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Pretty used to being with Gwyneth

Regrets that her mother did not smoke

Frank in all directions

Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais

Simply cannot go back to them

Roll your eyes at Samuel Beckett

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion

Metaphors with eyes

Life of Mary MacLane

Circle what it is you want

Not really talking about women, just Diane

Felicity's disguise

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Entries in elisabeth donnelly (12)

Thursday
Aug262010

In Which Jealousy Among Writers Is A New Phenomenon

We Have To Get Out Of This Country

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

Reprise

dir. Joachim Trier  

105 min.

The Norwegian film Reprise, the debut feature from Joachim Trier (distantly related to Lars von Trier, also a former skateboarding champion of Norway), is one of the rare films that nails the uncertainty and bravado of being twentysomething, struggling and flailing on the road to wisdom. Its greater achievement, however, may be that it is the rare wonderful film about writers and writing that isn't hampered by the conventions of a completely uncinematic alcohol-soaked biopic.  

Nearly leaping off-screen with Trier’s jagged, French New Wave fracture of a narrative, Reprise follows two twentysomething writers, Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner), in the flush of youth and ambition as they mail off their first manuscripts in a big red mailbox. "Do I really want to expose the world to this?" Erik, the blonder and cuter of the two, muses. Trier jumps into a fantasy, introducing the effectively literary Jules et Jim-esque detached narrator, where everything goes right for the writers – their books are published in quick succession, they become beloved cult writers with impeccable critical credentials, and end up inspiring revolution in Sierra Leone.    

But that’s not the way it happened. Not at all. Erik is quickly rejected, and Phillip is published in the fall. And even though Phillip achieves the dream, he’s a sad young literary man who's written a critically acclaimed piece of work, it does him no good. Phillip has a mental breakdown.  

We really get to know Phillip after the crackup. After the broken glass, the suicide attempt, a bloody shirt, and a grin that signified the sinister slip of madness. His psychosis is never quite explained, left empty and scary, a weighty burden. Yet it resonates because there’s something truly unsettling about seeing a beautiful youth – a writer, for god’s sake – cross the line from sanity to something darker.  

Freed from the mental institution, Phillip reunites with his ex-girlfriend, the beautiful gamine Kari. They started innocently; he made her laugh until she cried, teased her about looking goofy, making her laugh all the harder. But despite their initial joy, lust, and innocence, their relationship was integral in tearing Phillip apart, and pushing him over the edge. To watch them attempt a reprise is heartbreaking. "Remember when I tricked you into falling in love, in Paris?" he asks, and he takes her there a second time, trying to repeat every experience, making sure that he takes the same risqué and sexy picture of her in the same public garden to the point of humiliation.  

Over the course of the film, the greatest insight to the workings of Phillip’s mind comes from the narration, when it’s revealed that that every time he counts to ten, he is trying to change his life. At ten, he hits on Kari for the first time when they meet at a punk club, he takes crazy, suicidal risks like driving his bike into a car, standing on train tracks looking at an oncoming train - and this dancing on the razor's edge is all for the sake of a temporary reprieve. Phillip can’t escape his brain chemistry, the cruelest fate of all.  

Phillip has the flashier role, and by the time he has come and gone as the authorial flavor of the week, Erik – who has mostly been worrying and caring for his friend - finally gets a deal for his soggy-sounding manuscript, called "Prosopopoeia" (a Greek term where a writer is speaking in another voice, ie, "if so and so was alive today, he'd be..."). On the book’s release, he makes a fool of himself on TV, air-quoting away his nerves, describing his work as "searching for the absolute language, a language that can grasp all the world’s nuances, and that is a madness of sorts." His girlfriend breaks up with him because he never "sees" her and in a neat trick, it's true - she's not allowed to be a character in the film, not allowed to have a voice. She's simply a silhouette.  

But Erik has something on Phillip - he has his sanity. And his ability to worry and care for Phillip, who he loves and resents in equal measure. Their literary rivalry and ambitions cast a shadow over the film; they’re the elephant in the room. The two are united in their staggering literary ambitions. in their idolization of Norwegian writer Sten Egil Dahl, in their shared history and shared visions of a bright future. But talent, luck, and timing do their worst to separate the two. It’s a common affliction for literary types – you start off young and full of ambition, and then all of a sudden you’re trying to make rent writing about other people’s work while your best friend is on book number five. You have to be dead not to have flare-ups of jealousy, wanting what the other writer has; and Trier gets those feelings, however ugly and self-absorbed, on screen.   

