Reviews: Suze (2025)

I reviewed this lovely Canadian film for Ebert.

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“Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.” — Charles Dickens

DICKENS MISCELLANIA: QUOTES AND APPRECIATIONS

My favorite Dickens? Oliver Twist was my gateway drug. I read it when I was 11. Because I was obsessed with the movie. Tale of Two Cities came next. Read when I was 15 in 10th grade, under the tutelage Mr. Crothers, my great great English teacher. I’m sure I read Christmas Carol when I was a kid: going to see Trinity Repertory’s annual production of it, it was part of the air I breathed as a child. But then came all of the others. Great Expectations. Dombey & Son, Pickwick Papers. David Copperfield. And, for me, the Grand Pooh-Bah: Bleak House.

Charles Dickens, “Hunted Down”:

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

William Thackeray, after finishing the fifth installment of “Dombey and Son”:

“There’s no writing against such power as this – one has no chance! Read that chapter describing young Paul’s death: It is unsurpassed – it is stupendous!”


Letterhead for Charles Dickens’ literary magazine, ‘All the Year Round’, founded in 1859

Queen Victoria wrote in her journal two days after Charles Dickens died in 1870:

It is a very great loss. He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

[William Cullen] Bryant became a big noise in American journalism, a champion of liberal causes, and a catalyst. When [Charles] Dickens arrived in New York, he is reported to have asked on coming down the gangplank, “Where’s Bryant?”

Charles Dickens kept up a voluminous correspondence. He responded to fan mail, to reader questions, to any letter that came across his desk. In 1866, a woman wrote him about her desire to be a writer and if Dickens had any advice. Here is Dickens’ reply, dated December 27, 1866:

Dear Madame, you make an absurd, though common mistake in supposing that any human creature can help you to be an authoress, if you cannot become one in virtue of your own powers.

Charles Dickens:

I don’t go upstairs to bed 2 nights out of 7 without taking Washington Irving under my arm.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, November 30, 1954:

I’ve been reading Dickens, too, volume by volume by volume, and having a wonderful time. That abundance and playfulness and slopping allover the place is sowonderful.

Charles Dickens, after reading the manuscript of Robert Browning’s “A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’ in 1842:

“I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the old servant [Gerard] begin his tale upon the scene [II, i]; and be taken by the throat, or drawn upon, by his master, in its commencement. But the tragedy I never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you tell Browning that I have seen it [ms.], tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.”

Charles Dickens
By Dorothy Parker

Who call him spurious and shoddy
Shall do it o’er my lifeless body.
I heartily invite such birds
To come outside and say those words!

L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, wrote in her journal:

I first read [Pickwick Papers] when a child — there was an old coverless copy lying around the house and I reveled in it. I remember that it was a book that always made me hungry.”

William Styron:

E.M. Forster refers to “flat” and “round” characters. I try to make all of mine round. It takes an extrovert like Dickens to make flat characters come alive.

Ralph Ellison:

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Saul Bellow:

“Dickens’s London is gloomy, but also cozy. And yet realism has always offered to annihilate precisely such qualities. That is to say, if you want to be ultimately realistic you bring artistic space itself in danger. In Dickens, there is no void beyond the fog. The environment is human, at all times.

Jeanette Winterson:

Dickens is to me the most interesting example of a great Victorian writer, who by sleight of hand convinces his audience that he is what he is not; a realist. I admit that there are tracts of Dickens that walk where they should fly but no writer can escape the spirit of the age and his was an age suspicious of the more elevated forms of transport. What is remarkable is how much of his work is winged; winged as poems are through the aerial power of words.

Evelyn Waugh:

[Dickens] liked adulation and he liked showing off. But he was still deeply antagonistic to Victorianism.

Peter Carey:

[Edward] Said was writing about Magwitch, the convict from Great Expectations, who is a classic Australian figure. There he is, trasnported to Australia, a free man after serving his seven-year sentence. He is an Englishman, but only as long as he doesn’t go to England. But he is so fucked by it all that he’d rather risk his life to go back to England and sit at the feet of his invented gentleman child and have cakes and ale. I thought, Oh, that’s so good. Up until that stage in my life I hadn’t read much Dickens. I’d always had trouble with the saccharine little girls – in Bleak House, for instance. Much easier to watch on television for me. But after reading Said I thought, I better read Dickens. I was astonished that I enjoyed The Pickwick Papers. I found in Great Expectations a perfect book, and not a lot of saccharine little girls either. Then I started to read about Dickens. That’s how I got to Jack Maggs.

James Baldwin:

I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom that the major ones don’t. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven’t got the same weight or intensity.

William Faulkner:

“My favorite characters are Sarah Gamp – a cruel, ruthless woman, a drunkard, opportunist, unreliable, most of her character was bad, but at least it was character; Mrs. Harris, Falstaff, Prince Hal, Don Quixote, and Sancho of course. Lady Macbeth I always admired. And Bottom, Ophelia, and Mercutio – both he and Mrs. Gamp coped with life, didn’t ask any favors, never whined. Huck Finn, of course, and Jim. Tom Sawyer I never liked much – an awful prig.”

Robert Stone:

Many writers of my generation, which was spared television in its youth, grew up with their sense of narrative influenced by the structure of film. And you can go back much further to see that. Joyce, for example. Interestingly, Dickens seems to have anticipated the shape of the movies – look at the first few pages of Great Expectations.

George Orwell wrote an essay on Dickens, a fascinating vigorous and scoldypants analysis. Orwell was not noted for his sense of humor, and Dickens, above all else, is FUN. He should be FUN, George, remember? Still, it’s a must-read. Here are two excerpts:

The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still remembered as monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes afterwards effaces it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one seems always to remember them in one particular attitude, doing one particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out brimstone and treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging her husband’s head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling tracta while her children fall into the area — and there they all are, fixed for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and yet somehow more solid and infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer. As Ruskin said, he “chose to work in a circle of stage fire”. His characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smolett’s. But there are no rules in novel-writing, and for any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about — survival. By this test Dickens’s characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they exist.

And here Orwell writes about Dickens’ gift for writing about childhood:

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one reads it.

Christopher Hitchens wrote, in a book review of Peter Aykroyd’s biography of Dickens:

So I find the plan of my original enterprise falling away from me; I must give it up; there is something formidable about Dickens that may not be gainsaid.

Martin Amis:

When I am stuck with a sentence that isn’t fully born, it isn’t yet there, I sometimes think, How would Dickens go at this sentence, how would Bellow or Nabokov go at this sentence? What you have to emerge with is how you would go at that sentence, but you get a little shove in the back by thinking about writers you admire. I was once winding up a telephone conversation with Saul Bellow and he said, Well you go back to work now, and I said, All right, and he said, Give ’em hell. And it’s Dickens saying, Give ’em hell. Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.

