This week's episode of the movie podcast was something I'd been thinking about doing for a while but never got around to setting up: recommendations. The Beast movie was recommended by an out of nowhere email that I've since returned to only to realize the person who sent it never gave their name. The other movie, The Messiah of Evil, was sent my way by Josh Simmons. The star of Messiah is Marianna Hill, who recently showed up in The Baby, a creep festival about a family of women who keep their brother in a crib, treating him like a baby all of his life. His social worker shows up and upsets the apple cart for her own reasons. While watching The Baby, I felt very keenly that at any second all of the characters were going to start licking each other's bodies--it's got a real vibe for a movie rated PG. Messiah is also a real vibe kinda movie, but the sex always felt like it had already taken place, and that you were catching up with people in stinkier rooms. Nina wasn't a fan, but it sparked some decent conversations about her general dislike for movies that operate at that kind of languid pace, with characters that are either repellent or idiotic--it's stuck with me, weeks later.
The other thing that popped up in that episode was the latest Jack Reacher book, The Sentinel--to use Morgan's phrasing, it's a "torch passer". Lee Child has decided he's no longer interested in writing the books (according to one of my two key suppliers of Jack Reacher related information, Lee doesn't "like" Jack anymore), and he's passing the responsibility off on his brother Andrew. Andrew had to adopt Lee's moniker (the books are credited to Lee Child with the words "& Andrew" in tiny letters between the "Lee" and the "Child"), but he doesn't seem capable of bringing anything else to the table. While the book follows some general Reacher patterns--he shows up in a small town where a larger force is closing in on an innocent person, there's a couple of valiant law enforcement types that team up with Jack, and he hurts people and shows an unconvincing interest in blues music --it reads terribly, veering back and forth from reading like the outline of a Jack Reacher book to something else entirely, a dull and cringe-filed series of mugging and jokes. The plot eventually turns into a thing about the sanctity of the American electoral system, with The Sentinel eventually revealed as some godlike firewall system whose ability to protect American computers from Russian interference is so total that Russia has no choice but to activate 60 year old sleeper cells and whatever mercs Putin can find. There's a ransomware plot, a sexy Nazi maid, underground bunkers in Pleasantville, Tennesseee. It's all extremely bad. I was going to write about it in more detail and try to partner it up with Marilynne Robinson's Jack, another long running series of books that also completely torpedoed all of my goodwill, but this little tangent will have to do. Here's what I thought about that one.
Jack
By Marilynne Robinson, 2020
This is the fourth book in Robinson's series of books surrounding the same general series of events and characters, following Gilead, Home & Lila. Like those three books, it features a push and pull relationship with the way intelligent people grapple with questions of Christian faith. The previous books met with justified critical acclaim, cash and prizes, and a welcome boost in recent years due to Barack Obama's continued support for the writer and these titles in general. I'd be curious if he finds this one as much of a disappointment as I did. Unlike the previous three, where issues of race where grappled with via the main character's observance of race through their own, primarily white, lens, this one puts a black woman far closer to the center of the narrative, and Robinson's mystifying inability to give her even the most basic of an interior life is only surpassed by the failure of the book's opening salvo to achieve the same levels of grace that have laced everything I've read by her. That sequence--where the titular Jack wanders a large cemetery with the black woman he loves and they talk all night--is devoid of humor, true human expression and most of all, love. It's a scene that has to work for the book to succeed, to build a franchise of passion and connection that make sense of the impossible difficulty the two characters are set to embrace if they attempt to be together. It doesn't. Instead, Jack is presented as the latest in that long string of brilliant, tragic men destroyed by their alcoholism that populate so much of what is considered serious American fiction. All the tropes of the cliche are there, with Jack surrounded by a horde of loving victims and enablers, forever forgiving, with those who break ranks portrayed as cruel and unfeeling beasts (who may occasionally conclude their criticisms with stammered apologies), but worst of all: Robinson fails to ever present what it is that makes Jack so appealing in the first place. In the same way