In Which Wim Wenders And Sam Shepard Begin To Understand Each Other

The Irredeemable World

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Don't Come Knocking
dir. Wim Wenders
122 minutes

Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard's 1984 film Paris, Texas runs 147 long minutes. The central performance, by Harry Dean Stanton, is quite breathtaking in its solipsism, and the movie includes many of Wenders' signature shots of the harsh environment of the American West with which he fell in love. Like any film by Mr. Wenders, you have to wait a good hour to decide exactly how much up its own ass this production will end up being. His collaboration with Sam Shepard, then, seemed so unlikely precisely because the playwright got through to what actual people wanted and desired so much more organically than Wenders ever did.

If you could not tell, I was never the biggest fan of Paris, Texas, although it is a gorgeous and moving film. Wenders and Shepard finally reunited to atone for the sins of the past with 2005's Don't Come Knocking, which is substantially better in every way. Let me tell you why.

First of all, there is the matter of Sam Shepard's performance as the titular character, a vain and stupid actor named Howard Spence. Besides Harold Pinter, there probably has never been a playwright who was as good on film as Shepard, who is now no longer with us. Shepard was a genius for the stage; I mean he just knew exactly how everything should be played, but the amazing thing is he never wrote this in his scripts. His plays are all meant for the actors to do as they will, which is funny because he knew better than anyone how many bad actors there were after decades in the theater.

Buried Child was probably Shepard's best ever play, but 1980's True West was his broadest story and will probably end up his most well-known effort. The only Shepard play I ever saw live was Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly switching the main roles of True West, which kind of never made sense to me, even though they were both very good at it. The idea was it kept the concept of the two brothers fresh, and the actors enjoyed it. When I went to see True West at the Circle on the Square, Bruce Willis was sitting across from me, because he was doing True West on Showtime, maybe the worst version ever done of the play. He was horrified by what he was seeing, probably because he knew the role did not suit him.

The best part of True West and every Shepard play is the language. He knew exactly how people talked, and his characters did not talk the same. This was not David Mamet where it turned into this weird omnipoetic thing or Suzan Lori-Parks where the language overwhelmed everything and became more like a chorus. This was people and how the main fact of their speech patterns indicated their desires, ambitions, and flaws.

In Don't Come Knocking, he takes on this very slight, often drunken man who walks off the set of a Western he is filming in Utah. The first thing Howard Spence does after he escapes is go visit his mother (Eva Marie Saint). That's one of the things I enjoy most about Don't Come Knocking. His mother picks him up at the bus station, she has a couple scenes with him after that, and then he just goes on his way.

Howard heads to the Montana metropolis he passed through while he was working on another film. While he was there, he impregnated a waitress named Doreen (Jessica Lange) who he kind of had a thing for. He wants to get back to that, even though twenty years have passed. In Don't Come Knocking, she never takes him back, because this is not a Hollywood movie, thank God, it is a Sam Shepard play only with better sets, if not actors.

In that town of Butte is a woman named Sky (Sarah Polley). Sky recently lost her mother, and she carries the woman's ashes around in an urn. It was clear then that Polley was a dynamic talent, and her mere presence in Don't Come Knocking is completely overwhelming. Shepard has this great scene where he meets her and at first he thinks she's a fan, and even after she convinces him that she is not one, he still warms to her slowly. When you've been hurt the thing you learn is how dumb it is to trust someone in those first five minutes.

Sutter (Tim Roth) is an insurance man sent to bring Howard Spence back to the set by any means necessary. When he finally finds Howard, he handcuffs them together. This is such a Shepard thing, and it is a great onstage conceit in general. Roth has always been terrific when it comes to bringing a basic humanism to every kind of role, even that of the traditional antagonist. But as in many Shepard plays, the true antagonist is far more difficult to discern.

Shepard and Jessica Lange, his one-time wife, have this supercharged scene that takes place as they are walking through the main drag of the town. In this sequence, Wenders works considerable magic with windows and reflections, and the dialogue is so completely right for how people who know each other a little, but not a lot, make sense out of the conflict intrinsic to their lives.

Howard Spence knows that he has a son named Earl (Gabriel Mann) this entire time, and he goes to see him. Earl responds by throwing all of his own belongings out of his window onto the street and breaking up with his girlfriend Amber (Fairuza Balk). She sticks around anyway, sensing that this difficult moment is not really about her.