Editor Robert Gottlieb:

The most famous case of editorial intervention in English literature has always bothered me – you know, that Dickens’s friend Bulwer-Lytton advised him to change the end of Great Expectations. I don’t want to know that!”

Jeanette Winterson, in her essay “Writer, Reader, Words”:

Dickens is to me the most interesting example of a great Victorian writer, who by sleight of hand convinces his audience that he is what he is not; a realist. I admit that there are tracts of Dickens that walk where they should fly but no writer can escape the spirit of the age and his was an age suspicious of the more elevated forms of transport. What is remarkable is how much of his work is winged; winged as poems are through the aerial power of words.

David O. Selznick, independent movie producer, was a huge fan of Charles Dickens. He said later on in life that he could point out punctuation errors in new editions of Dickens’ novels, so well did he know all of those books. Here are two memos from Selznick in re: film adaptations of various books by Dickens:

To: Mrs Kate Corbaley
June 3, 1935

It is amazing that Dickens had so many brilliant characters in David Copperfield and practically none in A Tale of Two Cities, and herein lies the difficulty. The book is sheer melodrama and when the scenes are put on the screen, minus Dickens’s brilliant narrative passages, the mechanics of melodramtic construction are inclined to be more than apparent, and, in fact, to creak. Don’t think that I am for a minute trying to run down one of the greatest books in the English language. I am simply trying to point out to you the difficulties of getting the Dickens feeling, within our limitations of being able to put on the screen only action and dialogue scenes, without Dickens’s comments as narrator. I am still trying my hardest and think that when I get all through, the picture will be a job of which I will be proud – but it is and will be entirely different from David Copperfield.

My study of the book led me to what may seem strange choices for the writing and direction, but these strange choices were deliberate. Since the picture is melodrama, it must have pace and it must “pack a wallop”. These, I think, Conway can give us as well as almost anyone I knew – as witnessed by his work on Viva Villa! Furthermore, I think he has a knack of bringing people to life on the screen, while the dialogue is on the stilted side. (I fought for many months to get the actual phrases out of David Copperfield into the picture, and I have been fighting similarly on Two Cities, but the difference is that the dialogue of the latter, if you will read it aloud, is not filled with nearly the humanity, or nearly the naturalness.

As to Sam Behrman, I think he is one of the best of American dialogue writers. Futhermore, he is an extremely literate and cultured man, with an appreciation of fine things and a respect for the integrity of a classic – more than ninety per cent more than all the writers I know. He can be counted upon to give me literacy that wiol match. On top of this, he is especially equipped, in my opinion, to give us the rather sardonic note in [Sidney] Carton.

Here is another memo from David O. Selznick:

To: Mr. Nicholas M. Schenck
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.
October 3, 1935

I should like also to call to your attention the danger of treating this picture [Tale of Two Cities] as just another [Ronald] Colman starring vehicle. Granted that Colman is a big star; that any picture with him achieves a good gross; A Tale of Two Cities, even badly produced, would completely dwarf the importance of any star … The picture is beautifully produced. If I do not say this, no one else in the organization will. It has been splendidly directed by Jack Conway; and Colman is at his very top. Further, bear in mind that the book of A Tale of Two Cities would without Colman have a potential drawing power equaled only by David Copperfield, Little Women, and The Count of Monte Cristo among the films of recent years because only these books have an even comparable place in the affections of the reading public. This is no modern best seller of which one hundred thousand copies have been published, but a book that is revered by millions – yes, and tens of millions of people here and abroad.

Tens of millions. And counting.

dickens-at-desk

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“For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth…” — Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine


Maybe this is him.

I’m armed with more than complete steel,
The justice of my quarrel.
— Christopher Marlowe, Lust’s Dominion. Act iii. Sc. 4.

Playwright, poet, prodigy, agent in Her Majesty’s secret service: the incomparable Christopher Marlowe was born on this day.

Marlowe was accused of putting atheistic ideas into his plays, and was on the verge of being arrested, when he was stabbed to death on May 30, 1593. Not much is known about him. It seems he was a spy of some kind. He was also a drinker, a fighter, a lover, and … a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. How did the two men inform and perhaps copy one another? Evidence shows that it was Shakespeare who did most of the copying. Scholars have studied this literary symbiosis for years. The answer (who copied whom) is less interesting than the inquiry itself. Info on Shakespeare is slim (way slimmer than what we have on Marlowe). There’s very little evidence left behind (besides the plays and sonnets, I mean.)

That Marlowe would die in a sword-scuffle with “Ingram” over who was going to pick up the check (or … was there more to it??) … means there’s a lot to keep conspiracy theorists happy for centuries.

“And so it befell, in that affray, that the said Ingram, in the defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher a mortal wound above his right eye.” — Coroner’s inquest, 1593

Continue reading

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“Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.” — poet Anne Spencer

Anne Bethel Scales Bannister Spencer was yet another poet-librarian, like Dudley Randall, and many others. It was part of a tradition, one worthy of more study (there are websites devoted to it!). As the daughter of a librarian, I am always drawn to these particular journeys, since libraries are not just buildings, they are symbols, and librarians are in charge of a public trust. For an African-American in an earlier era, becoming a librarian was one way to further education, but also …. it goes way way beyond that. Just consider: to a librarian, knowledge is a lifelong process. You aren’t just educated during the brief years you go to school. Or, SOME people are, but those aren’t the people we are talking about. Education, to many, is a way of life, whether you’re in school or not. This was true of the people who joined the poet-librarian tradition. So, let’s hear it for poet-librarians.

Anne Spencer is primarily associated with the Harlem Renaissance, although she didn’t live in New York, was far removed from that whole scene. But she was one of the many poets writing at that time, bringing her own voice to a rich and diverse movement. Her legacy is a living one, primarily because of her home and her extraordinary garden – in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her home continues to be a tourist attraction (and it was during her life as well! It was a gathering place for travelers, admirers, garden-lovers, poetry lovers, civil rights activists). Anne Spencer’s home and garden is now on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Aren’t human beings interesting?

