In Which We See A Portrait of Ourselves

The Gloom Over New York

by ELEANOR MORROW

Portrait of Jennie is this weird movie starring Joseph Cotten that I haven't been able to fully remove from my brain. I first saw it when I was little, and it became the center of all my wants and desires. Let me tell you why exactly that should be.

Portrait is about a mediocre artist who paints still lifes and can barely sell anything. His muse appears to him one night in Central Park as a prepubescent girl. Like any opportunistic pedophile, he's eager to talk to her about her parents and her boyfriend. Always he suspects she's simply humoring an old man. 

Jennie appears and disappears to him. He researches her background and discovers she's deceased and their flirtations are actually hauntings. This bowls him over with erotic desire. Can you understand why I was confused this was a film I was allowed to see when I was only eleven?

I missed then what I don't now — the pristine visions of New York, the idea of art in any corner, no matter how dank or destitute.  

Portrait was directed by William Dieterle, a German actor in his younger days who always wore a white hat and gloves on the set. The film's producer was David Selznick, who originally wanted Vivien Leigh in the role of Jennie. Shirley Temple was even considered, for she could film her scenes over a number of years so as to appear older.

Jennifer Jones took the role of the dead young girl instead, and her excitability and friendliness with her body are unusual for a nun. Her face shimmers to ensure you never get a straight look at any part of it. Eager to involve this starving artist into her maudlin dance with death, she forces him to believe that he can save her from the New England tidal wave (?!) that took out her boat one salty evening.

It's never explained why exactly a nun would take a boat out solo during the worst storm of the year, but it doesn't need to be. Really she is doing nothing more than luring him to his own death.

Contrast this with my literary heroines of those days — Pollyanna and Nancy Drew, of course — and you can see why this disturbing vision of a lost soul pulling her lover into hell enraptured me so. For the first time I didn't feel empathetic towards characters I watched onscreen. I merely emanated a glowing pity.

Because this story hinged on the plausible denial of man-girl love, the Jew from Pittsburgh Selznick fired five writers who tried to adapt this "story" into a feature. Selznick himself was so taken by Jones' portrait that Cotten paints in the film that it hung on his wall until he died. Perhaps this reminded him that there was no such thing as a perfect object.

When Cotten's character goes up the coast to find the place where his not-so-Eric-Bana-esque time travelling love perished in the water, the film's black and white diegesis melts into salty green. It's a shocking transition — who knew that color could exist in a world of blacks and greys? (Like Oz, this underworld metes out its pecularities regularly.)

Like Dorothy, when Cotton wakes, his friends are there. She is his lover, too, in spirit. She owns a gallery destined to make his loving portrait real art. It's a good thing you told us where you were going, they say. It's the only thing that saved you.

Portrait of Jennie is a subtle suggestion that it's okay to tell lies, or else it was an explicit instruction to pursue the fantastic, what others found unbelievable. Such fancies put Mr. Dieterle on the Hollywood blacklist, even though he made one of the finest prewar films, Blockade. The pursuit of the fantastic also managed to kill Portrait of Jennie's cinematographer, Joseph H. August. For the film, he was nominated for a posthumous Academy Award, and rightly so.

His visions of the world are dark, never giving away their full breadth, like a pent-up glimpse of the underworld. We move among them like ants, and even as a girl, I was sure that wasn't all they were.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. 

"Femme Fatale" — Beck (mp3) (Velvet Underground cover)

"Sunday Morning" — Beck (mp3) (Velvet Underground cover)

"Waiting for My Man" — Beck (mp3) (Velvet Underground cover)

The Very Best of Eleanor Morrow on This Recording

Destroying Harry Potter from the inside...

A spirit rose and fell...

The aliens of District 9...

The inspired joys of Don Draper...

She went into a lonely place...

...and rode the perilous turns of Thieves' Highway.