And while Phillip and Erik are grappling with issues of life, jealousy, and how, exactly, to define your goals, their group of tight-knit friends offer goofy advice on girls and the endless balm of punk rock, reflecting the artistic ideals of the young aesthete. The most basic characters in the film, they’re the ones who provide “the poetic details of boy culture,” to quote Trier in a New York Times interview, who goes on to hope that the film casts a spell that could be like the boy version of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. And the Diner/Breaking Away lineage of the friends you have in your youth, this gang of guys, has a wonderful payoff - a glorious scene where the guys crash a party and liven it up by hijacking the iPod station with Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” and boom, instant dance party.  

Then, all of a sudden, the film turns, hard, and it's up to the audience to interpret what, exactly, it means. It could be straightforward storytelling, or a brilliant deconstruction, like Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But Trier sets up two sides - the literary genius who can't write, the diligent writer who maybe can - and asks the audience to decide where Phillip and Erik go, and whether it’s a tragedy or triumph.  

joachim trier

Trier takes familiar tropes of youthful idealism and ambition, but he manages to spin the story in a vital new way. Credit goes to the exuberance of his fast-cutting French New Wave technique, which playfully jumps around in time. The cast is full of fresh-faced non-actors - Anders Danielsen Lie, who has the difficult role of Phillip, is also a doctor and a musician - serving a perfectly written script, infused with ideas and not one wasted word, where twentysomethings are allowed to speak openly and honestly and without inarticulate likes.  

Reprise has the sort of Great Film, reaching-for-the-bleachers aim that puts the nearest American equivalent (mumblecore, with its likes, uhs, improv, and endless roles for Justin Rice? Reality Bites? Michael Chabon book adaptations?) to shame. You leave the film with a greater understanding of what it means to be to be young and to be a writer. Bittersweet and hopeful, Reprise suggests that we outrun the past, the present, and the minutiae of our lives, constantly carving them into something solid and real. And maybe, when it comes down to it, that's the real art that we create - the utter, unknown art of youth.

Elisabeth Donnelly is a contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find her previous work on This Recording here.

"Lifeline (Barefeet version)" - Citizen Cope (mp3)

"A Father's Son" - Citizen Cope (mp3)

"Keep Askin' (acoustic)" - Citizen Cope (mp3)

Sunday
Jun202010

In Which There's A Lady In The Water

Don’t Go in the Swimming Pool

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

It was day five that I snapped. The swimming pool was stressing me out. I told the Brit that I needed to take a moment and I called him, crying. I wasn't planning on crying. "We're just sitting here, in front of a pool! I don't know what to do! I'm from New England!" When faced with a resort hotel, you're supposed to lounge and read and drink and drink and that's the route to ultimate relaxation. I was all wrong for this lifestyle. My books were neurotic New York things - Arthur Phillips' The Song is You, a stolen lobby copy of Amy Sohn's Prospect Park West, a whole dishy book about hating the Park Slope Coop and wanting to fuck Paul Bettany.

I started walking through the hotel, tears streaming down my face, looking like the messed-up drunk chick at a party. My pasty Irish skin - which had already gone through four bottles of SPF 50 - was bright red, an appropriate look for relaxing poolside. In between my heaves, he reminded me, "Of course you're freaking out. You're at a swimming pool. When have swimming pools not been terrible?" Snottily, I took a look at the pool. A throng of middle management in matching polo shirts had taken over one end, bud lights high, yelling out pleasantries about their dicks. In another corner, a couple had their tiny little dog out, sitting on the plastic floating raft that I had been on a mere half-hour before. I envied that dog, with its joy, natural swimming ability, and lack of control over facilities.

And as I stared at that dog, it was like biting into a madeline. All of my swimming pool memories came flooding back. The time I was shot in the back and left for dead by some delusional diva. The time I dived into the pool and was infused with an alien life force that made me feel like young, hot Don Ameche.The time I did it with Elizabeth Berkley and she had an epileptic seizure while she was coming. The time I was writing my pulp English mystery novel in a remote French cottage and this slatternly teenage popped up, proceeding to sunbathe topless poolside while doing every skeevy French construction worker in sight. It was like being stuck in a sauna with the French Paz de la Huerta. It was hell.

