A lot of movies these days don’t have any opening credits—not even the title shows up until the end of the film. This one gives us the title, and a long list of actors, but no credits for writing or directing. As the movie unfolds, it becomes clear that this couldn’t be a movie by some nobody: it’s a cinematic adaptation of an imaginary 19th-century anthology of half a dozen tales of the American West, each beginning with a full-page painted illustration of a scene from the story, and who had the cultural capital to make such a weird project a reality? Around the turn of the millennium I picked up the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain series, a set of facsimile editions of every book Twain published in his own lifetime. A lot of them were collections very much like this. But even at his most pessimistic—and he went through some very pessimistic periods—Twain rarely told stories as garishly dark as these. There is some tonal variation:
A very broad and cold-hearted parody of a couple of nearly extinct cinematic genres
A tale of an incompetent criminal with some real gallows humor
A story in which the joke is how great a curse life can be and just how little one’s life can be valued by others
The most upbeat installment of the lot, in which a man enters an idyllic, untouched landscape, tears it up, gets into a murderous squabble, and disappears
A heartbreakingly tragic scenario in which everything adds up to go precisely wrong for some lovable characters, for the universe is just that cruel
A Twilight Zone episode, to end things on an eerie note
With a list like that, I probably should have known what was coming when the writing and directing credits finally did pop up, but I didn’t. Then they appeared, and about 0.1 seconds later I thought, “Ohhh, of course!” So, belatedly, here are my credits for this movie:
Jack London, Stewart Edward White, Joel Coen, and Ethan Coen, 2018
#10, 2018 Skandies
Last year I watched a movie called Certain Women that put three shorts together and said, “These stories are all set in Montana, so, bing, a unified whole!” It didn’t work. This does. Yes, it pulls together six short stories that, as noted, vary in tone, but I liked the way that, by telling different stories, the Coens were able to hit so many elements of the western: the singing cowboy, the sharpshooter, the quick-draw showdown, the bank robber, the cattle rustler, the little mining town, the prospector, the Oregon Trail, the stagecoach. The conceit that we’re reading a 19th-century book is a good one: those color plates, and the way that the captions for them are all previewed for us at the start of the movie, are an example of masterful literary technique applied to film. And there are enough motifs from the first four episodes (e.g., the mark of Cain, the Comanche attack, playing possum) that pay off in the crucial fifth episode to make the whole a bit more than the sum of its parts. And yet… I dunno. “The Gal Who Got Rattled”, all on its own, might make my pantheon, and this full anthology won’t. But there just aren’t many venues for 38-minute films.
Peter Rock, Anne Rosellini, and Debra Granik, 2018
completely spoils bothmovie and book
#9, 2018 Skandies
One thought I have often had while on road trips through vast patches of wilderness, or pulling up coordinates for Stochastic Planet with no inhabitants within a hundred-mile radius, is: What if you were to just chuck it all and go live there? Could you just disappear for years, or decades, in the United States or Canada, simply by relocating to somewhere no one ever goes? And by “you” I mean you, not me, because I have no wilderness survival skills—I barely even have suburban survival skills. But there was a time when the entire world was wilderness, and humans managed to survive. They usually did so in bands of maybe thirty or fifty people, but I’ve read plenty of accounts of fur trappers in the Old West (one shows up in the last segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs!) who went it alone, or with a single companion. So would it actually be feasible go somewhere, probably somewhere forested so air patrols can’t find you, and make a home there?
That is what the guy in this movie has tried to do. He’s not in the wilderness, exactly, but in Forest Park, a 5000-acre preserve in the Tualatin Mountains, technically within the city limits of Portland, Oregon. He doesn’t shun civilization entirely—he makes occasional runs into town for groceries and to stop at the VA hospital to pick up his prescription meds, which he sells to other tent-dwellers as his primary source of income. And he’s not alone—sharing his wilderness life is his daughter. She’s of middle school age, but has never actually attended school; nevertheless, thanks to her father’s tutoring and a bedraggled copy of an encyclopedia, she’s at grade level. They have a very close relationship, even sharing a tent, but despite the suspicions of everyone they run into, he’s not molesting her and he’s not trafficking her. There is no dark secret.