Anne Spencer was born in 1882 in Virginia. After her parents separated, her mother got a job in an inn in a community with a very tight-knit and established Black community – lots of entrepreneurs, small businesses – rare at the time. It helped form her outlook on life. The two stayed with a big family, and Anne enjoyed a luxury that so few children – even less so black children – had at the time: lots and lots of free time. She didn’t have to go to work, her mother didn’t send her to school at first, so she had all this free time to … think and dream and walk in the woods (she loved nature) and just BE. She taught herself to read by poring through Sears & Roebuck catalogs. (There have been some really interesting pieces on the democratization of our world through the Sears catalogs – this is beyond the scope of this piece, but if you’re interested, just Google around, and you’ll find some really fascinating commentary. I love that the Sears & Roebuck catalogs play a part in opening Anne Spencer’s mind to LANGUAGE.)

When her father – not on the scene physically, but still present in her life – learned that Anne wasn’t going to school, he hit the roof. Anne was then enrolled in a seminary school. She really couldn’t read and write, she was far behind all the other students. But she was eager to learn, and quickly excelled, rising to the top of her class. She then became a teacher, and married someone she met at the seminary, Charles Edward Spencer. They were a real power couple. She became the librarian at the all-black Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, and maintained that job for 20 years.

Speaking of Dunbar: Here’s Anne Spencer’s poem for Paul Laurence Dunbar (post about him here).

Dunbar
Ah, how poets sing and die!
Make one song and Heaven takes it;
Have one heart and Beauty breaks it;
Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I—
Ah, how poets sing and die!

It was when she decided to open up a chapter of NAACP in Lynchburg, in 1919, that the “break” occurred. James Weldon Johnson (post about him here), during a visit with her, found out she wrote poetry. He recognized instantly that she was good. He sent her work off to H.L. Mencken, who felt the same way as Johnson did once he read it. (I love people who HELP. Mencken – post about him here – was often that “helping” figure to the major names of this era. His name comes up constantly, a testament to his stature in the literary world.) Anne’s first poem was published in the NAACP magazine “The Crisis.” Her work spread quickly. She was included in almost every anthology (and was the second African-American to be added to the Norton Anthology of Poetry).

But let’s talk about her HOUSE. I have never visited it, but if I’m ever in that area of the country I will be sure to make a stop. She and her husband devoted time, energy, and finances, into creating this oasis. The garden was key. Anne was a devoted gardener, and the natural world is one of the main “characters” in her poetry (it’s not a surprise she loops herself in with Keats in the poem “Dunbar” above.) During her lifetime, people would travel from all around to take tours through her garden.

Why does this move me so much?

Here she is, in her famous garden:

In 2018, Spencer was paid tribute to by being put on a postage stamp:

Here are a couple of her poems. The second, “At the Carnival” is my favorite.

TABOO

Being a Negro Woman is the world’s most exciting
game of “Taboo”: By hell there is nothing you can
do that you want to do and by heaven you are
going to do it anyhow—
We do not climb into the jim crow galleries
of scenario houses we stay away and read
I read garden and seed catalogs, Browning,
Housman, Whitman, Saturday Evening Post
detective tales, Atlantic Monthly, American
Mercury, Crisis, Opportunity, Vanity Fair,
Hibberts Journal, oh, anything.
I can cook delicious things to eat. . .
we have a lovely home—-one that
money did not buy—-it was born and evolved
slowly out of our passionate, poverty-
striken agony to own our own home.
happiness

At the Carnival

Gay little Girl-of-the-Diving-Tank,
I desire a name for you,
Nice, as a right glove fits;
For you—who amid the malodorous
Mechanics of this unlovely thing,
Are darling of spirit and form.
I know you—a glance, and what you are
Sits-by-the-fire in my heart.
My Limousine-Lady knows you, or
Why does the slant-envy of her eye mark
Your straight air and radiant inclusive smile?
Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.
The bull-necked man knows you—this first time
His itching flesh sees form divine and vibrant health
And thinks not of his avocation.
I came incuriously—
Set on no diversion save that my mind
Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds
In the presence of a blind crowd.
The color of life was gray.
Everywhere the setting seemed right
For my mood. Here the sausage and garlic booth
Sent unholy incense skyward;
There a quivering female-thing
Gestured assignations, and lied
To call it dancing;
There, too, were games of chance
With chances for none;
But oh! Girl-of-the-Tank, at last!
Gleaming Girl, how intimately pure and free
The gaze you send the crowd,
As though you know the dearth of beauty
In its sordid life.
We need you—my Limousine-Lady,
The bull-necked man and I.
Seeing you here brave and water-clean,
Leaven for the heavy ones of earth,
I am swift to feel that what makes
The plodder glad is good; and
Whatever is good is God.
The wonder is that you are here;
I have seen the queer in queer places,
But never before a heaven-fed
Naiad of the Carnival-Tank!
Little Diver, Destiny for you,
Like as for me, is shod in silence;
Years may seep into your soul
The bacilli of the usual and the expedient;
I implore Neptune to claim his child to-day!

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“and I / spoke with tongues that sent their devotees / out of this world!” — poet Melvin B. Tolson

“I, as a black poet, have absorbed the Great Ideas of the Great White World, and interpreted them in the melting-pot idiom of my people. My roots are in Africa, Europe, and America.” – Melvin B. Tolson, 1965 interview

It’s Tolson’s birthday today.

If you’ve seen Denzel Washington’s wonderful film The Great Debaters, then you know of Melvin B. Tolson’s leadership in the “debate” world of HBCUs, and the crucial role these debates played in fermenting the rhetoric and style of argument that would then pour into the civil rights movement. It’s a fascinating film about an important part of American history, and I highly recommend it!

Melvin Tolson was a poet, but he was also a teacher and coach of the celebrated debate team, Wiley Forensic Society, at Wiley College in Texas. He was the one who began to push for debate teams from black colleges to debate teams from white colleges. This was radical, and completely unknown territory. Because … what if the debate teams from HBCUs won? (They did. Often.)


The debate team at Wiley College

Tolson was born in 1898. His parents instilled in him the importance of education. He went to a couple of different universities, became a teacher, and then went off to Columbia to get his Master’s. By this point it was the early 1930s. His thesis was on the Harlem Renaissance. Tolson was deeply influenced by the Modernist writers – he read them all – Joyce, Stein, Pound, Eliot – as well as all of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. He wasn’t from New York City. He was born in Missouri, went to colleges in the Midwest, so I think there’s something about his reaction to the Harlem Renaissance – as well as the Modernists – that had a freshness of perspective, a freshness of insight. He wasn’t a city boy, steeped in this stuff like it was the air he breathed. He felt in it the revelation that it was, the break with tradition.

Here he is reading his poem “Dark Symphony.” He’s got such a distinctive voice. He throws himself out there IN his voice. It makes me think of how he worked with his debate team kids on prosody, projection, using the voice to make rhetorical points, to build a case. This was part of many intersecting traditions, cultural and religious and political, which would reach its apex in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, with their inevitable build, their use of repetition, the way the tension increases and increases until finally some transcendence breaks through. I love listening to him.