Polley is phenomenal in her scenes with Shepard, but she interacts with her potential stepbrother even better. in both circumstances she glows with a vital radiance all the other participants in Don't Come Knocking are so keen to recapture. We never do find out if Sky is actually Howard Spence's daughter, and it is implied that she is probably not. But that actually only improves things for Howard Spence, because he finds it easier to love someone he never was told he had to be responsible for than his actual son. In typical fashion for this great American author, one form of love ends up being a bridge, the only true path, to the other.

In every narrative, the idea is that by the end something has to change. Shepard gave this rule of stage a clever and brutal twist. He conceived of the idea that people could try to evolve, but nothing could actually change them - not dialogue, not action, not violence, not death - they could only react to it unconsciously, like putting on a winter coat to repel a cool breeze. Things were altered, but not necessarily what was needed.

The most redemption Howard Spence receives is a soft hug. This is not only enough for him, it is beyond his wildest expectations. Years and years of loneliness change what gives us pleasure; the merest thought of those we truly care for, not the return of the affection, can provide solace. It is enough to see and be around those we love.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which We Pay Mind To Author Photographs And Facebook

Cowgirl Mouth

by MOLLY LAMBERT

To become an author photograph, you must stop being yourself. You must sit in a chair looking serious, possibly on a deck or otherwise inside a room filled with books. You must stare off as if possessed by thought, and then you must pretend you are thinking about something besides how the picture is going to look. You must not make the face that you actually make while writing, or you will look crazed.

Some people prefer to look crazed, but that's a very specific kind of author photo and those people are usually Hunter S. Thompson impostors lacking in the effortless stylishness and talents of the actual Hunter S. Thompson. William S. Burroughs also preferred to look cool. A crazed photo will not make your writing any more crazed.

A good author photo will last you several books. A truly iconic image can be repeated infinitely. If you are attractive enough, you can put the picture on your book. If you are a talented enough writer, no one will suspect that anyone buys your book because of what you look like. If you are a man, putting a picture of yourself on the cover implies some self-seriousness, especially if you are handsome. If you are a woman, putting a picture of yourself on the cover implies frivolity or that you are a C-List celebrity trying to sell books. Most serious new books do not have author photos on the front.

Unless you are Patti Smith. If you are Patti Smith you can do whatever the fuck you want. Also if you are Susan Sontag or Joan Didion or Hannah Arendt. People take a woman seriously so long as she is not also trying to seem beautiful. If she can fake a lack of vanity, or transform her vanity into an attack on generalized female vanity.

I have looked at Sam Shepard's author photograph countless times. People don't automatically think that Sam Shepard is trying to seem handsome in his author photo because male beauty is assumed as a thing that just is, that naturally exists. In actuality all beauty is somewhat acted, even in the beautiful. A candle must be lit. 

What does Sam Shepard want us to know about himself? That he is married, or at least that he sports a wedding band. He wears a denim work shirt to show his allegiance to the West (although he is from Illinois) and to demonstrate a kind of folksiness, to differentiate himself from all the authors in their starched oxford shirts or sweaters or white suits. To show us that he is a Sam, not a John, and everything that implies.  

How do you decide what face best represents you? How can you possibly pick one image of yourself to represent you at all times? If you pick a serious photograph you are discounting all the times you are not serious. If you pick a smiling photograph, the light-heartedness seems grotesque because it was so obviously faked or staged.  

Hunter S. Thompson holding a stick suggestively as a young man without sunglasses 

But no person is entirely funny or serious, so one photograph seems impossible. Maybe two photographs next to each other, one representing each. Maybe one superimposed on the other. The other solution is to smirk, which implies seriousness and humor at the same time. Some people use candids, but they're still choosing which one. Any face you make in a self-take will seem ridiculous, because it will be. 

Gertrude Stein by Carl Van Vechten

Not too long ago it was taboo to put a picture of yourself up on the internet. It was something reserved for only the truest geeks who it was assumed had nothing to lose in devaluing their privacy, feelings about which are a true generational gap, (although obviously now your grandparents are on Facebook) and dating websites, which were also considered taboo. It implied a kind of sad desperation. It still carries some of those connotations. People feel more ashamed using Photobooth than PornHub, but there's hardly a person alive that you can't find a picture of now on the internet. 