that her opening meet-cute never becomes cute, Jack's appeal never adds up. It doesn't help matters that the first three books were so efficient in displaying how, from an outside perspective, Jack's occasional forays into theological discussion (to say nothing of his performative suffering) gave those books theologically obsessed characters a chance to exercise faith-in-action. Here, Jack's rambling, argumentative riffs on mortality and feeling come across as immature, stunted, and worst of all: self-pitying. If he'd been met by a partner who pushed for more, who challenged him the way his father is presented in previous books, it's possible that Robinson could have found the elegance that makes up so much of the dialog in Gilead. Instead she shies away from even honoring the physical act of love that the two characters--one black, one white, both the children of faith--feel compelled towards despite the consequences that it will (and does) bring about for them. Instead, it's another book in the long history of American letters and art, where a black person exists to provide an inspirational mirror for a good, but flawed, white character. Coming along at a time when America's literary establishment has found real financial success through a performance of anti-racism that attempts to supplant the action of change by purchasing the feeling of change, it's a massive disappointment. Robinson is someone who has thought and written so keenly in the past, and to see her blow it this badly is hard to watch.
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The comics podcast that came out this week has been in the tank for a few weeks--there's been a real fiasco as of late getting even a fraction of the room noise out of them, and between that and trying not to lose either of my two jobs, I've struggled to get them out on time. But I think i've cracked how to make them sound a bit better, and hopefully it'll be back on schedule? (I've had this same series of thoughts enough times in the last six months to know something else is about to go wrong.) The focus on this one is on ourselves, so I don't have much to add here. I will say that I wish I had been reading the book i'm currently reading before we recorded this episode though, because having the ability to have quoted the book--Jonathan Rosenbaum's Placing Movies--would have been a really succinct way to feel useful when the boys are delivering so intelligently.
Rosenbaum is not and will never be one of my favorite film critics, if i'm going purely off of the metric of "can this guy help me to find movies that I will actually enjoy"--I just don't share his taste or style of watching. I also think he's deeply unfunny, and while he thankfully doesn't try to be funny that often, it makes reading him for long periods an unpleasant experience. Why? Because he's a catty bitch. And the thing about catty bitching in criticism is that it's only entertaining on a long spectrum if the person in charge is funny--and Rosenbaum is just too full of himself. He's one of those guys who mastered the art of saying "I don't actually care that much" about things they are clearly obsessed with long before everybody on Twitter became a person who does that. And so even when you agree with him--and when it comes down to it, his catty complaints about how self-obsessed certain segments of film criticism are with themselves are pretty much always spot-on--you find yourselves in agreement with something so fucking lame and useless (bickering between movie reviewers!) that it'll make you want to jump off a bridge. Rosenbaum also can spin out on the act of movie viewing that makes the experience sound so medicinal and dull that it's hard to believe any of the things he describes are remotely enjoyable, even when it's things you've seen yourself and are fully aware that they are, in fact, extremely enjoyable.
But I'm liking it a lot anyway! He keeps pulling out these little moments--a quote about how the New Yorker works to create a posture of concern that eliminates the need to have actual concern or do anything for anybody that isn't you, or pulling a quote from an early 90s movie reviewer that wondered how much of the audiences rejection of awareness and canonization of total fucking idiots as tastemaker had to do with said audience being too victimized to believe they were capable of having their own taste...its got a lot of little rabbit holes in it, enough to paper over the amount of score settling that shows up throughout the books terrible structure, which sees each section opening with Rosenbaum re-litigating every criticism, real or imagined, ever leveled against him for the essays that are about to be reprinted in these sections. Anyway: it's a useful book and it reads well. I like arguing with it in my head, and I'm glad I didn't read it when it first came out, because I probably would have accepted a lot of his nonsense at face value.
-Tucker Stone, 2020
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