Gilbert Gottfried, a famous American comedian, died on April 12, 2022.  Gottfried appeared at a show in New York a few days after terrorists killed thousands by flying jets into the World Trade Center.  In his stand-up routine, Gottfried made this joke:  "I have to leave early to catch a flight to LA.  Unfortunately, I could get a direct.  The flight is stopping at the Empire State Building."  The audience was aghast and someone cried out "Too soon."  Gottfried followed his quip about the terrorist attacks with his version of the notorious "Aristocrats" joke, a shaggy-dog story that involves bestiality, necrophilia, and incest.  No one, Gottfried recalled, expressed any discomfort with that joke.  Later, Gottfried ran into additional trouble when he joked about the tsunamis that devastated southeast Asia in 2011.  Again, his humor was regarded as in poor taste and "too soon."  Carmen's Innocent Love is a 1952 Japanese comedy directed by Keisuke Kinoshita. The film is a classic example of humor that was "too soon" and, in fact, most Japanese critics reviled the movie.  It's bizarre and off-putting and,  in fact, I can't recommend the picture.  I will note, however, that some well-established critics of Japanese cinema make large claims for this movie and it is certainly interesting from many different perspectives.  But I didn't think it was funny and the film's humor is raw, abrasive, and over-the-top.  However, I have many times commented that comedy is in the eye of the beholder, very much culturally determined, and, perhaps, some people in Japan may have found the film hilarious -- but contemporary reviews suggest to the contrary.

The movie is the second in a projected series that came to a screeching halt with the critical and audience failure of Carmen's Innocent Love.  The film chronicles the romantic adventures of a beautiful young woman, a member of the demi-monde in Tokyo, and her efforts to gain respectability (she is a cabaret performer and a strip-tease artist) by marriage to an egocentric, and eccentric, artist Hajame.  Hajame has wealthy parents and marriage to him is supposedly worth 3 to 4 million yen.  Hajame, however, is betrothed to Chidori, the buxom and promiscuous daughter of a prominent right-wing politician, Mrs. Sataka (she is the widow of a general in the Japanese Imperial army).  Mrs. Sataka needs her daughter to marry the artist so that Hajame's wealth can be added to her war-chest to support her political aspiration to Japan's legislature.  The plot is very complicated and, at times, inexplicable to someone not familiar with Japanese post-war politics and society.

Carmen is performing in a low-class pastiche of the Bizet opera that ends with a strip-tease.  The show is very popular and we see her performing enthusiastically, flinging herself around in faux-flamenco dances to Bizet's music.  Carmen's friend, Akemi, interrupts the show when her small baby begins crying.  Akemi has been abandoned by her boyfriend -- she worked with him in a burlesque "swordsmanship" show.  Akemi and Carmen are very poor and Carmen blithely suggests that they abandon the baby -- the kid cries all the time, is ugly with a flat nose, and upsets the other denizens of the lower depths hotel, the Camel Apartments, where Carmen lives.  (There's a weird subplot involving Carmen annoyed to the point of homicide by the crying baby and taking out her wrath on a chicken; the owner of the poor chicken is aggrieved and he appears from time to time, seemingly a reasonable if easily irritated fellow, who sometimes babysits Akemi's brat.)  Akemi and Carmen abandon the infant at the Sato Atelier where Hajame lives with his parents and a crazy aunt -- the aunt is obsessed with the atomic bomb and can't say a sentence without bringing up the subject; she calls disruptive women "atomic bombs" and dresses in an odd melange of garments that she calls "atomic bomb" as well.  When there's a fire in the neighborhood, everyone runs out on the street in scenes reminiscent of a Godzilla movie -- they think another atomic bomb has been detonated.  Akemi can't bring herself to really abandon the baby and she returns to the art studio to retrieve the kid -- this allows a "meet cute" between Carmen and her love interest, Hajame.  Hajame has a studio full of mobiles similar to Calder artworks, strange phallic statues, Henry Moore style sculpture, and other odd modernist works, all played for laughs.  (The film is very hip, up-to-date and outrageous -- it's similar to Frank Tashlin's vehicle for Jayne Mansfield, The Girl Can't Help It).  Hajame is engaged to the voluptous Chidori who is the disreputable daughter of the right-wing political aspirant and feminist  Mrs. Sataka (she looks a bit like a Japanese version of Eleanor Roosevelt). (Mrs. Sataka is physically monstrous-- in giant close-up, we first see her moustache and enormous buck teeth as she bellows samurai-style into the telephonel remarking on her someone says:  "Catfish have whiskers too!")    Mrs. Sataka, who is a prudish hypocrite, goes to see Carmen in her strip-tease show.  At this point, Carmen is posing nude for the arrogant and exploitative Hajame -- he basically acts as her pimp and invites his cronies to "sketch" her as she models nude for them.  At the strip-tease show, Carmen can't bring herself to disrobe and a riot ensues.  When the brutal impresario begins to beat Carmen both Akemi and Mrs. Sataka rush onstage to her rescue.  Akemi who has learned swordsmanship for her burlesque show seizes a sabre and assaults the impresario.  Mrs. Sataka makes a basso profundo speech bawling something about women's rights.  (I presume that Mrs. Sataka imitates some female right-wing politician well-known in Tokyo in 1952, but I have no idea who she is supposed to represent -- her politics are an odd mix of feminist rhetoric implausibly compounded with extreme right-wing militaristic Emperor worship -- at one point, the authorities arrest Mrs. Sataka, an act consistent with the American occupation that would have discouraged this sort of stuff.)  There are political rallies and anti-rearmament parades, all more or less played for comedy.  Carmen and her side-kick Akemi are tempted to become whores and, in fact, an old panderer makes a direct pitch to Akemi to join her brothel.  Both women try honest work, but they aren't well-suited for it.  One of the film's ongoing gags is that wherever Carmen works her bosses sexually harass her and this results in violent confrontations between Carmen and the men's aggrieved wives.  There's plenty of slapstick -- chairs fall backward and people are constantly involved in vulgar squabbles.  Carmen tries to impress the supposedly upper-crust Hajame (he's really just a poseur) -- she even takes ballet lessons with a flock of six-year old girls to improve her cultural standing.  (We don't feel sad for Carmen because she fails to seduce the unpleasant Hajame -- the man is self-evidently a fraud although Carmen doesn't see this.  To exploit the anti-rearmament sentiment in Japan, he titles one of his Jean Arp-style sculptures something like "Baby Birds threatened by daggers."  It's clear that Carmen is morally superior to Hajame in every respect and that he is unworthy of her affections.)  Hajame has a sports car and he goes for a ride with Chidori -- the car fails and poor Carmen, who happens upon the scene, actually tries to push the heavy vehicle carrying her would-be boyfriend and her rival.  Carmen is inexplicably masochistic and renounces her claims on Hajame, noting that her bad reputation would harm his prospects.  Carmen is left behind on the dark street and makes her way home.  She's drunk and tells Akemi that the two of them should become whores.  One of them says:  "You know the saying:  even insects have souls."  One of Akemi and Carmen's hustles is to appear at political rallies in costume.  Earlier in the film, we've seen them dressed as rats at a rally in which a politician vows to "clean up Tokyo" and exterminate "all the (political) rats."  At Mrs. Sataka's rally, they appear grotesquely dressed as pens and bottles of ink -- apparently, representing the Free Press that Mrs. Sataka probably opposes. There's some heckling and Carmen is called on-stage to speak.  She gets stage-fright and can only stutter:  "Yes, I'm against war", not the sentiment that pro-rearmament Mrs. Sataka expected.  There's another riot.  In a long shot, we see Carmen bedraggled on the street and titles appear:  Where is Carmen going?  Hang in there Carmen!" with a closing title that says:  "End of Part II."  These questions aren't answered -- the film was a failure and there was no "Part III."