“Dark Symphony” was included in his first published collection of poetry, Rendezvous with America, in 1944.

Much of his poetry was inspired by his time in New York, which was pretty brief, all things considered. He wrote episodic poems, impressionistic, about Harlem, its denizens, its environment. He taught at Wiley from the 1920s to 1947, and then he moved to Langston University where he taught for the next 17 years. Honestly, his influence can’t even be measured. Teachers like this change the world. Their influence spans generations.

In 1965, he published Harlem Gallery: Book One, The Curator. Although coming into the fervor of the 1960s, Harlem Gallery came out of his 1930s experiences in Harlem, and he had started the book back then. It was meant to be (and is) a panoramic view – but also a street-level view – of the life in Harlem as he saw it and experienced it, seen through the lives of three black artists, their concerns, their lives, the hot spots they frequented, how they felt about art, how they felt about the world. Voices, Harlem Gallery is filled with voices. The most important voice – or the one that everybody remembers is Hideho Heights, a man known as “poet laureate of Harlem”. The “curator” part of the title is important in understanding Tolson’s methodology and vision for the book. (He died in 1966. There would only be “Book One,” sadly.) Tolson “curated” Harlem, for the “gallery show” that was the book.

Here’s Hideho Heights:

and I, like the brims of old hats,
slouched at a sepulchered table in the Zulu Club.
Frog Legs Lux and his Indigo Combo
spoke with tongues that sent their devotees
out of this world!

Another poem by Melvin B. Tolson. (His poem about Abraham Lincoln is also superb, but it’s very long, too long to post here. Many of his poems are quite long. They all should be sought out and read.)

An Ex-Judge at the Bar

Bartender, make it straight and make it two—
One for the you in me and the me in you.
Now let us put our heads together: one
Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun.

I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law
Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw.
When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event
Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent.

What I shall tell you now, as man is man,
You’ll find in neither Bible nor Koran.
It happened after my return from France
At the bar in Tony’s Lady of Romance.

We boys drank pros and cons, sang Dixie; and then,
The bar a Sahara, we pledged to meet again.
But lo, on the bar there stood in naked scorn
The Goddess Justice, like September Morn.

Who blindfolds Justice on the courthouse roof
While the lawyers weave the sleight-of-hand of proof?
I listened, Bartender, with my heart and head,
As the Goddess Justice unbandaged her eyes and said:

“To make the world safe for Democracy,
You lost a leg in Flanders fields—oui, oui?
To gain the judge’s seat, you twined the noose
That swung the Negro higher than a goose.”

Bartender, who has dotted every i?
Crossed every t? Put legs on every y?
Therefore, I challenged her: “Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”

The boys guffawed, and Justice began to laugh
Like a maniac on a broken phonograph.
Bartender, make it straight and make it three—
One for the Negro . . . one for you and me.

QUOTES:

Langston Hughes:

No highbrow. Students revere him and love him. Kids from the cotton fields like him. Cow punchers understand him … He’s a great talker.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Perhaps no work more successfully synthesizes the twin legacies of the Harlem Renaissance and Euro-American modernism than Harlem Gallery. As indicated by its subtitle, Book I, The Curator, this twenty-four part poem, divided into sections headed with letters of the Greek alphabet, was originally intended to be the first of a five-part poetic sequence on the history of African Americans. Like the modernist sequences of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hart Crane, Tolson’s was an ambitious poem of epic proportions, interweaving multiple voices, narratives, and references. Allusion is the poem’s primary device for sustaining compression, efficiently summoning stories, characters, historical events, and previous texts from a stunning array of sources. Upon the publication of his magnum opus, Tolson was said to have “out-pounded Pound.” Neoligisms, convoluted syntax, multiple layers of irony, and strained figures of speech also help create a forbidding verbal texture.

Robert Donald Spector:

Here is a poet whose language, comprehensiveness, and values demand a critical sensitivity rarely found in any establishment… Whatever his reputation in the present critical climate, Tolson stands firmly as a great American poet.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Melvin Tolson, who began his career in the Harlem Renaissance but wrote his best poetry later, fused the folk-based, oral aesthetic of poets such as [Langston] Hughes and [Sterling] Brown with the allusive strategies of Euro-American modernism in Harlem Gallery )1965), one of the last great high modernist poems. If high modernism is often grim, Tolson evinces a high-spirited delight in his ability to master, manipulate, and shift among different styles and idioms. He nimbly leaps rhetorical registers, from the curt abbreviations of slang to the over-elaborations of pedantry. Stuffed-shirt classicism jostles alongside racy innuendo. Since high modernism is already itself a culturally mixed aesthetic, and since Harlem Renaissance poets such as Hughes and Brown harness both black and white influences, Tolson further hybridizes two distinct yet already hybrid modes of poetry.

Donald B. Gibson, Reference Guide to American Literature:

On the basis of his first volume of poetry [Rendezvous with America] …it would hardly have been possible to predict the kind of poet Melvin Tolson was to be a decade later. A poet who writes ‘I gaze upon her silken loveliness / She is a passionflower of joy and pain / On the golden bed I came back to possess’ does not show particular promise. Likewise the lines ‘America is the Black Man’s country / The Red Man’s, the Yellow Man’s / The Brown Man’s, the White Man’s’ are not suggestive of the great lines yet to come.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Perhaps the premier African American poet in the high modernist tradition, Melvin Tolson was one of the most densely allusive and verbally dazzling poets of the twentieth century … Oblique and multilayered, rhetorically mannered and fiercely learned, the long poetic sequence Harlem Gallery was published at a time when the reigning paradigm in American poetry emphasized direct self-expression (the autobiographical proclivities of confessional poetry) and political assertion (the nationalist imperatives of the Black Arts Movement). Long after his death, as poets explore other possibilities, the significance of Tolson’s contribution is becoming apparently.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Nothing here is straightforward: Tolson continually signifies, riffs, and embroiders.

Robert M. Farnsworth, on “Dark Symphony”:

[The poem] celebrates the historic contribution of black Americans and their struggle to gain recognition for their achievements, ending with a proud and defiant prediction of black accomplishment and cultural realization.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry on Rendezvous with America:

… explores class antagonism and race relations in America, while also reflecting Tolson’s interest in New Negro progressivism, which defied old racial stereotypes to foster a new African-American psychology.

Donald B. Gibson on “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia”:

“[There is] a system of tensions not unlike the dynamic forces holding an atom or a galaxy together. Each element threatens to go off on its own; yet as long as the balance of forces remains constant, the system functions.

