Category Archives: Movies

Camelot and the Wild West

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Last Sunday, after the Bears lost, I was working on one of my western movie posts. Mary switched channels and I looked up to catch the conclusion of First Knight, starring Sean Connery as King Arthur and Richard Gere as Lancelot. Several thousand light bulbs went on as I watched and realized the old west and Arthur’s Britain are territories of legend with much in common.

Duel to the Death by N.C. Wyeth

Both the old west and the Arthurian forests are places where legend fills in all we do not know.  Where there be dragons, there also is imagination.  We populate these realms with our angels and demons, and yet the settings are of this world, as opposed to outer space or Middle Earth.  You can visit Tombstone or Glastonbury.  Most historians agree there really was an Arthur of Britain who held off the Saxon invaders after the Roman legions left.  We know that Wyatt Earp, George Custer, and Calamity Jane were as real in their time as we are now.

Gunfight by N.C. Wyeth

I suspect that most of the tales we love of both knights and cowboys are hero journeys, in the classic sense outlined by Joseph Campbell. In his PBS series, The Power of Myth, Campbell said that when they left to search for the Holy Grail, each knight picked his own place to enter the forest – to follow the path of another would have been shameful.

That same ethic frames a number of westerns, and is historical fact in the case of the the mountain men.  Several kept articulate journals describing the yearning that moved them leave “civilization” behind to see what lay beyond the next ridge.

I do not want to belabor the point, but Pothos, the yearning for the unobtainable, was actively cultivated as a virtue in the courtly love ethic celebrated by the troubadors and in the stories of Cretien de Troyes.  Just like modern film directors, Cretien was writing about an era that was gone in his time, but inspired dreams we still share today.  Be it John Ford or Peckinpah, I’m a sucker for a good western, just as I love stories of the knights of old, from Mallory to Monty Python.

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There is one huge difference between the world of Arthurian legend, and the world of the western – and by extension, the 21st century world we all inhabit.  When the knights entered the forest on their solitary quest, they knew what they were trying to save – Camelot – and they knew what they were trying to find – The Holy Grail.  These legends grew from a world that in reality was probably more brutal than the west of any of Sam Peckinpah’s westerns, and yet from all accounts I have read, this was a world where ultimate certainties were not in doubt.

For us the entrance into the forest or desert is a little darker, for we don’t even start with the same certainty that what we are after exists.  Still, in one account Joseph Campbell quoted, the Holy Grail, was never the same for any two people.  It changed to give each what their heart desired.  A very contemporary Grail!  If we don’t start out with a clear idea of what we are looking for, well I don’t think the knights of legend really did, or the people who climbed onto a covered wagon.

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And finally, though lists always leave something to be desired, here is a pretty decent NPR list of classic and important westerns, from Stagecoach to Brokeback Mountain, to the new True Grit.  Happy Trails!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/01/13/132905247/git-along-little-dogies-a-western-starter-kit/

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

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I had planned to discuss Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), in the same vein as my earlier discussion of True Grit and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but after wrestling with the post for two days, I realized this film does not fit both of the characteristics I was trying to understand in the others, characteristics I said made them memorable beyond the confines of genre.

Awareness of the nearness of death is there all right – in fact there are few movies in any genre where life is cheaper, as shown in the scene where a hired killer shoots a naive cowboy for target practice.

What is missing is that yearning-for-what-we-cannot-name, an unrequited longing that I called by its Greek name, Pothos.  The characters in McCabe never get that far.  They can’t even satisfy their basic yearnings for livelihood, dignity, love, and survival.

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Some of the modern directors who brought us the western anti-hero and a new and darker vision – people like Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood – nonetheless loved the genre and set about transforming it rather than trashing it.

Altman sought to use the western genre to make a point.  The year before, 1970, he had used the setting of the Korean war in MASH to reveal the damage modern warfare does to the human soul.  In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he uses the western genre to make a similar statement about large corporations and unbridled capitalism.  He called the movie an anti-western and set out to dismantle the myths.

John McCabe (Warren Beatty) is a gambler and would-be entrepreneur with an undeserved reputation as a gunfighter.  Constance Miller (Julie Christie) is an opium addicted madam.  They form a business and later a romantic partnership to open a high class brothel in Presbyterian Church, a mining camp named for its largest and least used building.

