What could have been
Artistic works that fell short of writer’s expectations
Disappointment is a selfish thing; it is all about the disappointed.
It has its roots in expectations, which is something that’s hard for an artist to control. An artist doesn’t owe an audience anything more than what we all owe each other, which is respect. (Though to be disappointed in someone’s work, you have to first respect that work, don’t you?)
Anyway, I was asked to write about movies, music and books that have most disappointed me in recent years. I recognize that as a trap even as I walk into it — I just want to make the ground rules clear. I’m not writing about bad art and bad artists, I’m writing about how some things I looked forward to failed to satisfy my expectations. Some things I just don’t get. That doesn’t mean that the people who get them are wrong. It’s a big, wonderful world and we needn’t pretend to enjoy what bores or baffles us. You shouldn’t have to look for validation anywhere other than your heart.
First up is Damien Chazelle’s
La La Land, which famously didn’t win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and which was just released on DVD. I didn’t review
La La Land for the newspaper, didn’t see it until it had been in theaters for a month and haven’t written about it much, so it’s strange that I’ve received email messages recently that start out “I know you’re no fan of La La
Land but … .” As far as I can tell (and our electronic archive will support me on this) I’ve not said anything disparaging about La La Land in print. But they’re right — La La
Land was not my favorite film of 2016. Even if I had seen it in time, it likely wouldn’t have
made my long list for the best films of 2016, much less my Top 10. It’s a fine movie — pretty and smart — but it went on a little long and the more I think about it the less substantial it feels.
But the real roots of my disappointment are in the pieces I’d read about it before I watched it. Some of those reviews got my hopes up. When I read raves of the film — like the one by Piers Marchant we published in this newspaper — I really began to anticipate the movie.
This is one reason why I try not to read much about movies that I may write about. Ideally, I’d walk into every movie ignorant of the director’s past work and oblivious to the stars in order to give each movie the chance to work whatever magic it might have.
As a practical matter, this is impossible, especially since I edit more movie reviews than I write, but striving toward the goal helps me avoid what happened with La La Land: I sat down in the theater, the lights went down, the music came up, and I immediately began thinking about how the opening scene of a city waking up was an obvious homage to 1932’s Love Me Tonight. I noticed the Cinemascope, and was intrigued by the logistics involved in shooting the tour-de-force opening number. I was immediately thinking about the bureaucratic hurdles they must have had to overcome to block off the freeway. I was noticing the camera movement and the tonal palette — all those primary colors! — wondering how they cast the dancers, and being impressed by the production values.
And that’s no way to watch a movie. Or, maybe it is, but it’s not the most enjoyable way to watch a movie. La La Land never became about the characters on the screen, it never was about Seb and Mia’s bittersweet love affair, or even about their respective artistic ambitions. The movie was supposed to be about the compromises and difficult choices artists invariably have to make, but it ultimately seemed to be, in the words of Arkansas filmmaker Mark Thiedeman, about “how hard it is not to be famous yet.”
That said, I didn’t mind that Seb — played with tender panache by Ryan Gosling — was an immature jerk who whitesplained jazz and mansplained everything else. That was the point. Chazelle, who betrayed his affinity for the music with 2014’s Whiplash (a much better movie) and the musically adept Gosling likely understood the character’s wrongheadedness. Seb is precisely the kind of purist who makes people think they hate jazz, but the movie makes that clear. (It is odd that the number that’s supposed to represent the corruption of jazz through pop pollination — the John Legend set piece “Start a Fire” — is arguably the best in the film.)
The fact that Gosling and Emma Stone’s performances aren’t precisely calibrated to Broadway standards is also intentional. Chazelle was going for something along the lines of the casual performances in 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of the influences he wore on his sleeve. (A less obvious inspiration might have been Woody Allen’s underrated 1996 film Everyone Says I Love You, which took the idea of “ordinary people” singing and dancing to extremes. In that film, Allen asked Goldie Hawn not to sing as well as she could in order to sound more natural.)
Still, even though I’m willing to defend La La Land on some of the charges that have been leveled against it, I just didn’t find it all that compelling. It seemed an artificial and contrived project, another Hollywood movie about the rigors and rewards of show business. Compared to the really good movies of 2016 — Moonlight, Jeff Nichols’ Loving, Elle, Toni Erdmann, Hell or High Water — it’s a step or two behind.
Still, on another day, in other circumstances, I might have responded to it differently. After all, I liked 2011’s The Artist, a similarly gimmicky valentine to show business.
WINTER IS COMING
On the TV side of things, the most disappointing series I’ve seen is Game of Thrones, but to be truthful I only watched about 20 minutes of the first episode — until the first torture scene or decapitation, I don’t remember which it was. So I’ve never given HBO’s biggest hammer a chance, and defer to all my smart friends who seem to love it. I don’t know nothing about Lannisters or dragons.
But the show I stuck with too long is HBO’s just-ended Girls, which I respect even though I have doubts about whether its creator, the talented but appalling Lena Dunham, genuinely respects anyone who might be watching the show, outside perhaps a few clued-in Brooklyn millennials and/or potential future intellectual-financial sponsors like Judd Apatow.
While there’s a real danger in confusing Dunham’s public persona with the insecure, entitled character she plays on television — the extraordinarily solipsistic and apparently talentless Hannah — I don’t pay much attention to the cringe-inducing drama that attends Dunham’s celebrity. I know she says (and tweets) dumb things but since I’m neither a defensive men’s rights advocate or disappointed feminist, I have trouble caring about Twitter outrages. Like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, Dunham is a kind of performance artist. And while we can choose to enjoy (or not enjoy) any of these figures’ particular schticks, we probably ought to realize that most of what they say is designed to maximize attention; a lot of their talk is akin to pro wrestling kayfabe — they don’t mean it literally and we understand that, although we all pretend that they do.