Robert Donald Spector:

One of America’s great poets.

Blyden Jackson, on “Harlem Gallery” in New Republic:

The brotherhood of man and the universality of serious art …catalyze [the poem’s] perceptions.

Donald B. Gibson, on “An Ex-Judge at the Bar”:

In style and content [it is] very much like a good deal of the later poetry and untypical of the rather commonplace character of much of the first volume. [It is] in tone typically Tolsonian. The juxtaposition of the formal and the informal, the classical and the contemporary, the familiar and the unusual accounts in large measure for the unique character of Tolson’s best poetry

Donald Gibson:

Tolson, by virtue of an extraordinary mind and intelligence, keeps a vast array of disparate elements in constant relationship. His poetry is, therefore, coherent, and its primary effect is of the containment and control of vast reserves of energy.

Denzel Washington:

What I learned while doing research for the film is that many black colleges, like Wiley and Morehouse, opened during the decade following the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. That’s because education was believed to be the way out, so when millions of black people were finally let go after almost 250 years, boom, we opened schools. And that’s partly why Melvin Tolson’s debate team was able to beat these other national teams in the ’30s: Great thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Melvin B. Tolson couldn’t teach at schools like Harvard or Columbia.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry on Harlem Gallery:

The poem celebrates both traditions, but aligns itself with neither, revealing each to be partial and flawed when uninformed by its opposite. It enacts the implicit tension between the terms Harlem and Gallery. The relation between the Harlem Renaissance and Euro-modernism is one of the great puzzles of twentieth-century poetry, and it is embodied in the jazzy yet intricately allusive sections of Tolson’s masterpiece.

 
 
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“Since the beginning, I’ve said, ‘I’m not going to get involved with my image.’” – Charlotte Rampling

It’s her birthday today.

I first saw Charlotte Rampling in Angel Heart, where she has one hauntingly weird scene: a rumpled schlubby Mickey Rourke visits her to question her. Her apartment is filled with strange artifacts, beautifully placed. The decor is a mixture of lush-bordello and shabby-chic. There is the creepy sound of the piano, the one striking notes, and the clinking of her spoon against the side of the cup. Every sound has clarity, adding to the sense of her character’s strangeness. There’s her quiet intense voice, measured, yet with dark knowledge beneath it. Her light blue eyes seem to see right through him. Charlotte Rampling is a beautiful woman, but there is an unnerving quality to her beauty. It is not come-hither beauty. It is beware-beauty.

I had no idea who she was. I was instantly intrigued and began keeping my eyes peeled for her. She’s my kind of actress. Fearless. Un-pin-down-able. Doesn’t seem to give a fuck. Doesn’t care at all about her beauty, except this it is one of the many useful tools in her arsenal. Throughout her career, she has resisted classification and type-casting and she also just doesn’t recognize any limitations. She does not make “careerist” choices. She hasn’t waited until she’s elderly to start making brave bold unconventional moves. She started OUT that way. (I always think of Rampling and Helen Mirren as similar: both of them started out making attention-getting controversial choices in what films they appeared in. They refused to be “someone’s girlfriend”. They never took boring roles. The pressure on beautiful young women to only do certain kinds of things is super intense. It takes … balls … to resist. Gena Rowlands. Theresa Russell. Bibi Andersson. Charlotte Rampling is one of THOSE.)

Angel Heart was striking, but when I rented 1974’s The Night Porter (with Dirk Bogarde) I realized who I was dealing with. Charlotte Rampling made herself known to me. If you want to understand her as an actress, start here. She was in only scene in Angel Heart. She’s in almost every scene of The Night Porter and she is such a disturbing and dark presence you almost can’t look at her.

In my wild 20s, I wanted to wear that as a Halloween costume, but cooler heads prevailed.

She is one of the scariest actresses of that lucky generation who “came up” in a time when directors/writers – often men – were creating these monster parts for women requiring great skill and courage. You don’t cuddle up to Charlotte Rampling, in the same way you don’t warm to Gena Rowlands or Theresa Russell (eve if you love them. They scorn your love somehow. Not as humans, but their characters are so remote and self-obsessed – or even mad, and their madness warns you off). You admire, but you also step back. All can do as an audience member is sit back, shut up, stop wondering why they are so DIFFERENT from other actresses (where is the inspirational closure, where is the self-empowerment message, where is the resolution, where is the clarity?), and let yourself be overwhelmed. They are frightening titanic figures.

Her performance in The Night Porter is shocking, and I don’t shock easily. The clips are age-restricted so you have to click through. Here’s her first entrance.

I wanted to point your way towards a wonderful piece by Stephen Metcalf from 2008 – which has stuck in my head all these years – about The Verdict, and one specific scene between Paul Newman and Rampling.

In 2011, she showed up as Kirsten Dunst’s and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s mother in Melancholia, one of my favorite movies of the last 20 years. She’s as sour as a lemon in Melancholia, and her attitude sits on top of simmering rage. She’s not conventionally “motherly” and her presence serves as a biting commentary on why her two daughters are the way they are.

She’s not the lead, and only shows up in a couple of scenes – but like other great character actresses – when she shows up she almost single-handedly justifies the film’s existence. I reviewed the film when I first saw it at New York Film Festival in 2011.

This is not meant to be a career retrospective. There are so many more roles I could mention! She works constantly, and mostly in challenging unconventional work. She’s not afraid of working with younger newer film-makers. If their vision is intriguing, she’ll take a chance on them. She does not shy away from risks. She’s all about risks.

I did want to point your way towards Lian Lunson’s beautiful spiritually-meditative film Waiting for the Miracle to Come, filmed primarily on Willie Nelson’s Texas ranch, and starring Willie Nelson and Rampling as a retired vaudeville couple, waiting for their daughter to return to them, the daughter they gave up.

It’s a beautiful movie, and Lian – who has directed primarily documentaries and concert films – created something truly special. Charlotte Rampling’s character lives her life as Marilyn Monroe, has created her entire persona as an homage to Marilyn, and is so lost in the fantasy she LIVES this way. Instead of pathologizing her, though, Lian embraces her – as does Rampling. She may be a little bit like a Tennessee Williams character but let’s not forget, Tennessee Williams always said he wrote about survivors, that he never once wrote about a “victim”.

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Lian about her film which you can read here. The image of Lian and Charlotte Rampling going to see Merle Haggard in concert in Texas will not leave me any time soon.

Finally: for some years now, Charlotte Rampling has been traveling with a recitation show called Night Dances, where she performs Sylvia Plath’s poetry, accompanied by cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton (who also directed), playing Benjamin Britten’s solos for cello underneath. It sounds riveting!