At least, there isn’t in the movie. I was surprised to check the book on which it is based out of the library and discover that the final third or so of the movie and the book are wildly different. Each is an invention, even though the first half or so of both book and movie borrow heavily from real life: in 2004, a 53-year-old man and his 12-year-old daughter were in fact found having lived in Forest Park for four years, the child having been homeschooled (or tentschooled) with the help of an encyclopedia. Discovered by a jogger and brought in by the police, they were each vetted and cleared by the local social services, who found them housing in rural Yamhill County—the dad was to earn his keep by working on the farm where the house was located, while the daughter was to attend school for the first time. But after a couple of weeks, they disappeared, and are thought to have returned to living in the wilderness, this time somewhere in the Coast Range. Both the movie and the book follow this chain of events closely, and while they diverge from there, they both posit that a grim twist of fate awaits the dad. In the movie, he is seriously injured in the woods, and while waiting for him to return, the daughter looks through their zip-lock bag of “important papers”, and to the extent that he does have a secret she discovers it: she finds newspaper clippings about vets of the ’00s neocon wars committing suicide, and we gather (though it is already pretty clear) that the dad’s insistence on living in the wilderness has been brought on by war trauma. In the book, he is murdered by a pair of transients, and a dark secret actually is revealed at this point, as the girl recovers a repressed memory that her father had kidnapped her from a foster home in Boise, and that she has a sister still living there. She makes her way to Idaho to reunite with her sister and foster parents, only to decide that she doesn’t want that after all—though she spots her sister at the elementary school she herself had once attended, she doesn’t wave or call out, struck with the feeling that, no, they’re just too different now. She has become accustomed to wilderness living and wants to return to that life to whatever extent she can. In the movie, by contrast, the girl gets help for her dad from some of the locals, who put them up in an RV. She likes living indoors and being a member of a community, just as (again, in the movie) she had liked living on the farm, having possessions beyond what she could carry, and going to 4‑H meetings with the local kids. When the dad, the moment he recovers, starts getting ready to return to the wilderness, this time the daughter makes it clear that she’s not coming along: “The same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me.”
I remember that when Photopia was optioned to be adapted into a film, the head of the production company told me that there would almost certainly be changes that I disagreed with, and that in such cases he would try to find solutions we could both live with, but that ultimately I would not be the one with the final say. I assume it is the case with most adaptations. And in this case, I think I preferred Rosellini and Granik’s film to Rock’s book. Still, I have to think that it takes an impressive amount of equanimity to see something you’ve written get turned into a movie with the exact opposite thematic statement. Leave no trace of the point of the original story, amirite?
The Dead Zone
Stephen King, Jeffrey Boam, and David Cronenberg, 1983
spoils theending
We briefly interrupt our 2018 Skandies countdown for some quick remarks on movies I watched with Ellie this past weekend.
I saw something like the last 25 minutes of The Dead Zone on cable around thirty years ago, but this was my first time watching the whole thing. You probably know the premise: guy has cerebral trauma and emerges from a coma to discover that by touching someone’s hand he can receive psychic flashes of that person’s past, present, or future. In the end, he shakes the hand of a populist senatorial candidate and discovers that in the future this candidate will be president and launch a first-strike nuclear war purely out of a megalomaniacal sense of “destiny”. The psychic resolves to assassinate him. His assassination attempt fails, but the candidate attempts to shield himself with a baby, thereby ending any political aspirations he might have had. As I observed about A Face in the Crowd, these days that looks awfully naive. Today we know that if a demagogue tried to use a baby to shield himself from an assassin, tens of millions of people in his cult would insist that it was fine because that baby was no angel.
Living in Oblivion
Tom DiCillo, 1995
This time I saw the whole thing on cable around thirty years ago—twenty-seven years ago, to be precise. I had a vague memory that it had left me a little cold, but when it popped up on one of the streaming services, it seemed like a good candidate for a rewatch—that was more than half my lifetime ago and perhaps this time it’d do more for me. Alas, no. It’s one joke (indie movie director is trying to shoot a scene, but something goes wrong!) done over and over again for half an hour, and then that half hour is done three times (as the first two times, a character wakes up and we learn it was all a dream). And I have a whole pattern (Pattern 43) about how I don’t like movies about filmmaking. Still, I am happy with my selection because Ellie enjoyed it a lot more than I did—she said that the cascade of things going wrong captured the feeling of a typical day at all sorts of workplaces. Based on what I’ve seen in the news, it certainly seems to be the case at Twitter.
Also, while Steve Buscemi is famous for having never really looked young (“How do you do, fellow kids?”), after watching him play Nikita Khrushchev, it made for no small amount of whiplash to see him here with long, dark hair and his Mr. Pink facial hair. We were all so much further away from actual oblivion then…
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