But besides reminiscing about days of wanton sexuality, murder, and fountains of youth, I thought about my most salient swimming pool memory: as the locus for "is that all there is?"-style ennui. Benjamin Braddock floating to nowhere, in his scuba gear, diving to the bottom. Mr. Blume in the fetal position in his pool, a curious fish of a kid swimming by in swimmies. A swimming pool may be wealth and achievement, but if you can't grasp happiness in its murky waters, than what's the point? My resort pool mocked me. I should've been happy to see it, ready to party, but I thought too much.

I thought about John Cheever's "The Swimmer": Neddy Merrill swimming home through his neighbors' backyards, swimming through the seasons, ending in the winter of his life; coming home to a deserted and locked home, and, crucially, forgetting all the details. Like poor ever-swimming Neddy my swimming pool was a place of reckoning where I could figure out what I was doing with my life--but I had no answer for it. I wasn't going anywhere. I wasn't even going into the pool.

When dusk fell, the pool and I were going to have a showdown. It was prettier in the night, glowing with an unearthly turquoise light. I thought of one more genre of swimming pool scenes, the only ones that don't suck: they involve break-ins and skinny dipping, from Felicity finally getting Ben in the pool, late night on the WB or that hot makeout scene in Whip It set to Jens Lekman.

The Brit and I got sloshed on desert cocktails. We wore our prettiest girl outfits and flirted shamelessly with the bartenders. Fortified with cucumber and rum, we ran outside and jumped into the pool, wearing our clothes and shoes and ruining our hair. My sequined leopard-print dress, the outfit of a slutty granny's dreams, thanks to Rodarte for Target, grey heavy in the water. The Brit grinned. We ran into the hot tub to warm up, and some local kids started chatting us up. Aware that to them, we were potential manic pixie dream girls, we left quickly with a thanks and a goodbye, running back to our rooms. With the help of the Brit, I said goodbye to being the depressed hero in some statement on the emptiness of modern life. It was time to be my own hero.

Elisabeth Donnelly is a contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about the AMC series Breaking Bad. She is a writer living in New York, and she tumbls here.

"Sensitive Euro Man" - Pavement (mp3)

"The Man in Me (Bob Dylan cover)" - David Bazan (mp3)

"The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" - Sia (mp3)


Tuesday
May112010

In Which Everything Breaks Right For Once

Heisenberg

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

That homie's dead, he just doesn't know it yet. Walt H. White (Bryan Cranston), the high school chemistry teacher-cum-drug lord at the center of the most queasily compelling morality play on television, AMC's Breaking Bad, is going to die. Whether it's his case of terminal lung cancer or collateral damage from the whole drug thing, he's hurtling towards the end.

The looming threat of Walt's inevitable death is what makes Breaking Bad such a satisfying show. There's space to ruminate on the show's funhouse mirror look at utterly American worries like health care, immigration, and the drug trade, all the while staying focused on a man discovering his inner psychopath — and liking it! — on a nihilistic ride to the bottom. The show is gorgeously, strikingly filmed with an eye on big sky and neon like Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas or a William Eggleston photo. Breaking Bad's portrayal of the terrifying drug trade on the border is enough to make the casual viewer get an idea of the fear driving the state of Arizona insane.

And there is a dramatic pull beyond the pitch of "the ever-syndicated in perpetuity sitcom dad, Hal from Malcolm in the Middle, becomes a meth dealer!" — as the narcocorrido band put it in episode 2.7, "Negro Y Azul," "that homie's dead/he just doesn't know it yet."


For the uninitiated, Breaking Bad starts in media res — Walt is in his tighty whities and a gas mask, crashing an RV in the desert and recording an anguished goodbye message on a videocamera for his family. Then we speed backwards to see how such a buttoned down man got into these circumstances. It starts, of course, with a terminal cancer diagnosis where his HMO won't cover anything beyond lower quality care. Walt's situation is complicated by a middle class lifestyle in Alberquerque, New Mexico: no significant savings, a disabled son, and a pregnant wife who's willing to pay for cancer with credit cards.