Rampling has done it everywhere, throughout Europe and England and Ireland, as well as in the States. Why didn’t I go see it when I could? Here’s a review of the show in the New York Times.

With minimal movements and eerie concentration, Ms. Rampling spoke 11 of Plath’s lengthy, elusive poems, all performed from memory. Sometimes she stood and confronted her listeners. (Or was she confiding in them?) Other times she spoke while reclining on an ottoman, or propping herself up with her arms. In more narrative poems, like “Edge,” her delivery was restrained yet purposeful; in emotional poems, like excerpts from “Three Women,” she was swept up in the moment, as if struggling with how to express herself.

Rampling continues to inspire and astonish.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“I don’t need to ‘tell’ the story…The story is being told from itself by following the different moments in different locations.” — Mia Hansen-Løve

One of my favorite contemporary film-makers is Mia Hansen-Løve. Hansen-Løve is interested in how people listen, how people walk and move through space from point A to point B, she’s interested in the locations where they live, the conversations they have about philosophy, film, politics. She is interested in rhythm, in questions, in the in-between moments when we move from.one place to the next.. Many critics (and regular people, but I’m mainly talking about critics) look for answers. They want answers, they want clarity of intent. I’m so bored by “looking for correct answers”, and I’m bored by writing like this: “This film is good because it reflects how I see the world.” or “This film is bad because it displays the wrong attitudes.” “This film is bad because it doesn’t include what I personally think it should include.” “This film is bad because it doesn’t state outright what it is about.” and etc. I don’t just dislike this attitude: I deeply distrust it, since it comes out of adherence to ideology (what ideology is irrelevant, the result is the same). Hansen-Løve is not a binary kind of filmmaker. She doesn’t think that way. Ideas are there to be played around with, taken on, discarded, discussed.


Mia Hansen-Løve

Hansen-Løve is the child of two philosophy professors (Things to Come is clearly somewhat autobiographical), and she herself has a Master’s in German philosophy. She got her start as an actress when Olivier Assayas put her in a couple of his films. There was obviously a kindred-spirit thing between them and they eventually became romantically involved. They were together for years, have a daughter together. What is interesting here is to consider the way Assayas’ films and Hansen-Løve’s films “talk” to each other, the influence Assayas had on her, but also the other way around. There’s a lot of common ground.


Olivier Assays and Mia Hansen-Løve

She made a couple of short films in the mid-2000s before graduating to feature-length films. She directed her first feature film – All is Forgiven – when she was only 25 years old. All of her films can be seen as part of the continuum of her interests, style, and sensibility. All of it was present in her first film. She arrived this way, in other words. She’s developed, of course, as a film-maker, but her work was recognizably hers immediately. Her sensibility is not commercial, which makes it gratifying that her films have gained worldwide accolades.

My introduction to Hansen-Løve was through her second film, The Father of My Children (2009). (Her first film, All Is Forgiven, was not released here theatrically until last year. More on that in a bit.) The Father of My Children is a psychological study of a film producer who plays many roles in his life. He hustles, he gets things done, he’s a workaholic, he’s a loving father to three daughters, he lives in one of those French country houses filled with ritual, relaxation, beauty, respite. But he is in trouble. Hansen-Løve was just 27 years old when she made this, but she shows an uncanny understanding of life at different stages, and an ability to imagine herself into the shoes of a middle-aged man. Her empathy is wide-ranging.


Father of My Children (2009)

The guy is in deep shit financially because of his involvement with a film directed by an erratic difficult “auteur” (shades of Lars von Trier). He tries to hide this from his wife. Hansen-Løve isn’t interested in plot so much as she is in how life impacts people, how they react to things, what they do in response. She is disciplined in her focus.

2011’s Goodbye First Love is a film I truly love: it so accurately captures the overwhelming feeling – the agony and ecstasy – of first love. Hansen-Løve does not work in clear-cut binaries. The guy in the film is sincere in his love, but equally sincere about his future plans, which will take him away from his teenage love. It’s devastating.


Goodbye First Love (2011)

The title isn’t Hello First Love. It’s about the crucible of falling in love when you’re a hormonal teenager, when love is do-or-die, when your whole world is love and first sex and passion. Then of course there is also the torment when you realize it’s your FIRST love, not your FOREVER love.

The first film of Hansen-Løve’s I was assigned to review was 2015’s Eden. I’ll be honest: Eden blew me away: here’s my review. There is a central character, but he is not really what the film is about. What the film is ABOUT is the French house-music scene, and its development over a 20-year period. The “scene” is the lead character.


Eden (2015)

This may sound like a cliche but her films are about the rhythms of life itself. The passing of time is a major factor in all of her films. The healing of old wounds, the creation of new wounds, the conversations had over dinner, at a pub, the in-between moments of beauty or boredom. Her films sometimes take place over a long period of time – Eden is the most radical example. Important to note, because it’s a distinguishing characteristic of Hansen-Løve’s films: she doesn’t care about “aging” her actors with makeup, or “signifying” the passage of time visibly (hair color, wardrobe, whatever). The same actors play the same characters when they’re young and old, with no visible change in appearance, and you’re just supposed to buy that they’re older now. You do buy it. All the focus on creating “believable” aging seems unimportant when you watch Hansen-Løve’s films. Eden might be off-putting to regular audiences because of this, and because of its length, but it’s worth it. It may be her most personal film. Submit to its rhythm. Stop waiting for a plot. Stop waiting for Hansen-Løve to state herself clearly. Her films don’t work like that.


Eden (2015)

Finally, came 2016’s Things to Come, starring the great Isabelle Huppert as a philosophy professor whose marriage breaks up after many years, launching her into a new world. You may think you know what the film is going to be, based on the plot description. But it’s not that at all! The real events happen here in the smaller moments, the conversations, arguments about politics, a cross-generational relationship (not strictly romantic, but not un-romantic either), the moments of silence and repose where thoughts swirl around. Thinking can change things as much as action.


Things to Come (2016)

This was the film where Hansen-Løve was criticized for not being feminist enough (whatever that means: the film stars Isabelle Huppert as an independent free-thinking intellectual woman who finds her own way in life after her marriage disintegrates. So … that’s pretty feminist, oui?) There were (ridiculous) grasping-at-straws criticisms like: With all of the philosophers name-checked in the film, why no mention of Simone de Beauvoir? Or women at all? People were truly upset. Hansen-Løve addressed these criticisms in interviews. She thought the whole thing was all a bit silly, and wasn’t interested in people who watched her films that way. Here’s my review of Things to Come.


