In Which You Can Pacify But Never Kill The Medfly

Why Does Naked Make It Art?

by WILL HUBBARD

Someone help me out with this. Is it the lighting, film quality, or decade that makes Robert Altman's Short Cuts feel like a made-for-TV movie? Did he like that style, or was it just that Short Cuts came on the heels of a dark period—if you can really call making great money for directing mindless television programming 'dark'—of Altman's career?

Thankfully, the spell of TV-like mediocrity breaks with the film's first moment of utter bewilderment—so much an Altman specialty—in which a man with a pool-cleaning business (Tarantino's Mr. White, in much the same character and wardrobe) is trying to put his children to bed to the sound of his wife talking dirty (really really dirty) to a man on the phone for money. It's a cue that says Here ends the formulaic Hollywood expostion— now for something a little different.

Who doesn't <3 Lily Tomlin?Credit the original plotlines to Raymond Carver, but with the acknowledgement that Carver's stories had, previous to Altman's agile weaving, seemed unfilmable. Carver's fictions, like Faulkner's before him, are an attempt to mirror reality in all it's paradoxical, unseemly interrelations. Altman's a good fit, because a moment in his sprawling movies is not a moment in time but a synapse firing in all directions forward, backward and sideways.

In a particularly poignant moment in Short Cuts, Altman proves—with no small help from prime-of-her-life Julianne Moore—that even the obligatory minute of nudity can function artfully in an adult movie. Because a sex scene does not fit into his cosmology, Altman has the woman take her clothes off while engaged in brutal emotional conflict with her lover (a spilled glass of wine causes her to remove and frantically scrub her skirt just as the dinner guests are supposed to arrive). The sequence so reverses the expected order of events that it might safely be called heartbreaking.

Porky-Piggin' itNow that I think about it, other glimpses of nude females mark many of the film's other significant junctures. There's the pool guy secretly watching the manic cello-virtuoso nihlist tomboy fake kill herself/skinnydip, the too-old-to-be-that-drunk-and-broey guys finding a nude female corpse floating around their favorite fishing hole, and the egoist doctor coming home to his wife painting her best friend in the buff, prompting the unforgettable query: "Why does naked make it art?"

In Altman there is always the growing sense that things are about to fall apart. Borges called this "the imminence of the revelation," but in Altman it is more the imminence of the conflagration. In Short Cuts, this comes in the form of a minor, run-of-the-mill LA earthquake. I'm not sure the 74 plotlines Altman has opened are totally resolved when the earth begins shaking, but at least the pool-guy won't be listening to his wife pillow-talk into the phone anymore. Or will he?

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. If you'd like to complain about or request a change to this website, please contact him at fuckoff@thisrecording.com.

"West Coast" — Anni Rossi (mp3) highly recommended

"Venice" — Anni Rossi (mp3)

"Machine" — Anni Rossi (mp3)

Anni Rossi website