FILM « In Which We Wail To An Uncaring Universe »
Friday, June 7, 2013 at 10:30AM 
Camp Life
by SUNNY BISWAS
Yesterday I broke a cooking pot and thought of The Wicker Man. Not the (supposed to be good, haven’t seen it) film from the 70s. It was the terrible Neil Labute-directed remake, starring Nicolas Cage and immortalized here:
More specifically: as I stared down at shards of crockery on my kitchen floor, what floated through my head was Cage shouting (starting at 1:30 in the video), “Killing me won’t bring back your goddamn honey!”
It made me wonder: does bad art have more to say about life than good art? Maybe not more to say. I mean that bad art can have more resonance. It can feel more applicable. At times, its ineptness has more to do with the actual world than the grace of the good.
A quote from Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder comes to mind: "The other thing that struck me as we watched Mean Streets was how perfect De Niro was. Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between."
De Niro's performance in Mean Streets is perfect, but this perfection means that he doesn't resemble a real person. He's removed all the impurities of life so that we can better understand his character. That distillation of experience is the same process that makes all great art worthwhile. The problem — which is no problem at all — is that his performance is so much more vivid than reality that it ends up forever sundered from the ungainly truth.
Only a generous viewer could call The Wicker Man ungainly. Seriously, it’s a terrible film. The “best of” clip is misleading. The scenes it includes are of course amazing — Nicolas Cage stealing a bicycle! — but those are the only good scenes in the entire film. The rest of the movie is tedious in every way imaginable. That's not even getting into its goofy misogyny: the villains are an all-female cult who chop off the tongues of their male servants, kill male babies, and lure men to their deaths with the promise of sex. (Feminism, amirite?) Don't watch it. Trust me. But when I fuck up — whether that’s making an awkward joke, or diving in for a kiss and chipping a tooth, or dropping a pot of rice — I don’t console myself with thoughts of great art. No. Against my will, scenes from The Wicker Man start playing in my skull. Because in those moments, my life doesn’t feel beautiful or true. It feels closer to watching Nicolas Cage running around in a bear suit.
During the frequent instances when I fail, the movie’s idiotic story seems to mirror the dropped plot points of my own life. The dead space in the film reminds me of so many empty mornings (and afternoons, and nights). The laughable dialogue brings me back to all of my fumbling attempts at charm. Mainly, I think of Nicolas Cage wailing to an uncaring universe about his ridiculous demise.
Because really: my most painful memories are filled with pratfalls. I stutter in the middle of the big speech and my breath smells terrible when someone comes in to tell me the bad news. A woman broke my heart while I sat on the floor and chewed on a cold grilled cheese sandwich. I was drenched in sweat from a workout and the lighting in my apartment made me look like I’d been dead for weeks. It was too ridiculous for anyone to be sad except me. It occurred to me then and it has come to mind occasionally ever since: how could the minor tragedies of my life be anything but camp when I’m the one involved?
As for why I thought of that line about the honey instead of anything else — well. Before I explain, I should provide some context.
At the end of the movie, Cage has been captured by the evil feminist cult. (There’s no reason to get into the details of how he got there because the details are stupid.) They are about to sacrifice him in a pagan ritual meant to restore health to their dying honeybee population. Because they are an evil feminist cult that produces and sells craft honey? Anyway, since he is a man of science who wants to appeal to their rationality, he yells to the mob surrounding him: "This is murder! Murder! You’ll all be guilty, and you’re doing it for nothing! Killing me won’t bring back your goddamn honey!"
In response, the crazy ladies break his legs and stick his head in a helmet filled with bees. It’s pretty great.
What interests me is that the dialogue can also be heard as the despairing cry of a buffoon to an inept god. It’s like Cage is channeling bizarro Euripides. He’s been wandering around an island for the last couple hours having stupid dreams and saying stupid things and not knowing what the hell is going on. Most of this time he’s been in such ludicrous situations that the universe had to be laughing hysterically. Now they’re going to pour bees on his head and burn him alive, for no reason at all. Of course he’s upset — he’s discovered that the story of his life is garbage. Mysterious forces have pushed him through a senseless plot that no ended up enjoying. He thought that he was a hero, but he’s been starring in a flop. I don’t know if he’d feel better knowing that there was a design behind his misfortunes. Instead, he might be infuriated at finding out that there was a watchmaker after all — He was just incompetent. Someone had been carrying him across the beach the entire time, except at the end He dropped him in the fucking sand.