When I get spam friend requests on Facebook I always spend some time looking at the picture and wondering who they are, whether their personality bears any resemblance to the fake facts in their info section, what the actual original context of the picture was and whether they know they are being used to represent an imaginary human being. It's like having a staring contest with a robot. If you win, it explodes.

Rita Hayworth photographed by George Hurrell

The author photo was previously only an issue if you were famous or notable. As a kid I used to pore over a book of George Hurrell photographs that had the unretouched photos on one side and the finished images on the other and wonder why the real pictures of movie stars looked less "real" to me than the retouched ones. How I recognized Bette Davis and Ginger Rogers in the pictures with blown out exposure and dramatized contrast, and who were these strange mundane people right next to them?

You go to bed with Gilda and wake up with Rita Hayworth. You go to bed with Rita Hayworth and wake up with Margarita Carmen Cansino. You cannot wake up with Gilda. How could it be I had never noticed the retouching before then? I had just accepted automatically that the finalized image was truth. Thus is Facebook.  

Hunter S. Thompson, a few cool guy accessories and a plaid flannel later

What's especially amazing is that nobody had to be taught how to do it. Everyone just understood how from viewing and absorbing images, a process jacked to warpspeed by the internet with sites like flickr and tumblr. I used to have boxes full of pictures I cut out from magazines. Everyone has seen enough album covers, enough movie posters, enough author photos, to understand how to present themselves in a picture.

Once you start thinking about this, it is impossible to stop. You can't look at anyone's facebook pictures of themselves without determining how they are trying to portray themselves, how they want to be perceived: cool, pretty, fun, serious, goofy. You are never just being yourself in a photograph. You are being yourself in a photograph.

Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders

What is it that men see in cowboys that they want so much to see in themselves? A natural seeming lack of desire to demonstrate or communicate feeling? A sort of wildness, freedom from constructed identity, even though "cowboy" is one of the most deliberately constructed identities there is? Writers seem particularly drawn to them because they represent pure physicality, a direct line between being and deeds. As if cowboys never stay up at night in cluttered rooms thinking about who affects them.

It's why I fantasize about being a doctor even though it is as ridiculous for me to say I'd like to be a doctor as to say that I would like to be a duck, and yet I still fantasize about both in equal measures for the same basic reason. A purpose of spirit divorced from personal purpose of mind. An objective practice with concrete goals.

The illusion that all that matters is whoever's on the operating table that day, or however many cows need to be roped, and then you're too exhausted from the physical fullness of your work to take it home with you. But of course you do. 

Fact: Ernest Hemingway was forced to wear a pink gingham dress as a child

People romanticize cowboys for the same reason they romanticize gangster rap. It is the idea that there exist somewhere men for whom masculinity is natural, not a performance. The biggest lie of course, in rap and also Westerns, is that anyone exists who can kill people and have no feelings about it. That is how countries get men to join the army and go to war, by glamorizing this idea, and why they then get PTSD (shellshock) and are fucked up about it for the rest of their lives. The Wire is essentially a treatise on the endless fucked up cycle that permits and reinforces this.  

It is a partial lie that distracting the body can distract the mind. When the mind is overly preoccupied there is literally nothing that can distract it from itself. ("There is no geographical solution to an emotional problem.") The illusion I have that doctors live a professional life uncomplicated by personal relationships? I know it is a total lie. The doctors I know have told me that it is a lie. Everyone imagines themselves succeeding in some field that is different from the one they have chosen to pursue. All fields are equally ensemble casts. That is why ensemble casts are so relatable as an idea. 

Cormac McCarthy as a young man, not yet a professional fake cowboy

Cormac McCarthy is from Providence, Rhode Island. He is as much of the West as H.P. Lovecraft is of R'lyeh or Yuggoth. The only citizen of a place that exists entirely in his mind. I often think about Cormac McCarthy being a kid fantasizing about the West, and then I think about my own childhood fantasies of New England.