The film's often grotesque and caricatured subject matter is mirrored by the picture's bizarre film technique.  In just about shot, the camera is either canted radically to one side or another.  Many shots begin on an even keel and, then, the camera begins to rapidly roll onto its side.  In some sequences, the camera tilts right, then, left until it is even before, later, pitching rapidly to the left into a shot in which the characters seem sprawled on their sides.  The point, made literally, is that everything is out-of-balance in the world shown by the movie and there is literally no stable perspective on anything.  The effect is interesting at first but, then, used so insistently as to "wear out its welcome."  

Carmen's Innocent Love follows Kinoshita's very popular Carmen Comes Home, the first technicolor film produced in Japan -- the picture was released in March 1951.  In the precursor film, Carmen is shown to be a farmgirl named Okin from Nagano -- a "little funny in the head because she was kicked by a cow when she was a little girl."  The movie was a big hit.  Carmen's Innocent Love, shot in gloomy black and white, was regarded as unduly misanthropic and put an end to the projected series of movies.  

Better Call Saul (first series 2015)

 I am one of the few people who didn't watch Breaking Bad and can't comment on the show's characters and mythology.  I understand that a crooked lawyer named Saul was a character in the Tv series (first released on AMC) and, apparently, thought to be sufficiently interesting to support a spin-off show.  I don't know exactly what Saul did in Breaking Bad although I would expect that his adventures were picaresque to say the least.  Whenever I watched Breaking Bad, the program was incomprehensible to me -- ultra-violence played out against a background of extravagant melodrama with some sort of industrial processing plant splayed out against a warped-looking desert full of tarantulas and cactus.  I entered the show in this middle and couldn't make head nor tail of it.  

Better Call Saul is, apparently, a prequel.  We see the hero (played by Bob Odenkirk) managing a Cinnabon in Omaha -- this introductory sequence is shot in black-and-white and full of menace.  I don't know what it is supposed to mean.  Episodes are 42 minutes long, apparently designed for 18 minutes of commercials per hour.  However, I saw the series on Netflix without commercial interruption -- periodically, the screen would go to black where commercials had been excised.  There are eight shows in the first series that appeared in 2015.  The show is excellent but a little bit too rich for my taste -- I found that one episode viewed nightly was not enough (each show is plotted to end with a "cliff-hanger"), but that two shows viewed back-to-back felt just a wee bit excessive.  The acting is uniformly superb and the direction is lucid and agile.  The series is shot in hyper-realistic color with superb set design -- some of the locations, for instance, the lawyer's office qua sleeping room in a nails salon run by Vietnamese women, are so detailed and remarkable that they take precedence over the characters and events that take place within them.  The photography is lurid with saturated colors and uses camera lenses that give everything a faintly distorted fish-eye perspective.  Set in Albuquerque and its adjacent desert, the show was shot on location and everything seems convincing and geographically accurate -- the range of the Sandias looms over the empty desert where the gangsters go to commit crimes and conceal corpses.  Sequences in a flashback set in Philadelphia had a similar sense of reality and conviction -- the dense, rainy urban landscape of Philly with neon flaring in the moist air is also brilliantly realized.

Better Call Saul paradoxically is about an ethically questionable lawyer named Jimmie McGill -- the somewhat Semitic implications of the show's name are undercut by the fact that the shyster is an Irishman from Cicero, Illinois.  (There's a little snippet of flashback inside the flashback explaining where the name "Saul" originates -- it's not a Jewish sobriquet at all.)  Jimmie is a hustler, eking out a bare existence by writing 140 dollar wills for old folks in assisted livin and doing public defender work..  He's a veteran of street scams perpetrated in Cicero involving bogus slips and falls on ice -- his nickname in Chicago was "slippin' Jimmy."  Jimmy's brother is a brilliant lawyer of the kind that exists only on TV (or in David Mamet's The Verdict), a guy who knows all the relevant statutes and cases by heart and can bark out orders like: "Get me Sedima v. Imrix and shepherdize it to within an inch of its life."  This might seem authentic to non-lawyers and, indeed, the legal citations, so far as I recognized them, are all, more or less, apposite but, of course, attorneys don't memorize statutes and case law in this way.  Jimmy's brother, Charles is on leave from the silk-stocking law firm in Albuquerque, laid up with some kind of psychosis involving deadly fear of electromagnetic fields.  (Charles lives in a house with all electric power connections ripped out and won't let anyone enter who is carrying a cell-phone; his disability frees him to act as an ally to his disreputable younger brother.)  There are some vivid supporting characters, an ex-cop from Philadelphia who is a murderer and all-around tough-guy -- also a useful ally for Jimmy -- and blonde lawyer who is (sort of) Jimmie's long-suffering girlfriend.  She's also enlisted in the plot to provide Jimmie with legal and logistical support when required by the story.  