That this happens in a terrible film is what lends it weight. In a great film, his death would have a thematic purpose, even if the theme was that life is meaningless. After all, nihilistic great stories still remind us that we can tell stories — in other words, that we have the gift of being able to create a narrative out of life’s essential incoherence.
Not so with The Wicker Man. It can’t reassure us because its structure is too flimsy. Instead, it demonstrates that even if we have the ability to impose meaning on the world, we might not be very good at it. We try to craft our experience into an epic, but we can’t always edit out the awkward pauses and wooden performances. At times the best we can come up with is a C-movie. Cage is yelling about bees, but I thought of him because he’s me when the world delivers the punchline. He sounds as anguished and absurd as any of us at the moment we realize our lives are a limerick, a Mad Libs book, a dirty pun. No one can be graceful when they discover that they’re a laughingstock.
At least he can blame a hack deity. I can’t. Nick’s right: the world’s always guilty and it’s always doing it for nothing. But the universe can’t help that it’s only a swirl of matter. I’m the one who’s supposed to craft order out of the unrelenting noise of circumstance. The fault’s not in the chintzy stars on the cheap sound stage. My inability to turn my experience of my experience into something beautiful is all on me.
*
I was planning on ending on that note, but it felt dishonest. It’s true that as I’ve grown older, the accumulation of experiences has made it harder for me to sew my memories together without the seams showing. And moment to moment I often feel like I’m badly impersonating myself. Still, I can’t convince myself to be hopeless.
There was a stupid joke I used to make when going through a string of bad luck. I would have a week where, say, my car broke down — the third time this year! — and all of my experiments at the lab failed and then, on top of that, a car of frat boys plunked me on the head with a beer can while I was out on a jog. After complaining to whoever, I would say that God must exist because a higher power was clearly fucking with me. It wasn’t possible for a person to have such unlikely bad luck so often. It had to be connected. I had to be cursed.
What made this dumb was that I believed it. A bad week made me think of the unlucky things from the week before. Then I’d comb through the month before, and two years before, and freshman year of high school, searching for any proof that I was doomed to failure. I couldn’t look at myself without seeing a terrible pattern. There wasn’t anything to see but the pattern. I had turned into a conspiracy theorist of my own life.
Not surprisingly, it was a relief to give up on the unifying power of my intelligence. Maybe it didn’t have to make sense. Maybe everything didn’t happen for a reason. Maybe life was a series of unconnected events that didn’t sum up to anything in particular. Thinking of myself as the lead in a small-scale tragedy was breaking me down. I’d rather accept the illogic of bad movies as my guide. It made it as easy to ignore a painful memory as it is to forget any dull character backstory. And believing in the possibility of a happy future became as simple as accepting that jarring shifts in tone and unlikely plot developments were part of the deal.
Poor Nick Cage. He was never going to crack the case. His destiny was just to scream nonsense at a bunch of ladies until they finally set him on fire. But surely he’s an extreme example. The rest of us — the single friend of the female love interest, gangster #3, the first marine to be killed by the man in the rubber fish suit, all of us bit players and extras — might not star in anything more dignified than him. In all likelihood, however, our stories will be a bit less bloody.
What, then, can we expect? You’ve seen enough bad movies to know: a string of disjointed setpieces. Stilted dialogue. Overwrought emotions. Inconsistent pacing. Characters showing up for a single scene, never to be mentioned again. And an ending that will — sadly, certainly — be anticlimactic. A scene or two might be moving in spite of the shoddy craftsmanship for anyone a few rare moments of transcendence that hint at the possibilities of the form. But even still, there’s little hope for a sequel. Those who come into it hoping to create a masterpiece will leave jaded and dissatisfied. Me, though? I’m just happy to be on the screen.
Sunny Biswas is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Austin. This is his first appearance in these pages. He tumbls here.
"Siren's Song" - Rogue Wave (mp3)
"Without Pain" - Rogue Wave (mp3)
The new album from Rogue Wave, Nightingale Floors, was released on June 4th from Vagrant Records.
sunny biswas
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