The brothel is so successful that representatives of the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company arrive to buy the pair out.  Not understanding that this is “an offer he can’t refuse,” McCabe holds out for more.  The company sends three hired killers to get rid of him.

Terrified, McCabe is able to shoot two of the men in the back from hiding (remember, this was 1971, the Bonanza era, the middle-of-the-street, “Draw, padnah,” era of fairplay in gunfights).  He kills the third man but is mortally wounded.  In the final scene, McCabe lies dying in the snow while Christie lies in a haze of smoke in an opium den.

That’s it.

I tried for two days to find something moving and uplifting in the film, and there is really nothing except the lyrics of three Leonard Cohen songs on the soundtrack.  In the opening scene, as McCabe rides into town, Cohen sings, “He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.” If true, that would have lifted McCabe’s story to the level of tragedy, offering some form of  catharsis, some purging of our emotions by terror and pity, but I don’t think it happens here.  Nothing is purged.  Our negative emotions stay with us as they do after a bad episode of the six o’clock news.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an important western in the history of the genre.  It is an unforgettable western and a haunting western, but not for the same reasons as the others I have been considering.

NEXT:  A Meditation on the Wild West and Camelot

Pothos in Westerns 2: Pat Garret and Billy the Kid

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Sam Peckinpah was 48 when he directed Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. His health was failing after too many years of drug and alcohol abuse; a documentary I saw showed the crew carrying him from one scene to another on a stretcher. He was also battling the studio for artistic control of  the project, a fight that he lost.  Critics panned the production release of the movie, though 10 years later, when the director’s cut was available, they praised it as one of his finest.

Peckinpah poured his heart and soul into this tale of a rebel who died too young.  It isn’t hard to see the connection. Maximilian Le Cain, a filmmaker living in Ireland, says:

[Peckinpah’s] finest works are permeated with an intensely haunting atmosphere of melancholy, loss, and displacement. His heroes are exiles, men out of step with their dehumanised times, alienated from love or domesticity, yearning for a redemption that they seem able to find only in self-destruction. It is a dark but intensely romantic vision. If for nothing else, Peckinpah admires his heroes for their staunch individualism in the face of a world that is changing for the worse, eroding under the blindly ruthless power of money. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/garrett.html

One summer saturday afternoon in 1973, I went to see Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I walked out of the theater stunned, went home and got my sister, and saw the movie again.  In the months and years that followed, I read everything I could about Billy the Kid.  I made a series of prints called, “Homage to Billy the Kid”  (the one that survives is shown below).  Two years later, my wife and I explored Lincoln County, New Mexico, where the key events of William Bonney’s life played out.

Homage to Billy the Kid, color etching by Morgan Mussell, 1973

It isn’t hard to understand why I resonated with Billy the Kid’s story.  “Billy, they don’t want you to be so free,” sings Bob Dylan in the title song.  I was an art student, stuck that summer in a western New York factory town, longing for the southwestern deserts where the skies and vistas are so open they don’t seem real.  Times were hard; the sixties were over; just as in the late 19th century, the price of being “out of step” had gone up.

Some biographies paint William Bonney as an engaging rebel, and others as a psychopathic killer.  I doubt that there is any chance of extracting the “real” William Bonney from legend, but one thing appears to be historical fact:  Billy the kid would not have been declared an outlaw if he had fought on the winning side of “the Lincoln County War,” a bloody open-range type conflict that culminated in a pitched battle on the streets of Lincoln.  There were no angels in that fight; no one deserved a white hat.

Not only is Pothos, the unrequited longing for “something more,” beautifully evoked by Kris Kristofferson’s portrayal of Billy, it permeates the New Mexico landscape and sky, which is like another character in the movie:  it mirrors the Kid’s doomed quest to “live free” with an extraordinary beauty that we glimpse but can never grasp and hold.