In the first series, there are roughly four narrative strands, more or less presented sequentially.  The show doesn't enact a single complicated plot like some recent series of this sort (for instance, horror shows like The Midnight Mass or Archive 81 or crime pictures like Your Honor); rather, the program focuses on individual interlinked stories that each have a beginning, middle, and end.  The over-arching narrative arc seems to be Jimmie's development from an opportunistic shyster to something approaching moral rectitude.  The first story involves Jimmy's attempt to extort money from an embezzler who has taken 1.4 million dollars from the common weal of Bernalillo County -- the embezzler is a good family man named Kettleman.  Jimmie colludes with some vicious skateboarders in an attempt to blackmail the Kettleman's into paying off a bogus hit and run claim.  Jimmie, who begins the show as a hardscrabble public defender, working for hapless criminals (all of them guilty) on a flat fee, is greedy and sees a way to make a quick buck by setting up the Kettleman's on a hit-and-run accident.  But things go terribly wrong; Jimmie finds himself negotiating for his life with horrifying Mexican gang members and barely escapes unscathed -- the skate-boarders, who are loathsome characters, come out of this affair far the worse for wear.  The second narrative involves Jimmie scheming to represent the Kettleman's who, of course, have plenty of cash on hand.  The story involves the embezzler's flight into the Sandia Mountains and Jimmie's adventures running them down and, then, after losing the client to the law firm where Charles remains "of counsel" as a senior partner (although now on leave), assisting his girlfriend in persuading them to take a plea -- this plot which involves a home-invasion and other hijinks is, more or less, played for comedy.  The third story, the most intense of the group, doesn't really involve Jimmie at all.  The ex-cop, Mike Ehrnmantraut, who takes vouchers for parking at the Bernalillo County Courthouse is confronted by two Philadelphia cops who suspect him of murdering two of their compatriots.  This plot involves some spectacular violence and a dramatic confession scene in which the ex-cop explains what he has done and his motives to his son's widowed wife -- his son was killed by the two corrupt cops whom he has murdered in turn.  The actor, Jonathan Banks, playing the ex-cop is pug-ugly but has tremendous presence and, whenever he is on-screen, the show springs into vivid, compelling life.  Finally, Jimmie attempts to rehabilitate the seriously disabled Charles and has stumbled onto a scheme to defraud hundreds of seniors in assisted living -- the eight episode series ends with Charles and Jimmie planning litigation under RICO (the Sedima case) against the vicious senior care facility.  

The show is crisply written, very ingenious and its portrayal of the legal system in accurate within the limits of the poetic license required for this sort of TV.  The acting is good and the characters are compelling.  I found myself looking forward to watching these shows each night and was sorry when the limited series ended.  

Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (MIA Show)

 Supernatural America:  The Paranormal in American Art is a large exhibition currently on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  (The show is curated by MIA art historians and has traveled to Toledo and the Speed Museum of Art in Louisville before returning home to Minneapolis.)  The show is fascinating -- indeed, it would take real curatorial malpractice to make an exhibit of this sort dull.  Because of its size, the exhibition is a little challenging and, if you attend to each of the 140 or so objects in the show, you will leave the museum somewhat exhausted as well as baffled and confused.  I found the exhibit stunning in both a good and bad sense.  It was all intriguing, but immersion in this sort of stuff, "the black mud of the occult" as it was characterized by Freud, also leaves you with a sour aftertaste:  this exhibit isn't about beauty or formal grace or felicity:  the objects in the show appear to have been coerced into existence; there's an unpleasant aspect of brute force about many of them -- they have the blunt hermetic, even, incommunicable aspect of pre-Columbian votive figurines or African fetish objects.  And, indeed, this comparison is apt -- like an Olmec ceramic jaguar-baby or a Congolese idol, these things are not art; they were not made by artists for display and delectation.  Rather, the great majority of things in the show are either mute witnesses to some kind of ghostly occurrence, testimony as to spectral wonders seen and remembered, or evidence of the afterlife and parallel manifestations of the uncanny such as UFOs and spirit writing.  These objects exist as spectral evidence, proof of other realms or, in the alternative, artifacts that attest to the mental illness or obsession of those creating these artifacts. Some of the artifacts on display are quite beautiful (although much of this stuff is depressing and even disturbing), but the formal characteristics of the objects are secondary to their status as paranormal evidence.  

The easiest things to evaluate in the show are novelty pieces made by established, academically trained artists.  Several of the paintings in the show are quite famous -- there's John Quidor's rendition of "The Headless Horseman", Rimmer's nightmare "Flight and Pursuit", a well-known and startling capriccio made by the luminist painter, Martin John Heade ("A Gremlin in the Studio" -- a much reproduced trompe l'oeil canvas of a little monster dancing under a canvas showing one of Heade's signature images of light reflecting off still water), and several spooky pictures by Andrew Wyeth.  (I've always thought that "Christina's World", Wyeth's famous painting of a disabled woman crawling like a spider over a sandy hill on a New England seashore fairly unsettling; there are several similarly disquieting images in this show.)  A couple of paintings by James Whistler on on show, one of them depicting a vampire-like society woman poised against the void.  George Tooker's big painting of death seizing a woman on the sidewalk, derived from Holbein's Dance of Death, but updated to an urban street is frightening with a strong presence.  (The catalog shows Albert Pinkham Ryder's great "The Racetrack" in which death on a pale horse and carrying a scythe seems to gallop around a gloomy, infernal racetrack but I didn't see it in Minneapolis -- this painting may be too fragile to travel; Ryder used idiosyncratic mixtures of paint, oil, and substances like tobacco juice and, then, smeared this stuff on his canvases with impasto knives -- the pictures have flaking, cracked, and scorched-looking surfaces that have been compared to drying magma, are unstable, and don't travel well.)  Similar in many respects to the grim, dense texture of Ryder's work are the paintings in the show by Ivan Albright.  Albright is an interesting artist and his pictures are, if nothing else, unlike the work of any his North American contemporaries.  Albright labored on his pictures for years and created densely congested surfaces in which his portrait figures are half-hidden beneath suppurating tumors of paint -- several of his most noteworthy images can be seen in this show, including a work that embodies his eccentric and macabre style:  "The Vermonter -- If Life were Life there would be no Death" in which an elderly man's face and body seem to be elaborately decomposing before our aghast eyes.  Albright had some Platonic notion of the soul trapped in carrion flesh and his pictures express this conviction in spectacular, if hideous, form.  There are some eerie pictures of abandoned houses by Charles Burchfield and others -- images of decaying empty rooms, some of which are literally haunted by gloomy shadowy ghosts. These sorts of pictures were made by artists once well-known in their day and can be evaluated according to the styles, themes, and fashions in painting existing when they were made -- they are art objects, technically adroit, and can be characterized according to their expressionist or regional realist influences (Wyeth is a New England regional realist; Thomas Hart Benton, who has a memorable image of an imminent head-on collision between truck and passing sedan in the show, is a Midwestern regional realist; Burchfield's images are like Hopper's paintings that have a similar sense of surreal vacancy; Albright, who is, more or less, sui generis, is influenced by expressionists and the Neue Sachlichkeit of artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix.) But these sorts of pictures comprise only a small part of the work on display -- the rest of the stuff in the show is far more eccentric.  These are pictures by mediums, images from seances, outsider art by painters who claimed to have seen UFOs or aliens, spirit photographs showing ghostly presences hovering over staid, grim-looking Victorians, paintings precipitated onto canvas by spooks, drawings in which the artists claimed that their hands were guided by dead painters such as William Blake and Peter Paul Rubens (on the evidence of this show, death certainly doesn't improve an artist's technique nor does it enhance the content or form of his work.)  This work is largely impenetrable, alluding to visitations so far beyond ordinary experience as to be almost impossible to interpret.  What canon of quality do you apply to a chalk picture of a smirking dead girl inscribed by a medium during a seance and probably made ambidextrously while she was spirit-writing in weird hieroglyphs with her other hand?  How do you judge eerily photo-realistic pictures of families "precipitated" from mists of color by busy spirits?  (A painting of this kind, circa 1900 of the Bird family with husband, wife, and two identical daughters, each with dead flint-like eyes is one of the most disturbing things in the show -- once seen, it can't be unseen and may haunt your dreams; this strangely luminous object was painted, so it is said, by spirit-precipitation of pigment onto a canvas, that is, not made by human hands.)  The show is salutary in that it reminds us that, after the great Death of the Civil War, millions of people turned to spiritualism and communed with their dead through mediums and seances -- there are several creepy Civil War pictures to this effect, including a garish and morbid painting by Emmanuel Leutz that looks, more than a little, like some of Otto Dix's savagely gruesome paintings made in the wake of World War One.  Spiritualist communities were founded at Chesterfield, Indiana and Lily Dale, New York and, apparently, still survive in some form today.  The show features voluminous white drapery that mediums wore in the late 19th century -- possibly to conceal the ghostly apparatus on their persons -- and things like Ouija Boards, ghost goggles, and other equipment for contacting the dead.  And there are bizarre pictures made by Outsider artists like Prophet Royal Robertson of Louisiana, images of space aliens and flying saucers surrounded by Biblical citations to the Book of Ezekiel ("the fiery wheel within the wheel") and densely written diatribes against women, politicians, and public figures.  In his early youth, a young man from Rumania, Ionel Topalzen, encountered a space ship and, then, spent the rest of his life struggling to diagram the machine in hundreds of small, brightly painted images.  There are a few religious paintings, suitably curmudgeonly and loquacious by the Rev. Howard Finster -- he became famous 30 years ago when David Byrne of the Talking Heads began collecting his art.  One eccentric painter is represented by a series of images showing apocalyptic octopuses strangling out earthly evil.  Another woman, Agatha Wojciechowsky, seems to have spent her life documenting visions that she experienced involving various sorts of angels and demons.  Taken in small doses, this sort of stuff is bracing and liberates the imagination -- but the large number of these things on show in this exhibition has an opposite effect:  in the end the viewer is left a bit abashed and depressed.  A few works of this sort evidence the profundity of the human imagination but galleries of these things leave you with the impression of the unfortunate ubiquity of mental illness or the prevalence of superstitious gullibility. 