In Which We Confine Ourselves To District 9

Space Age Sign of the Times

by ELEANOR MORROW

District 9 is about what happens when starfaring men become quarantined with a virus and send the ones they couldn't cure to Earth. Or perhaps this is only the most probable explanation for why a group of indigent aliens took hold of a ghetto in South Africa. District 9 takes the sf cliche of every alien species coming to America and imagines if they ignored America entirely, as it is far more likely they'd do. A parasite preys on the weak, after all.

The city of Johannesburg houses the contaminated populace, who love cat food and use a technology that surpasses humanity — except they can't use it to get home. Our hero is a bureaucrat, just another sad sack who shovels up the shit the government's been serving. He becomes contanimated himself upon attempting to evict a particular enterprising pair of aliens.

The bureaucrat's journey actually glorifies violence as a solution to human problems. This is at least in comparison to more diplomatic methods, which are death by an increasing series of steps according to the filmmakers. The bureaucrat goes into individuals hovels demanding a signature for eviction. This is implausible; what rights would aliens have on U.S. soil except the dignity granted to animals?

If this really happened, you can be sure there would be an alien commentator on Fox News before the day was out. This would be the most important political issue of a generation. In fact, the U.S. would probably feel responsible, even to aliens in South Africa. There's nothing our politicians love more than a messy international situation, for some reason.

Once infected with the virus, the bureaucrat finds his priorities changing rather drastically. He wants to reunite with his wife, but as what? Some alien scumbucket?

In real life, a smoldering, useless ship doesn't metaphorically represent a moral injustice. There is no ship over Johannesburg, no more reminder that whites enslaved blacks anywhere in the world. It is quite shocking that apartheid existed, but slavery also existed, very recently, in the country where we reside.

Slavery is a human custom, and a fairly old one. It's an aftereffect of religion; separating the haves and the have-nots for spiritual reasons. Men are often delighted to find something to wed themselves to closely, like a baseball team or a Democratic politician. And of course it is only ourselves we enslave, is the basic point of Neil Bloomkamp's movie.

We have pens that hold humans; seen the Palestinian territories lately? Go to North Korea — there are camps worse than Disctrict 10 in our world. I suppose my earlier charity towards U.S. aims grows cynical after all.

Eleanor Morrow is the contributing editor to This Recording. She tumbls right here.

"Fascination Street" — Metronomy (Cure cover) (mp3)

"Catch" — Art Brut (mp3) (Cure cover) (mp3)

"The Lovecats" — The Futureheads (Cure cover) (mp3)

In Which I Keep Going A Lot of Places And Ending Up Where I've Already Been

His Wife But Different Somehow

by ELEANOR MORROW

A man dreams of his own wife, but differently dressed. Her attire is unlikely, the expression on her face borderline alarming. She's making out with him in the hallway, smelling as she normally does, but with the a slightly stale taste. Her blue eye shadow suggests something is off. "It's my birthday," the man murmurs, to expedite the blowjob that will no doubt be forthcoming. Don Draper is back, baby, and so is Mad Men.

Setting back Draper's humanistic learning curve to zero was a sad move, although I guess they need to constantly reestablish that he's unfaithful for new viewers. He can't evolve, he's still stuck seeing the past flash before him as he curdles milk for his pregnant wife. If you really want to grow up, Don, try being a father for christ's sake. Instead all you do is joke about your daughter being a lesbian and give her your mistress' stewardess wings.

Everyone was so obsessed with themselves in the 60s, it's like the 90s but with better weed. "You squint too much. You need reading glasses," his wife tells him, standing in for all wives. Family hasn't been this dreadful since they came over for Easter. No wonder Don wants to get out of the house more often.

"Was I really in there?" Don's little girl Sally asks her parents, looking at her mother's pregnant tummy. Mad Men is a moving eulogy for existence, and last night's premiere, "Out of Town", sang it loud in all the ways the show's first two seasons did.

Weiner seems a little confused about the difference between what's actually good about his show and what the media thinks is good. His show has gotten attention despite not-so-great ratings because it's not just the usual pablum. But jumping into the darkest parts of Mad Men might turn off newbies, so last night was more about restating the new Sterling-Cooper status quo than rocking the boat.