Perhaps the best known artifact of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is Bob Dylan’s elegy, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” which sets the tone for the whole movie in its most haunting scene:

Knocking on Heaven's Door in Peckenpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid"

Knocking on Heaven’s Door in Peckenpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”

In an effort to find the Kid, Garrett seeks out another town’s sherif, Colin Baker (Slim Pickens), a man so disillusioned he has to ask his wife where he left his badge.  He is building a boat in his yard – a pathetic dingy – so he can “drift out of this damn territory.”  Baker, his wife, and Garrett raid the hideout of a former member of Billy’s gang, and Baker is mortally wounded.  He stumbles over to die by the little creek he hoped to sail away on, and we see it is too shallow to float anything larger than a paper boat.

Sam Peckinpah grew up outside Fresno and used to cut school to cowboy on a relative’s ranch.  According to Maximilian Le Cain (citation above), he did his best to live the myth of the hard living, hard drinking, womanizing, knife-throwing free spirits whose stories he tells.  Cain believes that when Peckinpah started Pat Garrett, he understood and set out to reveal the emptiness of this way of life – its inability to satisfy the hunger within.  He says:

Pat Garrett presents us with a country full of men without a future…If the Western is fundamentally about a struggle for survival in the face of a hostile wilderness, Pat Garrett is about people just waiting around to die. If the West is a wide-open country, Peckinpah’s sees it as a prison from which almost every decent person is trying to escape.

Quite a few movies came out debunking the myth of the west in the decade after that optimistic western epic, How the West Was Won (1962).  Many of these films were politically motivated in an era when, if the body count from Viet Nam was too depressing, you could flip to the ironclad righteousness of the Cartwright boys on Bonanza.

Superficially, Pat Garrett, appears to fit into this group of largely forgotten movies, but it is more.  What lifts it above the myth-busting movies, according to Maximilian le Cain, is Peckinpah’s love of the genre:

Unlike the revisionists, [Peckinpah’s] best films were at least partially self-portraits as opposed to ‘issue’ movies. He exposed the emptiness at the heart of the myth from the inside with the same anguish that he might feel in disclosing a fatal disease from which he was suffering. It is this depth of feeling that really sets this film apart from its contemporaries and has ensured its survival in the face of time.

True Grit, Pothos, and Westerns that Stick With You

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Not just Americans, but people around the world understand that some westerns completely transcend genre. Their stories stay with you; like the greatest drama (to paraphrase Joyce) they arrest the mind in the presence of what is grave and constant in human suffering and unite the mind with the sufferer.

Rooster and Maddie in True Grit 2010

I think the stunning remake of True Grit may prove to be one of these.  It has the two elements I believe are at the core of unforgettable westerns – great unrequited longing and an open-eyed view of the nearness of death.

The westerns I cannot forget – and I’m going to discuss three of them – have in common, a longing that goes beyond anything specific, but is best described by the wonderful Greek word, Pothos:  an insatiable longing for what lies over the horizon, for what is ever out of reach.  Pothos means desire, longing for, regret, want….It is [a] painful restlesness. That quote comes from a website, pothos.org,  devoted to Alexander the Great, the man who conquered the world but was never satisfied.  http://www.pothos.org/content/index.php?page=pothos-2

Like any good story, True Grit begins with an appealing character, Maddie Ross, who has a compelling need:  she is determined to bring the man who killed her father to justice.  The initial motive is overshadowed as Maddie’s relationship with federal marshal, Rooster Cogburn, develops.  My friend and writing buddy, Rosi Hollinbeck nails it on her blog:  it’s a love story   http://rosihollinbeckthewritestuff.blogspot.com/2011/01/book-for-readers-and-writers.html

The key thing is, you sort of know the nature of the love between them, but can’t quite say what it is, and the characters don’t quite know what it is either, so they inevitably drift apart, though the final scene suggests this may have been the most important connection in both of their lives.

The nearness of life and death is the constant minor chord that opens the movie and is present under the stormy sky at the close.   The best westerns are not about special effects and high body counts for their own sake, and they are not about the cavalry charges of childhood saturday matinees.  To some degree, they are meditations that remind us that a life with all its hopes and dreams is a very fragile thing; it can end in an instant.

The one other thing my favorite westerns have in common are haunting soundtracks.  I downloaded Carter Burwell’s soundtack as soon as I got home from the theater.  It’s a solemn and stately musical play with the melody of a great old hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” here captured by Iris Dement, whose voice itself resonates with the pothos evoked by the words.