Several contemporary works in the exhibition showcase current ideology about diversity and race relations.  An animation shown on a screen at the entrance to show comments on the fact that the American continent is haunted by vast numbers of Indians who were the victims of organized genocide -- the point is well-taken but the animation is obvious and superficial, not particularly well-done, and politically specious.  In one gallery, a large tuberose orb hangs suspended in the air -- murky cloudy forms are projected on the clotted surface of the orb (it is bigger than an adult man) and, now and then, we see lips and hands forming in the object; the thing comes with a soundtrack of whispers, chiming bells, oracular declarations -- it's very scary.  (My daughter entering the gallery displaying this object suddenly encountered a bored security guard, gazing in a half-comatose way at the shadowy lips and drifting shadows on the orb; she was startled and jumped half-way out of her skin.) 

A show of this sort is valuable for the thoughts that it provokes in its viewers.  We may be tempted to condescend to paintings by a man (to take one example) who imagined a vast octopus entangled with allegorically represented human emotions, all of this manifested according to the artist's synesthetic hallucinations.  But what to make of the adjacent galleries in the Institute of Art in which we see painted over and over again, a woman and baby inexplicably stationed in a stable with farm animals or, even more distressing, a handsome young man tortured to death on a cross.   

Southside Aces at Paramount Theater

 In 1963, my father, a jazz fan, took me to see the Hall Brothers Emporium of Jazz performing at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  It was a grey day and snowy as I recall.  The auditorium was dark with wood textures and the air was funky with the small of wet coats and sodden shoes and scarves.  The place was heated with steam radiators and some parts of the hall were very warm with an odor in the air of boiling water contaminated with lead and copper.  I was too young to understand the concert -- I think I was about nine.  The Hall Brothers were a fixture at the jazz club in Mendota and they played New Orleans jazz.  Dixieland jazz of that sort has always seemed ancient to me, an intricate antique form of music as remote from the present as Telemann or Vivaldi.  But consider this -- 46 years separated that concert in 1963 from Louis Armstrong's famous May recording sessions at Okeh with his Hot Seven in 1927.  I'm now 67 years old.  The time between that 1963 concert and Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues" is roughly the same period that separates today from David Bowie's Golden Years (1976), or the Bee Gees' songs featured in Saturday Night Fever or Abba's "Dancing Queen" -- none of these tunes seems antique to me, because, of course, they are part of my life.  When my father introduced me to Dixieland music, it was an old time form of music, but,in fact, really modern, comparatively speaking --as modern as David Bowie or Freddie Mercury or Abba is to listeners today.  

On April 3, 2022, the Southside Aces played a ninety minute concert at the Paramount Theater in Austin.  One of the musicians hails from Albert Lea and was somewhat familiar with the Moorish fantasia architecture at the Paramount Theater.  He took a picture and sent it to his mother.  From the bandstand, the tuba player told us that his mother  vividly recalled attending movies in the theater not so long ago -- the last film that played the Paramount Theater was Godfather II (1974), the year of David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel".  Six musicians comprise the Southside Aces -- trumpet, clarinet, electric guitar, sousaphone, drums, and trombone.  The performers are virtuosi and flawlessly replicate the sound of classic New Orleans and Dixieland jazz.  The concert was wonderful and demonstrates the continued vitality of this sort of music.  In general, the sound is complex and requires that the listener remain alert and attend carefully to the filigree of textures and ornamentation.  The impression that this music produces is one of three or four skilled musicians all playing simultaneously against a rhythm and percussion backbeat.  Each musician seems to be playing a completely different version of the melody and its chorus -- yet, somehow, these various parts all intermesh to produce a coherent, if exceptionally, intricate whole.  I'm always mystified by the way that the separate pieces of this sonic puzzle somehow fit together -- each soloist seems to performing a variation on the theme that is wholly distinct and constructed from elements almost completely different from what each other musician is playing at his side.  But the result isn't chaos but something like a Bach fugue -- the different parts are all held together by some mysterious legerdemain that, I suppose, musicians can describe and understand but that is beyond my  comprehension.