I like to think about the childhoods of people I can't imagine as children. I just picture them as a tiny version of whatever they look like now. It's especially funny with guys who have facial hair. Rhode Island is the smallest state, California one of the largest, but they are equal sizes in my mind. 

take me seriously because I am so very serious 

In New England during college, I developed my own Western fantasies. Finally delivered to the land of my teenage ideals, of real seasons and people who care about books, I started dreaming about the open plains. I thought about avocados and listened obsessively to Gene Clark and Gram Parsons. I could always locate myself much more easily in lonesome men than in their female counterparts. There was something too affecting to me about female plaintiveness. A part of myself I did not wish to have. But then I listened to Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton and found myself in there too. 

Larry McMurtry, champion of the emotional cowboy

We long for companionship, and then we long equally to be alone. That is what Westerns are about: pursuing aloneness together. You love the people who know you best, who know you as much as anyone can. They keep you alive in the wilderness. 

William S. Burroughs all eyez on me

Male loneliness is overly romanticized, female solitude overly demonized. There is occasional pleasure in loneliness because there is pleasure in being alone. The thing people actually like about Jennifer Aniston is that despite coming up in an ensemble cast show about friendship, she comes across as kind of a loner. Not a loser necessarily, although that is also a part of her charm. Mostly a loner (also, a stoner).

Aniston is a female take on 1970s antiheroes like Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye or Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. She just needs to find a way to translate it back into film. Her best roles, in Friends With Money and The Good Girl, capture this about her. That quality of being a loner is also what women like about Angelina Jolie, Winona Ryder, and Aniston's closest predecessor Barbra Streisand. Actresses who seem like outsiders are the most beloved because all women feel like outsiders, since they are.

When you think of yourself, you think of yourself as you are with yourself. Not as you are with friends, although that is also how you are. You spend an inordinate amount of time in conversation with yourself every day of your life. That's why you go out in the world and live, to try and lose track of this conversation. Identity is contrast.   

When you long for the West you are longing for space. For room between places and things but also between your thoughts. For a few years I used to say that New York made me feel overly claustrophobic. The buildings are so close together, I would say, they are pushing my thoughts that way too. But they weren't. It was just that I was pushing them that way. At its best New York pushes your thoughts upwards.

Joan Didion neckscarf diva

If you grow up intellectual in Los Angeles, you are constantly told that you do not belong there. People told me this so much growing up that I really believed it. Now I know you can be anything anywhere, an idiot in Paris or a genius in Des Moines (calm down IA intellectuals, I picked Des Moines because it's French and I like the way it sounds. Real G's move in silence like Des Moines.) That the people who think California is full of idiots bought an image they were sold, and they're no more foolish for believing it than I was for believing that New England would not also have idiots. 

Susan Sontag stacking paper

The public narrative about Los Angeles is that its beauty hides a corrosive interior. That you can't have temperate weather and fruit out of season without being punished for it somehow. That the Black Dahlia and the Manson family murders and all the fires and floods and quakes and riots are retribution for something, for original sin, for the buying and selling of false images and idols. That pleasure creates Puritan debt.

Raymond Chandler and friend

That concern with appearances means you care nothing about insides. That if something is beautiful it cannot also be serious. That if something is evil it cannot also be sometimes good. Even that artifice is automatically evil. I have never believed any of it. Los Angeles to me is edenic, even now knowing all its tricks. Los Angeles is corrupt but small towns have just as much sin. Los Angeles is a hooker with a heart of gold. 

The internet is the open country of the mind. The promise of space, no boundaries or bindings, no MLA handbooks or proofreaders. No set ideas about how writing or images "should" be, just how they can be and are.

No prejudice against fragments and run-ons and parentheticals, which I have always felt are truer to the way people actually talk with each other than "real" sentences, which have rules that that can ruin translation of thought. No old gods.  

It is freeing to write a "bad" sentence. It does not destroy the integrity of the "good" ones. If anything it props them up, the way "fucking" can be the best modifier. If you make your point, it does not matter how you make your point. Informality helps.

That is the purpose of blogging, of writing, of poetry. It's why we love Gertrude Stein. She is the founding father of This Recording and Allen Ginsberg is the founding mother. They cared that words could not so they broke it. 

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She also tumbls, twitters and runs GIF Party and JPG Club. Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb San Diego. She last wrote in these pages about the internet.