So it’s not Dunham that bothers me so much as Girls’ seeming inability to say anything authentic about what ought to be a very interesting generation — the first Americans in a while to understand that things are not getting better and that they’re never likely to achieve on their own the sort of comfort and security their parents took for granted. Instead, the show consistently devolved into a raunchier, sweatier version of Sex and the City, with Dunham often offering her nakedness as a kind of protest against the conventional expectations of viewers. While Dunham sometimes has a point, she invariably undermines it with gestures she’d probably celebrate as daring.
But what really undermined Girls, which did feature some well-written dialogue and even the occasional cathartic laugh, was its tendency to spiral in on itself. It seemed like every episode would feature at least one shouting match between besties that sounded like some of the complaints leveled against the series (and, for that matter, against millennials in general). Girls was an insular, narrowly focused show — a lot of the conventional criticisms leveled against it had more to do with Dunham’s counter-life as the world’s most annoying social justice warrior than it did with the series itself. But what bothered me was the palpable condescension and contempt it exhibited for the world beyond those refreshingly naturalistic poor apartments. Dunham has often been compared to Woody Allen, and that’s apt in at least one respect — both of them are smug artists hamstrung by their lack of empathy and generosity for people different from themselves. That doesn’t mean they can’t make good stuff — I’ve loved a lot of Allen’s work — but it does limit and blinker them. I suspect that there’s a part of Dunham that’s more like Hannah than she’s comfortable admitting. Maybe inside every bully is a scared little girl.
LESS THAN LESS THAN ZERO
I have a way of dealing with books I don’t like. I don’t finish them.
Every week, the discards pile up. For every book I finish, I probably start six or seven.
I don’t know how you feel about Bret Easton Ellis’ books, but he’s probably the author I find most disappointing. Even though he’s not really an author anymore; he’s a podcaster who sometimes works in the movies.
I’ve read all of Ellis’ books, but the only one I’ve genuinely liked was Less Than Zero, which was famously published when he was 21 years old and a student at Bennington College in Vermont. I don’t know how much credit Ellis’ creative writing teacher — journalist Joe McGinniss — deserves for having shaped the minimalist style of that book, but it was a terrific read in 1985 and it’s a terrific read today. I reviewed it for the Shreveport Journal, and though that review is lost to time and microfiche, I know I raved about it.
I expected Ellis to have a long and fruitful career.
And in a way he has. Marek Kanievska’s 1987 film version of Less Than Zero and Mary Harron’s version of his third novel, American Psycho, are terrific movies that achieve something like moral depth through their depictions of the empty and pitiless beautiful creatures that populate Ellis’ imagination. Ellis wrote the script for Paul Schrader’s
cult classic The Canyons and remains an interesting voice and a kind of Los Angeles icon.
But he never wrote another book that meant anything. The kindest way to regard his second novel, The Rules
of Attraction, is as a piece of juvenilia that found its way into the marketplace because of the demand created by the previous novel’s success. Ellis still had a brittle, detached style, but his social critique was sophomoric and his characters so dehumanized that they came off as monstrous clowns who existed mainly to provide grooming tips and certify the hipness of the brand names they variously employed and coveted.
I remember being incensed while reading American Psycho. Glamorama and The Informers ended up in the discard pile. I don’t know how anyone who started out so keen and original ended up seeming so flat, dull and derivative.
Another disappointment? Sigmund Freud.
In 1986, Harold Bloom wrote a piece in the New York
Times Book Review that suggested Freud was “the greatest modern writer.”
“No 20th-century writer — not even Proust or Joyce or Kafka — rivals Freud’s position as the central imagination of our age,” Bloom wrote. “We turn to Freud when we wish to read someone absolutely relevant on any matter that torments or concerns us: love, jealousy, envy, masochism, cruelty, possessiveness, fetishism, curiosity, humor or what we will. Like Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Freud is endlessly suggestive and brimming with insight on all these matters and more, always much more.”
Er, no. Freud’s not a bad writer, and he does tend to tell stories. But you’ll be disappointed if you expect The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) or On Narcissism (1914) to be zipless reads. He’s good, better than you might expect any scientist to be — although not as objective perhaps as a scientist should be — but he’s no Richard Ford.
WILCO SCHMILCO
I lost the thread on Wilco. They used to be one of my favorite bands, and I still love A.M., Being There, Summerteeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and almost everything up until 2004’s A Ghost Is Born.
And I still enjoy Jeff Tweedy and the offhand nature of some of the later releases, especially last year’s largely acoustic Schmilco.
But something crucial went out of the band in 2001 when they jettisoned Jay Bennett, who competed with Tweedy to be the band’s chief creative engine. It was probably a necessary move — anyone who has seen Sam Jones’ 2002 documentary about the band, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, isn’t likely to forget Bennett’s overbearing obsessiveness or Tweedy’s retreating to the bathroom to throw up after a confrontation with his bandmate.
Still, I’ve given up waiting for the next great Wilco album.
Similarly, while Neil Young has earned the right to record any sort of album he wants, after listening to Peace Trail (2016) and The Monsanto Years (2015) I’m starting to wonder if he even bothers to rehearse the band anymore.
I mean, c’mon. Show us a little respect.