The concert began with the "Boogaloosa Strut', a jaunty uptempo dance tune.  This was followed by the standard "Margie" on which the trombone player sang the lyrics.  Three movie tunes were, then, presented in succession in homage to the theater venue.  These included a gorgeous rendition of "Over the Rainbow" (played by heavily muted horns) and "Hello Dolly" with the trumpet playing growling out the lyrics in the manner of Satchmo's famous version of this show-tune and, then, a macabre and ingenious arrangement  of the "Imperial March" from Star Wars -- this is hard to imagine as a New Orleans flavored jazz tune, but the arrangement was excellent, snarky and grotesque.  The Aces programmed ten additional tunes, all of them brilliantly performed.  There was a "mouse-band" version of "Yacht Club Blues", "Muskrat Ramble," a song that actually has, to my surprise, a fast babble of surreal lyrics (sung by the sousaphone player.).  The group has performed at the Bix Beiderbecke festival in Davenport, Iowa and played Bix's "Davenport Blues" as well as a version of the 1899 Scott Joplin tune "Maple Leaf Rag."  In addition, the Aces did a version of Ma Rainey's 1922 "C.C. Rider", Sydney Bechet's flamenco-flavored "Le Petite Fleur," and a couple of original songs, written in a style that is a pastiche of classic Dixieland, however tinted, I think, with some sinister sounding film noir elements  "Skokie" by Louis Armstrong is a Latin-themed tune that sounds a bit like Duke Ellington scaled-down.  (I've never heard the song although it's serpentine principal theme seemed familiar to me.  But this is a characteristic of Dixieland jazz -- the music is always surprising in the twists and turns that it takes, but, nonetheless, feels fundamentally familiar and even predictable in certain ways; this is the classicism that is intrinsic to this musical form.) The final tune "Shake it, Break it" pulled out all the stops -- there was a spectacular trombone solo played very, very softly against a sizzle of cymbals, and then, a shouted vocal chorus.  

I left the auditorium thinking about my father, the Hall Brothers Emporium of Jazz (the musicians always dressed in black with narrow ties like old-time morticians), and what feel like great and melancholy expanses of time that, when viewed objectively, are really only fading memories of things that happened just yesterday.  Music is timeless.  We change but it doesn't.  Between 1927 and the concert that I attended as a child in 1963, there was a Depression and a World War and rock and roll was invented -- I think the Beatles were touring in 1963.  But none of this is really relevant to the music except in tangential way.  There's an element of escapism in all of this -- when I ventured out onto the street where the air was cold and moist and the day completely grey, it occurred to me that I hadn't thought about Covid, or cops kneeling on someone's spine or, even, the atrocities in the War in Ukraine for two hours -- I suppose this was a very fine thing indeed.

The Bubble

 Comedy is notoriously hard to review.  A lot depends on context -- an audience half-crocked on cocktails and laughing uproariously at a stand-up comic's gags will induce a sensation of mirth, even hilarity in those participating in the experience that may not be replicable in other settings. (Hence, the use of laugh-tracks on TV sit-coms.)  If you attend a comedy show in a sour mood or anxious about something or, even, angry, you may have difficulty in seeing the humor in the jokes on offer.   At the 2022 Oscars, Chris Rock made a joke that wasn't particularly funny and got himself punched as a result -- but the video clearly shows most of the audience laughing enthusiastically at the gag, including Will Smith, the man who threw the punch.  Humor is a matter of whim, context, and an indefinable mood or aura linking the performer making the joke and the audience.  Movies are even harder to analyze -- a picture that seems inert and unfunny to someone watching the show alone in his living room, might be a laugh-riot in a crowded theater.  It's impossible to reliably measure the effectiveness of a joke without having a roomful of spectators..  This is why comedy on film (or TV) is so impossibly difficult to assess.  Yesterday, I watched what appeared to be a pilot for Seinfeld -- the show was very different from its iconic form.  Jerry seemed querulous and, in his scenes with George Costanza, was clearly imagined to be subordinate to the more dominant and aggressive Jason Alexander.  (Jerry is rail-thin, shockingly young and much more an ethnic New York Jew than in later episodes -- he sometimes sounds like Woody Allen; Jason Alexander has most of his hair.  Kramer is called "Kessler".)  Line by line, the show is startlingly intelligent and Seinfeld's observational comedy is spectacularly witty and profound -- but the show isn't really funny in the sense that one doesn't laugh-out loud at its humor; you admire the cleverness and ingenuity of the jokes and dialogue but they don't register as funny.  But, of course, this could just be my own idiosyncratic reaction.

I make these comments prefatory to my note on The Bubble, a big-budget NETFLIX comedy about a film cast and crew in enforced isolation making a special effects laden horror movie.  The picture is way too long and much too diffuse to be any good -- although comedies, in general, tend to "throw in the kitchen sink" to produce their effects; in other words, comedies generally fire in all directions -- this has been the case since Aristophanes, who is notably scatter-shot, to Monty Python.  The Bubble, directed by a comedy specialist, Judd Apatow, has about twenty minutes of very cleverly written satire; it's full of broad farce which is not to my taste.  (There's a long sequence involving cocaine use that's convincingly weird -- the faces of the actors are distorted into caricatures of themselves and keep flip-flopping genders -- followed by a chase and, then, hysterical and brutal attempts to revive someone that has overdosed.  I didn't think any of this was funny and, further, it was confusing:  the actors were supposedly inhaling "key bumps" (to use Madison Cawthorne's formulation) of cocaine, not opioids and, therefore, the climactic use of a Narcan injection to the heart doesn't make any sense.  However, for all I know, some people may have thought that this chaotic sequence was hilarious -- and, so, who am I too judge?  I don't think there's any objective standard that can be applied.

Like most comedies, the script and director will go to any lengths to get a laugh and the film is greasy with flop-sweat, although there were maybe four laugh-out-loud moments in the 126 minutes movie.  David Duchovny is fairly funny playing a parody of his suave seducer persona -- Duchovny, objectively looks like a homeless bum down on his luck although he still has a thrilling amorous whisper; I suppose part of his appeal is his grungy appearance and big swollen nose too large for his features -- he certainly doesn't look like a ladies' man.  The female actresses who are in their thirties and gorgeous are the subject of dozens of jokes implying that they are "old" and "out of shape" and sexually needy.  (They are ruthlessly compared with a doll-like 18 year old girl who is beautiful and a Tik-Tok celebrity.) Fred Armisen, who is strange-looking enough in real life, plays a creepy director -- there's a scene in which he wades around in a pool with one of the leading ladies that is disturbing, but not funny and plays no part in the movie other than to allow the actress to shudder melodramatically at his embrace.  There are some some sex scenes.  Sex itself can't be made funny -- it's too grotesque and poses too many emotional challenges for viewers to laugh at the sex act itself.  It's the preparations for seduction, the pretensions of those involved, and the aftermath of sex in which the potential for comedy exists -- this doesn't seem to be apparent to the scriptwriters and producers of The Bubble.  The aspects of the movie relating to film making, particularly idiotic genre movies, are the best parts of this picture.  I thought the parody of horror films presented by the movie was pretty funny -- although even this (relatively successful) aspect of the movie was over-done and repetitive, exploiting the appearance of the special effects scenes as they are supposed to look on screen with the tacky mechanics of producing those images in front of green screens with actors clad in ridiculous green costumes.  There's some vomiting jokes, a bit of diarrhea and an elaborate brutal cat fight that wasn't even staged as comedy -- it's knock-down drag-out brawl.  One of the beautiful actresses gets her hand shot off, an effect featuring Peckinpah-style gore -- I think it would be hard to construe this as funny; the wound was too realistic and falls into the uncanny valley (close enough to be real to be disturbing) -- when Monty Python used effects of this sort, they went over-the-top with geysers of blood (the deadly rabbit in The Search for the Holy Grail as well as the combative knight who is reduced to a torso threatening to "bite" he enemy to death) or volcanic explosions of vomit and shit (Mr. Creosote in The Meaning of Life). The picture ends with an Abbott and Costello routine, familiar to me from the low-grade comedies made in the fifties and shown on TV -- the characters are in a helicopter which no one knows how to fly.  The scene is botched and doesn't work -- this is vulgar, buffoonery but, at least, Abbott and Costello knew how to wring out for the viewer whatever humor existed in this kind of material; Apatow doesn't have a clue how to stage this sequence and, at  least, one of his shots is so spectacularly mismatched as to call into question his fundamental competency -- if the helicopter is supposed to be hovering over a vast country estate, why do some of the shots show it posed over what looks like a light industrial complex, presumably a film studio in England or Hollywood.