Things to Come (2016)

In 2021 came Bergman Island, which I waited for with impatient anticipation. Bergman Island stars Tim Roth and Vicki Krieps (from Phantom Thread) as filmmakers heading to Fårö island (known as “Ingmar Bergman’s island”), for a writing retreat. The couple stays in Bergman’s actual house, complete with windmill.


Bergman Island (2021)

There are uneasy undercurrents in the relationship: Roth’s character is more successful than the younger Krieps. Indeed, he is celebrated, and gives a lecture on Bergman during their stay. She feels blocked creatively. She exists in the shadow of her boyfriend, not to mention the great and omnipresent INGMAR. (Is this reflective of Hansen-Løve’s own feelings during her relationship with the older and more successful Olivier Assayas?) At one point, she asks her boyfriend if he would listen to the plot of her screenplay, so she can get feedback. (Uh-oh.) Halfway through Bergman Island everything changes. The whole structure of the film changes. New characters show up. To say more would be to ruin the delight of the experience (I went into it cold, purposefully avoiding the festival buzz).

2021 also saw the long-delayed international release of her very first film, 2007’s All is Forgiven.


All Is Forgiven (2007)

It never got a theatrical release here in America and had long been virtually un-seeable to American audiences. I was so excited, and even more so when I got the assignment to review it for Ebert. It’s amazing to see how fully-formed Hansen-Løve was, even at 25. It’s like Orson Welles. Or Chantal Akerman. Artists who need no gestation period. They hit the ground running. Here is my review of All Is Forgiven.

If it were easy to make films like Hansen-Løve’s, more people would do it.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Often I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way I got more cooperation.” — Ida Lupino

It’s the birthday of actress and director Ida Lupino. To give some perspective on her unlikely and inspiring trajectory: she was born into a theatre family dynasty. By the time she was 14, 15, she was playing adult roles. She was British, but Hollywood beckoned. She was in a couple of pre-Codes, a glamorous “woman” (still a teenager), with platinum blonde hair.

Much more after the jump:

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February 3, 1959: The Day the Music Died

Tribune-1959-02-04

Buddy Holly was #13 on Rolling Stones’ 100 Greatest Artists list, and John Mellencamp wrote a very touching couple of paragraphs about Buddy Holly as the ultimate hillbilly, and how important that was:

I was just a little kid when I first heard Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue.” You may not understand what it was like being about nine years old in 1957 or ’58, but it was quite a treat. All of this music was just coming out of nowhere — Memphis and Texas. I was in a band when I was in sixth grade, and we played “Not Fade Away.” You shouldn’t even be in a band if you haven’t played that song. It’s two chords, beautiful melody, with a nice message. Holly’s songs never really left my consciousness.

Okay let’s go for it: Post – and so many clips – below:

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January 2025 Viewing Diary

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992; d. James Foley)
I saw this one in the theatre back in the day. There’s a revival coming up on Broadway and Bill Burr is going to be in it. It’s kind of perfect! He’ll be playing the Ed Harris part, I think, which is perfect, since the character seethes with a kind of helpless anger. Great cast here, obviously, but it’s pretty schticky. I am continuously amazed that Kevin Spacey was ever considered a good – or, my God, great – actor. No, he is NOT. I felt this way before his fall from grace. I remember talking about it with Sam Schacht 2 decades ago, for God’s sake. “He’s a very thin actor and he is being overpraised.” said Sam. “Thin” meaning emotionally thin, emotionally limited. Which, forgive me, disqualifies you from being considered a good actor. Being overpraised made him lazy and cocky. His default attitude (not emotion) was amused contempt. If you’re a character actor and that’s what you’re called upon to play – fine. But a leading man? Who won not one but TWO Oscars? The world went MAD for him. I couldn’t believe it. Here he is in Glengarry Glen Ross, my first exposure to him, and what he does here is what he did in every role. There. That’s it. That’s all he’s got to give. Amazing to me that he ever was a LEAD in anything.

Desire (1936; d. Frank Borzage)
Borzage is so romantic, so deeply interested in atmosphere – the atmosphere around love – its magic, its shadows. This is a heist movie, with Dietrich a cunning jewel thief, on the run across Europe. She basically runs into a corn-fed gee-willikers American, taking his first vacation ever. He’s supposedly a ladies man, although Gary Cooper plays it with more of a “shucks, golly, you’re pretty” kind of way which might not get him too far, except that he looks like Gary Cooper. Shenanigans naturally ensue. He has no idea she’s a thief. She keeps trying to shake him off her tail. But … of course … Desire is at work.

Blue Velvet (1986; d. Blue Velvet)
I’m working on a big piece on David Lynch. This loss hits different. Because he was singular. We won’t see his like again. It’s also interesting because I’m old. I witnessed his rise first-hand. If you were born in, say, the late 90s, Lynch was already a “thing” and you got on the train, knowing he was a master. It’s like me with, say, Godard or Howard Hawks. By the time I was born, they were legends and so discovering them was like joining a well-populated continuum. With Lynch, he was an unknown and then suddenly there was Twin Peaks. (Eraserhead didn’t really crack into the mainstream.) Turns out, though, I had seen The Elephant Man when I was in high school, because we read the script in drama class. The movie made a HUGE impression but I had no idea who the filmmaker was and wouldn’t have cared had I known. Years later, my boyfriend and I watched Twin Peaks together, it was appointment television and – in a lot of ways – the only thing bonding us together, lol. But before THAT I saw Blue Velvet at my local movie theatre. I went into it totally unprepared. (I also had to use my connection with the concession stand guy – he was in my acting class – in order to even get in, since it was rated R.) I had no idea what I was getting into. I didn’t read movie reviews. But we had one movie screen in our town so I went to see everything. I will never forget that first encounter. Ever. There was nothing like it in my experience, before or since.

Twin Peaks, Season 1 (1990; d. David Lynch. Plus: Duwayne Dunham, Tina Rathborne, Tim Hunter, Lesli Linka Glatter, Caleb Deschanel, Mark Frost)
I rewatch every couple of years. I’m so glad Twin Peaks exists. It’s a miracle. I mean, I still can’t even believe this thing was funded and green-lit. But it WAS.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951; d. Elia Kazan)
Allison had never seen it! So we watched together. (I’ve been in New York a lot this month. I had a massive fall, by the way. Bumped my head on the tile floor. Had to go to urgent care to make sure I didn’t have a concussion. Was a pretty scary couple of days. Natasha Richardson fears. My shoulder is still messed up. It could have been so much worse. Anyway, that happened.) It was frigid cold in New York, in the teens, and Allison and I holed up in her apartment. She’s reading a biography of Brando and I was like, “You have to watch his work. The biography is interesting but the truth of him is in his work.” It was so fun to discover it with her. What is amazing – considering the character of Stanley – is the delicacy of his work. It’s still a revelation.