TO BE CONTINUED:  In my next post, considerations of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

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Okay, once again I waited until nearly the end of a theatrical run to see a popular movie. I don’t know if there is a name for my condition: an almost pathological fear of seeing new releases in crowded theaters that harks back to the trauma we suffered when first attempting to see Star Wars. The theater sold overbooked tickets, just like an airline, and we had to leave just as Darth Vader appeared.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and this movie is the first produced by Fox after Disney let go of the franchise when Prince Caspian, the second film, posted disappointing returns.

I can understand that to a degree. I’ve read the first Narnian chronicle, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, many times; not so the others. The first book has things guaranteed to enchant the dreamer in all of us: a magical world in a clothes closet, filled with talking animals, where children become kings and queens, and defeat a great evil with the help of a lion who is a thinly disguised Christ figure.

I do not propose to outline the series for those who are not familiar with it, but pose a question the movie raised. What do we make of a film that is more compelling than the book because of the director and screenwriter have added elements the author did not?

Blasphemous as this may sound, I found Peter Jackson’s film treatment of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings more compelling than the book, but those movies remained scrupulously faithful to the text.

In Dawn Treader, the two youngest Pevensie children, Lucy and Edmond, and their obnoxious cousin Eustace, are transported to Narnia to help King Caspian on his voyage to the east to find seven missing lords of Narnia.  I remember the book as a series of episodes that were not connected thematically except through the characters’ battles with temptation:  Lucy’s desire for Beauty, Edmond’s desire for Power, and Eustace’s Greed which causes his temporary transformation into a dragon.

Let’s just say that when the first of this series of movies came out in 2006, I set out to reread the seven books, and gave up in the middle of this one.

In Dawn Treader, the final test that is overcome is a dark island where dreams come true.  Lewis alludes to, but doesn’t dwell on the possibilities of a world where truth and illusion are indistinguishable; with Aslan’s help, the crew rescues the final lord and makes their escape.

Director Michael Apted makes this dark island central to the story:  the crew and all of Narnia are threatened by a great evil that can take any shape – it mirrors each individual’s hopes and fears.  This is a very personal darkness, a tailor-made evil, a Satanic force that Christian theology imagines, but which Lewis did not in the third book of his series.

This force is also Mara, the demon lord of Buddhist theology who evoked the most piercing desires and fears in an effort to overcome Prince Siddartha on the night of his enlightenment.

“Value added,” is a business term I first heard in the 90’s applied to Intel, which takes silicon, one of the most common elements on earth, and transforms it into microprocessors.

“Value added” is also what Michael Apted did in fleshing out the unrealized potential of C.S. Lewis’s book, to portray each individual’s unique path of heroism.  In the words of the magician, Coriakin, “You cannot hope to overcome the darkness without until you subdue the darkness within.”

RIP – Leslie Nielsen

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Part of my holiday weekend was a self-imposed media blackout; often enough, it’s refreshing not to know what is going on, and so it was only this morning that I learned that Leslie Nielsen is gone.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/11/29/131661180/remembering-leslie-nielsen-a-master-of-the-art-of-not-being-funny

There are precious few movies that stay fresh after three or four viewings, and almost any of his silly flicks will have me in stitches though I have seen them numerous times. Laughter and good humor – what a gift in this world!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTHsNVXXlus

So long, Shirley!

Of High-Concepts and Strange Attractors

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I get a lot from reading and listening to screenwriters.  Today, while skimming some of the links posted below, I happened upon, Wordplay, the site for Scheherazade Productions, the company of screenwriters/producers, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. http://www.wordplayer.com/

The heart of the site, according to the Intro page, is the Columns tab, a growing collection of essays where Elliott and Rossio share some of what they learned during the five years it took them to earn their first paycheck as screenwriters.  I was hooked at the start of Column 01, A Foot in the Door.

Somewhere in my own efforts, I stumbled upon a stunningly simple and vital concept: before setting pen to paper (or fingers to keys), I should be able to describe my story in a single sentence. Trial and error (error meaning tens of thousands of words of meandering prose) has made it an article of faith.