From the previous text, I suppose the reader would conclude that I disliked The Bubble.  But this would be wrong.  The film is trivial and poorly made.  But I thought it was reasonably diverting.  Most critics revile this movie.  I thought it was okay for what it is.  Reviews that I have read give the film a hard "F" for failure.  I'd rate it as a C+.

The Andy Warhol Diaries

 It's hard to know what to make of the Netflix limited series documentary, The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022, written and directed by Andrew Rossi).  This is because the subject of the diaries is elusive himself.  Warhol remains hard to "see" -- you can't quite grasp him.  In part, this is due to Warhol's carefully cultivated persona; the artist embodied bland indifference, projecting an aura that "there's nothing to see here" -- of course, an affectation that encourages viewers to look with even more intense scrutiny at the object of their gaze.  (What is the man concealing?  What hidden depths hide behind the white fright-wig and the curiously mask-like features?)  The Diaries, a six part documentary, posits that Warhol was, in fact, a deep and passionate soul and makes it argument to this effect by chronicling the artist's sundry love affairs.  Although Warhol was famously guarded, he dictated diaries to an associate, Pat Hackett -- originally, these laconic diary entries were intended to document expenses incurred for tax purposes.  (Warhol starts by listing cab fares).  But, gradually, the diaries expanded in scope and, in the end, they present a portrait of the man and the rarefied New York milieu that he inhabited (and, indeed, came to embody).  Whether Warhol was any good as an artist remains debatable -- the film presents both admirers and detractors.  (Robert Hughes in particular abuses Warhol in terms that would be inadmissible today, remarking dismissively that he's just a "Catholic and a homosexual" -- in his own way, Hughes, who was almost as famous as Warhol in the seventies, was America's "official art critic", writing for Time magazine and publishing several highly acclaimed books, and he could be as bitchy and imperious as Pauline Kael.)  It's obvious that Warhol was too productive to maintain the highest standards and his "factory" ground out hundreds of dull reproductions of the artist's best ideas, but, I think, there's no doubt that the man was supremely ingenious, fantastically alert to the leading cultural issues of his time (issues that he not only astutely observed but, in large part, framed) and that many of his most famous works are not only iconic but also philosophically important and groundbreaking.  (I also think that much late Warhol remains in the hands of wealthy collectors and, perhaps, is not generally on exhibit -- an evaluation of these final works will have to await their accession to museum collections where they can be better studied, something that may require another generation or so.)  At the end of one program, Andy muses in deadpan tones:  "I thought:  what is art?  Does it really come out of you?  Or is it a product?  It's complicated."  In characteristic faux-naif terms, Warhol poses a central question -- is art a form of self-expression. dependent on the genius and passion of the artist?  Or is art genre-based -- that is, the repetition of forms that have found favor with buyers that can be reliably reproduced for the market.  It's an ancient distinction:  in Dutch painting, we have Rembrandt who seems to make art out of his own experiences and reactions to the world (the strange grubby religious scenes, the nude paintings of Saskia, the many self-portraits) and his genre contemporaries like Jan Steen (jolly topers), Aelbert Cuyp (sunsets and ships at sea), or Pieter de Hooch (serene interiors).  Of course, the greatest painters synthesize self-expression and genre and Warhol, sometimes achieved this sort of incandescent brilliance:  consider for instance, the famous 1964 painting, Warhol's Nine Jackies -- this is a profound image that combines Warhol's obsession with fame as well as his homosexual identification with a glamorous woman with an acute sense of commerce -- the silkscreened  image seems infinitely reproducible and the rank of three photographs each reproduced three times suggests by its very means of production that the work is generic, that is, an image made to be consumed.  Somehow, Warhol manages to make the picture both a revelation of self, an overt object of commerce, and, even, a meditation on the notion of history and history-painting.  In this image, the distinction between art as product or art as something that "really comes out of you" is transcended.  

German critics of a certain type categorize the works of Goethe in terms of the female muse who inspired the poem or essay.  The great man is said to have various phases in his aesthetic development that are named after his girlfriend of that period.  Picasso is often studied in the same way -- there are works inspired by Dora Maar, paintings influenced by Francois Gilot, and about a dozen others.  The Netflix series on Warhol's diaries uses a similar approach -- the documentary is as scandalous as a Mexican telenovela and, essentially, an account of Warhol's relationships with different boyfriends.  The melodramatic romantic material suggests that Warhol was either an ardent, fiery spirit who pretended to be a machine or a machine programmed to periodically act in an ardent, fiery and lovelorn manner.  (It's the nature of the diaries which are revelatory about Warhol's love-life that channels the documentary into this narrative.)  Warhol is seen pursuing and wooing Jed Johnson, a much younger interior decorator.  After that relationship collapses, Warhol becomes involved with a young Paramount executive, Jon Gould.  (Curiously, both men were twins -- there's something a little spooky about Warhol's interest in reproducing ready-made images and his boyfriends who were, as it happened, duplicates of someone else.)  Later, he seems to have been obsessed with the young and doomed Haitian-American artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat.  The series features lots of speculation about the exact nature of these affairs but there's no doubt that the artist was intensely emotionally engaged with these men,  (Whether these amorous encounters were chaste or sexual is the subject of lots of feverish conjecture -- Warhol claimed to be asexual but whether this was true is anyone's guess.)  In any event, the film argues that Warhol's romances were fundamental to his work and central to his creativity.  This gives the film a sort of tabloid character which enhances it's interest, but, perhaps, is unfair to Warhol's work.