With a diagnosis like this, some people would be staring into the abyss, flailing around in an attempt to square up finances and to figure out what really matters. Walt has no reaction; and he appears to take this death sentence as a blessing. He doesn't tell his family about his diagnosis for weeks. And when he does tell them, he refuses to seek treatment. Walt has become death.

While Walt is a chemistry genius with a degree in crystallography, he is also a stubborn, prideful bastard. So when his DEA brother-in-law takes him on a meth bust where an ex-student, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) is leaving the scene, and he learns about the easy money to be had — of course, the clear path is to go into business with Jesse as meth cookers and dealers. And soon enough, Walt is arguably a very successful meth cooker, with an accidental reputation as super-gringo meth lord "Heisenberg."

It's a choice motivated by money, pride, and desperation, and the bodies and fuck-ups pile up. Jesse is a dopey drug-addled degenerate speaking in 'yo's and 'bitch's, whose soft heart renders him potentially redeemable — whereas Walt is on a journey of discovery into his own innate psychopathic nihilism.

Breaking Bad is sharply plotted over the course of its strike-shortened first season, the amazing season two, and the currently-running season three. Creator Vince Gilligan (The X-Files, The Lone Gunmen, Hancock) and his team are amazingly adept at sending the audience through a variety of paces and subverting expectations every minute; some examples include one of the most disturbing hours of television that I'd ever seen (2.6, "Peekaboo," where Pinkman tries to extract justice on methheads while coming across their neglected, heartbreaking, smudge-faced and silent ginger kid) and an episode that's as tense as the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men (3.7, "One Minute").

Avoid watching Breaking Bad before bed, as it messes with your nervous system like a gory report on the evening news, encouraging visceral verbal reactions. Any episode will give you violence, explosions, and death: it's all surprising.

It's been quite a ride watching Walter White change from beige to drug lord, from ostensible hero to true anti-hero, and how his actions have affected Jesse's junkie spiral (season three Jesse is a clean Jesse, and finally Aaron Paul is allowed to be as attractive as he actually is), wife Skylar's Carmela Soprano-esque bitterness, and his DEA brother-in-law Hank's route from genial buffoon to PTSD suffer badass enough to chase after the great "Heisenberg" while taking out Mexican cartel thugs right and left.

Unlike other critically acclaimed dramas (what's up Mad Men?), something of game-changing consequence — not necessarily thoughtful symbolism — happens every week. And yet, it shares a certain clarity of vision with shows like Mad Men and The Wire. First off, it shows a man driven to psychopathic behavior by the stress, which is a hell of an indictment on the modern age. The cause and effect is clearer — since Walt is staring down death, his pride and worry snap him out of stasis, telling him to do something with his life, and the consequences are mighty.

In what is becoming a pattern on cable TV, Breaking Bad is as indebted to Cormac McCarthy as The Wire was forever 'Dickensian' or as Mad Men's blend of Don DeLillo and John Cheever fuels its mid-century American ennui. According to McCarthy, a story isn't worth telling if it's not about life and death, and Walter White is certainly a kindred spirit.

The show is preoccupied with the same issues surrounding McCarthy's Biblical tales of Southwestern justice and fate. Walt turns into a straight shooter out of a western, ready to kill or be killed for the sake of his manliness and to justify his existence. Scenes take place in a symbolic sunset under the wide-open desert sky. Judgment comes piling down on the characters. There are always indestructible sociopaths looming who would take Walt out in a heartbeat.

And ultimately, there's the wonderfully craggy face of Bryan Cranston. Playing a man of science and verve, he wipes all memories of Malcolm's Hal out the door. Walt's a man who lives in his head. He plays things close to the vest. To really understand what he's feeling, look at the wrinkles and worries in the canyons of his forehead. As long as he's wrestling with demons in New Mexico, Jon Hamm's slow burn is likely to remain seated come Emmy time.


Perhaps that's the way it should be; Cranston is the anchor of a show that reveals the screwy beauty, risk and emptiness underneath what was sold as the American dream. He's a man becoming himself in the light of life and death — and that is what's truly terrifying.

Elisabeth Donnelly is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"Nobody Loves Me (Massive Attack remix)" - Portishead (mp3)

"Acid Jazz and Trip Op (remix)" - Portishead (mp3)

"You Find The Earth Boring" - Portishead (mp3)

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