In his essay, Terry Rossio brings the concept alive in graphic detail as “The Warner Bros. Hallway Test:”

As a screenwriter, your choice of film premise is your calling card. Not your witty dialog, not your clever descriptions. Not your knowledge of structure and subplot and subtext.  The very first decision you make as a writer — ‘what is my film about?’ — will define your creative instincts in the eyes of the industry.

Rossio asks us to imagine a busy producer and director stopping by an office where a first reader is 40 pages into our screenplay. “What’s it about?” they ask.  What will the reader say?  What brief reply would catch and hold a director’s attention?

Once I heard a screenwriter try to describe, “High Concept,” which he claimed was a necessary ingredient for a story these days. Like most of the audience, I didn’t quite get what he was talking about. In Column 02, Rossio says that as a matter of fact, a story that can be summed up in a sentence is High Concept, but for him, that does not convey the special mojo that lifts a story above its peers. He “stole” a phrase from the mathematics of fractals: Strange Attractor.

I know this sounds a bit silly, but bear with me. Put ‘strange’ (meaning ‘unique’) and ‘attractor’ (from ‘attractive,’ meaning ‘compelling’) together and you get ‘strange attractor,’ or ‘something unique that is also compelling.’

Which would be just another, forgettable, “yeah, yeah,” bit of advice, if the author didn’t go on to give some examples:

“A group of ex-psychic investigators start a commercial ghost extermination business in New York City.”

“A defense attorney falls in love with her client. As the trial progresses, she doesn’t know if she’s sleeping with an innocent man, or a murderer.”

It begins to make sense. What is unique is not ghost stories, or love stories, or murder mysteries, per se, but the unexpected or quirky slants that were central to these movies. I remember coming across this “high concept” description of The DaVinci Code online some time ago – so simple yet so forceful I remember it without even trying:  A late night murder in the Louve leads to the discovery of a secret the Vatican has tried to suppress for two-thousand years.”

When he starts to outline specific qualities these strange attractor stories seem to share, Rossio begins with this image:

It’s as if thousands of people in Hollywood are combing the beach for that next great film idea, magnifying glasses out, checking every facet on every tiny grain of sand they come across. And then somebody points at a big, beautiful conch shell laying right out in the bright sun and says, “Hey, let’s make that!” You look at that big glorious pink and white crustacean and can’t believe you missed it.

If there were a magic formula, it wouldn’t be magic for very long. There are, however, some fifty essays on this site that promise to offer a lot of ideas and food for contemplation about the special qualities that can make a story come alive.

Inception

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Is all that we see and all that we seem but a dream within a dream?
– Edgar Allen Poe

Romantic poets, surrealists, Freudians, Jungians, mystics of all stripes, and popular culture at least from the time of “Twilight Zone,” have questioned the solidity of the world of consensus reality, and in some cases, asserted the primacy of the dream.  Twenty-six hundred years ago, in the Lankavatara Sutra, the Buddha said:

All things, external and internal,
are imputed by the mind,
Apart from the mind nothing else exists.

Now Inception bursts on the scene with a multi, multi, multi layered texture that makes The Matrix look like linear storytelling.

Once I heard author John Barth read his story, “The Menelaid,” a frame tale with characters from The Odyssey ,  that was eight – as in “”””””””eight”””””””” layers deep.  It was something of an academic exercise but the key image that sticks was the main character meeting Proteus, the shape-changer, and afterwards, never being quite sure of the “reality” of his experience again.

Imagine that kind of concept playing through a two and a half hour action adventure epic that is five layers deep (is that right – the plane, the van, the hotel, the fortress, limbo – yep) with thrills and chills, surround sound, and computer generated stuff flying at you…whew.

There is absolutely no way I can say much about the content of the film itself after just one viewing – I’m still in the – “Oh wow, man,” phase, but one among many things that really interest me is the sophistication of current movie going audiences.  We have come to accept, ponder, and even revel in multi-dimensional ambiguity that wasn’t part of movie going when I was young.  Along with the recent success of a similar fractured reality novel The Time Traveler’s Wife (I’m not sure if the movie did as well), it’s clear that the age-old tradition of of linear storytelling, much as I love it, is only one of several options these days.