The documentary uses AI to simulate Warhol's voice, a bland, monotone.  (Warhol was famously swishy and, it seems, he developed a pattern of speech that was intended to disarm those who expected him to talk with overt effeminate inflections -- instead, he always sounds a little like a nonplussed public service announcement.)   Critics have railed against this computer simulation -- I don't find it offensive and, in fact, think its rather effective in conveying the essence of the man.  An artist who said he wanted to be a machine is here made to speak through a computer program, that is, a machine.  The series is flashy with lots of quick cutting, plenty of excellent disco music along with a mournful melody (harp and violin) that sounds like Erik Satie and that is deployed to represent Andy's loneliness and melancholy.  There are some soft-focus reenactments -- mostly just images of Andy played by a double reading letters or reviews or dictating his diaries.  (These reenactments seems weirdly superfluous -- Warhol documented every aspect of his life and hoarded souvenirs by the tens of thousands:  he seems to have been more photographed than Ronald Reagan and there must be millions of feet of film footage showing the man and his associates.  But, curiously, this fantastic wealth of imagery adds to Warhol's mystery -- the more pictures we see of him, the less we seem to understand his motives and personality.  Warhol is always retreating into invisibility.)  The fast-cutting is not to my taste.  Warhol is an artist and we need some time to contemplate his works -- but the movie just keeps cutting away from things we want to see more closely:  if you have a good shot of a fist stuck up someone's rectum, then, we should be given more than a second or two to enjoy the image.  In a way, the movie seems a little prudish fast forwarding through all of the debauchery when we would like the picture to linger a little to let us see what's going on.  But the documentary is generally successful and I certainly enjoyed watching it.  There's a host of talking heads ranging from Bob Colacello (who edited Warhol's magazine Interview) to Jerry Hall (she has a charming southern accent and remains vivid as a wholly depraved southern belle)  and Rob Lowe.  These scene-makers are now long-in-the-tooth but many of them are articulate, opinionated, and provide interesting perspectives on the artist.  The film is weak on Warhol's works and days prior to the inception of his diaries -- in other words, the documentary begins, as it were in media res, with Warhol already world-famous and an arbiter of taste in New York's downtown scene.  For this reason, we don't see or learn much about the Brillo Box objects or the Campbell's Soup can series -- two of the artist's most important inventions.  The early silk-screens including the work showing Jacqueline Kennedy and his "Death and Disaster" series -- car-crashes, electric chairs, and the like -- are given scant attention because this art was produced before Andy began keeping the diaries on which the documentary is based.  Furthermore, the documentary shows us almost nothing of the film projects like Empire,  Chelsea Girls and Blow-job that made Warhol famous in the world of movies.  (The documentary posits that Paul Morrissey was the director of films produced under the Warhol imprimatur during the diaries period -- something that is certainly true but that doesn't excuse the void where Warhol's film work should be.)

The fifth episode of the six part series is affecting -- the show chronicles the rise of AIDS as the gay cancer and details Jon Gould's death from that plague.  Warhol is portrayed as steadfast and loyal in this part of the series:  despite his horror of hospitals (which turned out to be prescient), Andy visits Gould every night for thirty days when he is hospitalized.  Gould succumbs, blind, scabrous, weighing only 70 pounds -- and, also, denying that he is dying from HIV.  All of this is grim material and the show's tone darkens from the 24-hour party-people aspects of the earlier episodes to a memento mori   In my view, the fifth show is probably the documentary's apogee -- that is, its most compelling and interesting episode.  However, the sixth episode is also extremely interesting, although not as emotionally gripping.  The scope of the last show in the series is expansive.  We learn about Andy's failing health, his piety, and his death at 58 as a result of medical negligence in a New York Hospital -- a gall bladder operation (cholecystectomy) is botched, Warhol is provided too much fluid, and essentially drowns.  The show doesn't end with Warhol's death but expands to comprise a sort of elegy for the New York party culture of the early and mid-80's.  The filmmakers describe Jed Johnson's death in the fiery crash of TWA 800 -- this was after Warhol was dead himself and, so, strictly speaking is irrelevant to the film.  However, the crash at sea provides an opportunity for somber sea-scapes and tearful testimony from both Smith's lover and his brother.  (They carry a cut flower to plant in the sand at the edge of the sea off Long Island.)  The broad focus, particularly after Warhol's death, suggests that the show's ambition has become epic, a kind of cultural history of New York City in the decade of the 80's.  The episode is death-haunted -- Basquiat perishes from an overdose and Keith Haring dies as well.  Oddly, the avatar of Manhattan in the early 80's is Rob Lowe, then, a beautiful boy with "eyebrows so perfect" (Andy says) that they seem to be penciled-on".  New York City, from our current perspective, is viewed as a sort of grungy lost arcadia, a vanished paradise.  The old witnesses, now debilitated by age and suffering, testify to the specious grandeur of the epoch and quarrel about Warhol's significance.  Much of the final episode is devoted to several disputes about Warhol's legacy.  Was he a great "gay artist" or, rather, simply a great artist?  That is, to what extent does Warhol represent the gay community and to what extent did he repudiate his sexuality?  Most of his elderly disciples, the people who worked with him, argue that Warhol was emotionally closeted -- he viewed himself as a pervert and would have strenuously opposed the claim that he "represented" or advocated for the gay community.  Others, however, are anxious to claim Warhol as a covert, but, nonetheless, effective exponent of gay imagery and thematic material reflecting the plight or condition of gay men in 1980's America.  This debate must be considered in the context of the larger question of whether Warhol's art has "meaning."  In the film, the crucible for this controversy is Warhol's late "Last Supper Series", a hundred of so objects and paintings in which the artist repurposes imagery from the fresco by Leonardo da Vinci.  (Characteristically, Warhol modeled his work not on Leonardo's immensely degraded actual fresco in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, but on a cheap-looking three-dimensional model of the work that he purchased  in Times Square -- Warhol had admired the ceramic artifact in an uptown store but it was priced at $2500 and he thought that was too expensive; so he went down to the flea markets and second-hand places around 42nd Street to buy the model.)  Warhol produced the series of paintings as a commission from a gay Greek gallery-owner, a man named Iolas (he was suffering from AIDS and had to be cabbed from the hospital where he was dying to the gallery opening in Milan.)  The imagery in the Last Supper paintings assumes an eerie significance in light of Warhol's death soon after executing the works -- but it is a fallacy, of course, to impute too much meaning to canvases on the basis of the artist's death; needless to say, he didn't expect to die due to medical malpractice a few weeks after the gallery opening.  (Warhol's trip to Milan was a nightmare for him -- he was suffering from abdominal pain due to gall bladder complaints probably referable to some extent to his injuries from being shot by Valerie Solanas.  A germophobe, Warhol's diaries record that people around him in Milan were all sick and that one woman, a Italian gallery owner who appears in the series as a witness,  had the flu and repeatedly coughed in his face -- she denies that aspersion.)  The question raised by the Last Supper works is integral to all of Warhol's major paintings -- is the work intended as an expression of piety and religious aspirations toward forgiveness and sanctity?  Or is the work ironic, an example of homosexual camp in its  repurposing the kitsch ceramic model of the Last Supper?  Or is the series of paintings simply a commercial exercise, the more or less efficient and competent execution of a contractual obligation.?  In general form, these questions can be posed about all of Warhol's major works:  is he making a serious thematic point? or is he promoting a homosexual satire on straight culture? or is the work just naked commerce?  Curiously, Warhol's associates seem committed to the view that the artist's works have no thematic meaning and are simply money-making gimmicks.  One of his closest friends, Chris Makos is shown an impressive and, apparently, exemplary late Last Supper-themed canvas called "The Big C".  It's seems pretty apparent that the canvas has something to do with AIDS.  Makos denies the evidence that is directly before his eyes, saying that Andy was completing a contractual obligation when he made the painting and that he never publicly admitted to being gay and, certainly, didn't intend to produce a parable of sin, redemption and forgiveness in the context of AIDS.  He seems offended by the mere notion that the painting might have any sort of meaning.  "What does "the Big C" mean?" Makos asks.  "Well," the documentarian says, "C clearly refers to Christ and cancer, the gay cancer, as it was called."  Makos replies:  "I don't see any 'G' for "gay"?"  But the director flashes a close up of the inscription "the Big C" and we can clearly see that the "g" in "Big" is drawn emphatically and, in fact, positioned right next to the letter "C".   To an objective observer, Warhol is obviously using the painting to advance complicated ideas about AIDS, gay sexual practices (the fetishized motorcycles that dominate the picture), and the idea of redemptive suffering and forgiveness.  The fact that the point is even arguable relates to Warhol's public contention that his art was about making money and nothing more.  And this assertion is founded in Warhol's methodology, the way that he made his pictures.

