The Trench

So with my review for David Lynch’s astonishingly unpleasant Inland Empire lodged in my craw like a fetid chicken bone (hey, it’s a masterpiece) – I open the Times today to find that Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84. Funny, I thought to myself, he already seemed a lot older than that when I saw him on some television show a couple of years ago. Truth is, I hadn’t read any of Vonnegut’s newer novels (I gave up on Timequake after about thirty pages), but his essay a few years ago on war and religion and politics and addiction and general madness (it’s called “Cold Turkey” and it’s required) reminded me of the quicksilver of his erudition when aimed at subjects close to my heart.

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying.”

My first exposure to Vonnegut wasn’t through Slaughterhouse 5 as it is for many – but rather Breakfast of Champions, in junior high. For a thirteen-year-old, it’s pretty much life changing. Like figuring out when the protag in London’s “To Build a Fire” doesn’t actually, that there is such a thing as irony and unhappy endings in art and life. It causes a moment of cultural clarity; an existential displacement wherein, suddenly, things lumped into “pastime” and “entertainment” can actually hold lessons for life looming in the shadows of all that positive affirmation. A lot of people point at movies and say that they don’t want to go see something they see everyday on the news – that they go to movies to “escape”. But in saying that, as in so many similar statements, I have a lot of doubts that these people watch the news at all.

But Breakfast of Champions, yeah, and from there it was Cat’s Cradle and the end of the world – and then Slaughterhouse 5 and the Americans (!) raining liquid fire on a civilian population that included Vonnegut and a few other POWs from the Battle of the Bulge – and of course aliens and time travel because what other explanation, or surcease, could there be from that kind of madness? I learned a lot about writing from Vonnegut – not that I write like, or as well, or with as much wit and insight – but what I did learn was that it was all right to be angry with the status quo and with the happy acceptance of it, even when all evidence seems to point to Abyss. I’m not up to writing a proper eulogy of someone like Vonnegut – but the irony is that Vonnegut makes me want to do it anyway.

“How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into Religion I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.”

With the collapse of Grindhouse at the Almighty Box Office and the Weinsteins’ quick assertion that the audience is too stupid for it and that they will split it into two films for possible re-release in order to recoup their costs, Vonnegut comes to mind again as a guy who resists the very madness represented by the ABO. That we care at all is a function of bean counters and publicists. That it has begun to inform opinions of quality is frightening in the sense that anything can still be frightening that is so much part of the vulgate. Incidentally or not, I had a letter this week asking me to reconsider Blades of Glory.

G'night, Billy Pilgrim.

Went to a screening this week of Hot Fuzz and was gratified by the amount of gore in it. It’s surprising and extremely well done.

Of the seven or so major releases this weekend, the only one I screened (due to illness, availability, and so on) was Perfect Stranger and that at a last minute event designed to retard the number of reviews for it. I’ll do it on the radio, but I doubt that I have the energy to write about it with other, more worthy pictures, waiting to be reviewed. Writer’s block is blazing as well. As it is, I’m doing this little piece with a 101 fever that I’ve been nursing like cinder Otik for five days now. The flick is vaguely racist and certainly misogynistic, but then, you knew that.

Watched Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a little horror picture that’s been making some waves lately on the Internet. It’s diverting, I’ll give it that.

Doing a presentation of Rabbit Proof Fence tomorrow and then, on Saturday, of North by Northwest. One is critic-proof, the other is misanthropic: discuss.

Question of the moment: why did Grindhouse crash and burn in the popular conversation and what’s the fate of Tarantino’s creative freedom from this point forward as a result of it? For my part I should have said in the review for what it’s worth that I had more fun watching Grindhouse as part of a packed screening audience than any film since the first Jackass.

Also: best Vonnegut film adaptation? and best non-official (as in non-Vonnegut, Vonnegut) Vonnegut film? And, of course, best Vonnegut not yet-adapted and/or dream director/Vonnegut piece. . . say. . . Alfonso Cuaron and Cat’s Cradle?