While last night caught us up on all the news that's fit to print, major changes are afoot at Sterling-Cooper. By major, we don't mean the loud firing of a guy we've basically never seen on the show before. Things have to start getting a little more mixed-up than usual, and it would help if they involved some of the show's best characters.

On the surface, Peggy appears to have all her actual drama behind her. Let's hope it doesn't stay that way. What about giving her an actual romance to hang her hat on? I'm pretty sure Ken Cosgrove has a big dick, for example. But seriously, what about a torrid love affair between Peggy and a sexy client who really respected her for her work and ancient taste in fashion? If you cast Shia LaBoeuf in that role, you could probably boost the show's ratings by a whole point. Then he could dump her for a model in the ensuing ad campaign (Megan Fox or Odette Yustman, assuming they're not one person).

It's pretty sad that Sal's relationship with that super-cute bellboy has more depth to it than any Peggy's been allowed so far. In the wake of Sal finally finding himself with the mother of all hjs, we can only hope that the show doesn't become a prism through which bigots can view their own disturbing feelings about homosexuality. We already have True Blood for that.

One thing you can say about Don Draper is that he's no hypocrite. Hmm, no. Try again. One thing you can say about Don Draper is that he doesn't mind a little peeping. It doesn't seem all that likely that he'd be so knowing and kind about a bellhop handjob on a work trip, but I guess it takes a cheat to know a cheat, and Sal has dirt on him, too. Leave it to Don Draper to take subliminal advertising to a whole new level with his marvelous London Fog campaign.

Between Hung, True Blood, Entourage and Mad Men, each Sunday we're going to have to put the over/under on estimated hjs at four. And how much do you wanna bet that despite showing the vast corpus of heterosexual positions, that Sal never gets to really prove he's a top and no bottom?

At least Sal's criminally untapped potential as a character is getting tapped. Men from Toledo to Cincinnati fell in love with Roger Sterling's winsome, extremely placable younger fiancee, and I would have paid to see that divorce go to arbitration. There's got to be more there than the casual fop who wanders into Don's office waiting for Draper to bend over to pick up a pen.

The new British guy looks exactly like Pete Campbell, and since I love Pete Campbell, I guess this is a welcome development. British people don't understand raincoats, and their version of an electoral body looks like a debate team, but they really have a nose for capitalism. We can only hope that Don gets challenged by somebody soon - he's like the reigning champion of the big dick contest for the last 50 episodes. If I see one more person defer to his everloving wisdom, I'm going to scream like Pete.

As for the real Pete Campbell, he's made up with his wife, and the band is back together. His coming war with Kenneth Cosgrove has already approached his flirtation/impregnation with Peggy for lolness. Pete is the perfect character: not sympathetic enough to be the protagonist, just pitiful enough not to be the antagonist. He's like a really well dressed Archie Bunker.

I would watch a whole show entirely based around Pete and his secretary. They have such an incredible relationship, it's so giving and knowing. There's nothing like the love between a man and his secretary.

Hopefully the deterioration of any agency for Christina Hendricks' character will end the constant talk of how 'hot' she is, as if the charity of praising her beauty wasn't another condescending male objectification. She's now the weakest part of the show, or she has been since Matthew Weiner had her raped on the floor of someone's office last season. If she starts blowing that British guy in the office he was so presumptuous to occupy, I'm going to quietly cry for womynkind.

All that's gravy, though. What's important is that the men and women of the 1960s stay forever retarded in their own time, and we look back happily on it thinking about how much more cosmopolitan and understanding we are. The genius of Mad Men is that it makes you feel good about yourself, then bad about yourself, then good about yourself again.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and she tumbls here.

"Sharp Knife" - Third Eye Blind (mp3)

"One in Ten" - Third Eye Blind (mp3)

"Bonfire" - Third Eye Blind (mp3)