The core of Warhol's artistic practice was to detach the signifier (to use the jargon au courant in the 80's) from what it signified.  Warhol's Campbell Soup cans don't reference soup but, instead, abstract ideas about art as commerce, something manufactured and, therefore, almost infinitely reproducible.  The fact that Warhol's objects are signs stripped of their significance or referent (the signified) explains the artist's feckless refusal to explain the meaning of the things he made -- Warhol simply deflected questions as to significance by saying that his art "had no meaning."  But as the series shows, people make meaning.  If you release a signifier from what it signifies, that is, cut the sign loose from its reference, the sign doesn't become meaningless -- to the contrary, the sign floats free and is liberated to reference any number of things.  Warhol's detached signifiers are alienated objects, but, perversely, only alienated from their original meaning.  His signs represent the failure of signifiers, their ambivalence, their nostalgia for concrete and fixed meaning -- if I say my art is without meaning, I am necessarily making a claim about the world; I am exhorting my viewers to consider the meaninglessness of certain modes of being.  Warhol's bland declaration that his art has no meaning, accepted at face-value by many of his disciples, is, in fact, a statement about a crisis in meaning.  

Other ambiguities in interpreting Warhol's life and work arise in the context of Pat Hackett's diaries, the source for the documentary.  Hackett appears in the documentary wearing a large crucifix and there is some surmise that she may have edited from Warhol's telephone narrative certain important things.  (The fact that the woman is wearing a large crucifix suggests that she now may be ambivalent, if not actively, hostile to much that was integral to Warhol's life-style.)  Hackett deepens the mystery by saying that Warhol often told her things with instructions to not write them down -- that is, to not transcribe them in the diaries.  Furthermore, at certain key moments in his life, Warhol says "I don't have to tell the diary about this" or "I won't mention any more to the diary."  So Warhol's carefully cultivated aura of inscrutability remains intact.  Hackett says that some things that the artist told her were just between "Andy and myself" and "I'm not going to say any more about them."  

At his funeral, the famous critic John Richardson said that Andy pretended to be a voyeur but that he was really a recording angel -- an interesting formulation in that it begs the question as to what is the difference between these two types of transcription.  (Was Hackett Andy's 'recording angel'?)  In a secular universe, where God is absent or, at least, indifferent, how is a recording angel different from some sort of voyeur?  Look at the majestic opening of Wim Wenders Himmel ueber Berlin (released in English as Wings of Desire) -- the two angels perched over the city record everything and are privy to the thoughts of all the humans swarming below, but for whom are they gathering this infinite stream of impressions, fears, and desires?  This is a question also posed by Warhol's vast body of work.

I recommend The Warhol Diaries although I think it traffics in a sort of specious Schadenfreude.  The film shows us a man who had everything -- fame, fortune, the love of beautiful objects of desire, and an immeasurable creativity.  But you, dear reader, are undoubtedly happier than he was in your prosaic, middle-class, financially constrained existence.  In your life, nothing glamorous ever happens.  But Andy's life was devoid of glamour as well, because he was sad and lonely and emotionally indifferent to the glamour with which he was surrounded.  There's something glib and meretricious, something superficial and phony at the core of the documentary, a curiously reactionary and problematic equation between Warhol's life and his art.  But, ultimately, this hollowness is central to Warhol's work as well -- it's a Pop Art sensibility, a cliche reproduced on a heroic scale like one of Andy's silk-screened celebrities or soup cans -- it's the emperor who purports to have no clothes but isn't really naked; rather he goes abroad cloaked in ambiguities, a man who has everything but really nothing at all.

At the Pittsburgh Warhol Museum, a big brooding 19th century warehouse downtown, a video feed shows Andy's grave located across the river and in the suburban hills overlooking the city.  The day that I was at the museum, it was cold and rainy and the video showed a slick-looking granite headstone glistening in the rain, a few votive offerings (notes and soup cans and a bottle of Coke -- Warhol said that "all Cokes are the same and all are good'"), an expanse of winter-killed grey brown grass.  Later that afternoon, I found the grave, a difficult exercise in the claustrophobic ravines and hollows of the west Pittsburgh suburbs.  I parked the car at the hillside cemetery but couldn't find the grave.  A man was walking a small poodle among the tombs.  The man was in his seventies, wearing a cap bearing the name of an American battleship.  No doubt the fellow was a Trump supporter.  I asked him where Warhol's grave was located.  He was happy to tell me and seemed proud that this landmark was in the cemetery where he walked his dog.  He said:  "If you look up at that pole --" and he pointed to a utility pole, "you'll see a camera.  Just follow the angle of the camera down to the ground and that's the grave.  The camera is filming Warhol's grave."  I thanked the man and his directions were accurate.  I saw the camera poised on the utility pole and followed the vector of its gaze to locate the grave -- the granite was wet with the rain and there were some votive offerings on the stone:  a few handwritten notes that the rain had rendered illegible, a trinket-shaped like a heart, a Campbell tomato soup can, and a bottle of Coca Cola.