The Skeleton Twins (2014; d. Craig Johnson)
Allison and I went to the anniversary screening of this at the Metrograph, and producer/editor Jennifer Lee was in attendance. There was a discussion and QA afterward. It was so fun. We love this movie so much.

Mulholland Drive (2001; d. David Lynch)
I pretty much know this one by heart. It’s a masterpiece.

Twin Peaks, Season 2 (1991; d. David Lynch. Plus: Lesli Linka Glatter,
Todd Holland, Graeme Clifford, Caleb Deschanel, Tim Hunter, Tina Rathborne, Duwayne Dunham, Uli Edel, Diane Keaton – !!, James Foley, Jonathan Sanger, Stephen Gyllenhaal)
Season 2 is a wild ride, man. You find out “who killed Laura Palmer” and then there are 19 episodes after that. With interminable plot-lines like James and the Sunset Boulevard-ish lady, and Benjamin Horne losing himself in fantasies of the Civil War, and Nadine being in high school (ugh), and Audrey … what happened to the girl in Season 1? It’s like everyone lost their nerve when it came to Audrey. They had to soften her up, make her less strange. STILL, the larger through-line – which Laura Palmer’s murder merely represented, or was a portal to – of the darkness in the woods and in the world, and how the darkness manifests – is there. Those strange moments still come. The quality fell off so much it’s practically legendary, and the show hemorrhaged viewers. I remember that back then. And without the internet you REALLY had to pay attention to things. Somehow I figured out the show was in trouble, and my boyfriend and I looked back on Season 1 with nostalgia. Season 2 has its points though. The final scene is still shocking. I remember my boyfriend and I being so astonished by it and then the realization dawned “…. wait … what happens NEXT? Is that IT?” (The Sopranos‘ final scene has nothing on the final scene of Twin Peaks.) We’d have to wait 25 years to find out what happened next.

David Lynch: The Art Life (2016; Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Jon Nguyen)
Wonderful revelatory movie about Lynch’s life and art, with interviews and footage of him at work in his home studio. Which he had to be moved from during the fires. Which probably hastened his death.

Eraserhead (1977; d. David Lynch)
I had to catch up with this one later. I think I rented it at Blockbuster in Hoboken, when I lived there. It’s an industrial fever dream. You can see it in all this unconscious anxiety about being a parent. This is not news. It’s right there onscreen. Lynch could only make this because he won a scholarship from AFI. He said he had no idea what would have happened to him if he hadn’t gotten the money from AFI. He was an avant-garde un-commercial filmmaker.

Lynch/Oz (2022; d. Alexandre O. Philippe)
A little pretentious at points but I loved the connections made between Lynch and The Wizard of Oz. You’d have to be actively not paying attention to miss all the red shoes in Lynch’s work. I think in every movie a female character wears red shoes.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992; d. David Lynch)
A misunderstood – still – masterpiece.

Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces (2013; d. David Lynch)
Fascinating deleted/extended scenes from Fire Walk With Me. They add up to over an hour of film. Highly recommended. I have THOUGHTS about the deletions, and what they reveal about Lynch – but I’ll save that for the piece I’m writing.

Inland Empire (2006; d. David Lynch)
To quote myself: A misunderstood – still – masterpiece. Honestly, it’s not that obscure to me. I’m not baffled by it at all, at least not the main “plot”. An actress tries to get into her character and it leads her down some pretty dark paths. Very Opening Night-ish. It’s a brutal watch, in many ways, and it’s fairly ugly to look at (it was Lynch’s first digital film, and much of it looks like old video transfers). It’s ugly by design. The more I’ve seen this one, the more sense – if that is the word – it makes.

More Things That Happened (2007; d. David Lynch)
Another compilation of deleted/extended scenes, this time from Inland Empire. I’ve seen all these things before but went back to watch them again. Not just because I was writing a piece on him but because I was trying to process this. As well as the LA fires and the new ghoul in the White House. I flashed back to 2017, when Twin Peaks: The Return basically helped me – and a lot of other people, I know – get through that terrible year. It came out episode by episode, it wasn’t dumped all at once, and so – briefly – during one of the most divisive years in this country’s history (we were just getting started) – we all came together to watch the same thing at the same time, and then go to Twitter to discuss. Lynch is important to me and it’s personal. And you can see in all the pieces that have been written – everybody feels that way. It’s personal for everybody.

Love Me (2025; d. Andrew Zuchero and Sam Zuchero)
Not crazy about it but the opening is intriguing and so are (some of) the ideas. I reviewed for Ebert.

Lost Highway (1997; d. David Lynch)
I still remember where I saw this. At the Lincoln Plaza Cinema (RIP). I was in grad school. I was looking forward to Lost Highway like my life depended on it. I hadn’t yet read David Foster Wallace’s great piece on Lynch and on this film. Libraries of text have been devoted to David Lynch, but I think DFW’s piece wins. By a mile. But again, I wasn’t really “connected” to film criticism at the time, I just wasn’t in that world at all. So I had no idea of the buzz, or how the pressure was on Lynch, and the whole backstory. I was just a fan and I couldn’t wait to see it. It’s one of those vivid movie-going memories. I am still not sure if there is critical consensus on this – I don’t think “critical consensus” exists with his body of work. All I can say is I was pinned to my seat watching this thing. I loved every frame. What it “means” has just never mattered to me, not with him. I don’t try to “figure it out”. It’s a different kind of viewing experience. And I find it soothing, as creepy as his films are. It is TRULY “escapist” fare.

The Alphabet (1969; d. David Lynch)
His early films really show his avant-garde bona fides. People wishing he would just make a POINT, or make things CLEAR, don’t know shit. Starring his wife (his first) Peggy.

The Grandmother (1970; d. David Lynch)
A haunting short film about a young boy with two pretty awful parents who abuse him. There’s a bit about a monstrously shaped tree coming out of his bed, with a black space on it, like a hole.

Six Men Getting Sick (1967; d. David Lynch)
Vomit is definitely a theme for Lynch and has been there from the start! Member Evil Cooper vomiting in the car? Disgusting!

The Amputee Version 2 (1974; d. David Lynch)
Catherine Coulson – the Log Lady – as the amputee writing a letter as a nurse dresses her wounds. Very disturbing, but funny too.

Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1995; d. David Lynch)
Really more of a fragment than anything else but it reminds me a little bit of the Black Dahlia. And Laura Palmer.

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