Life Itself by Roger Ebert

       Looking back on it, the influence Roger Ebert had on pop-culture throughout my youth is unreal. Even when he appeared as a cartoon parody, he was immediately recognizable. I was probably a little too young to recognize his insight and his importance then; even now, I’d have to conduct a thorough perusal of his film reviews to really understand just how perceptive and influential he’s been to the movie industry. A friend of mine has put me on to some of Ebert’s viewpoints and in turn I felt compelled to read his memoir Life Itself.

Life Itself achieves what memoirs are meant to do: they provide some backstory to the author, explore and review some of the industry-related accomplishments of that person’s life, and discuss the trials and tribulations that give their life drama, depth, and texture. Ebert even makes a reference to the cliché of all memoirs starting with notable members of the central character’s ancestry before he cheekily does the same, diving into some backstory for his grandparents and the like. From there, he gives a reasonably chronological account of his life with some tangents and lack of linearity, each section designed to give some insight into his perspective.

The scope of the book is impressive. Ebert talks about everything from his first girlfriends to writing for his school newspaper and submitting his first articles as he worked towards being a newsman. He talks about his transition into working in television and his routine appearances at film festivals and even some work he did consulting on films or speaking with hot shot directors. His career is without a doubt an impressive one, but it’s the personal parts that really make the memoir notable. 

The book also captures a cultural moment, explored perhaps most specifically when Ebert reflects on his favourite Americana diner. Ebert encapsulates a historical ‘moment’ and evokes that 1950s and 1960s diner culture that seems a prototypical experience. Something that strikes me as a little funny is that in both Roger Ebert’s memoir and David Lynch’s memoir there’s an affinity for ‘hamburger and milkshake’ culture and I just now looked up Ebert’s thoughts on Lynch, suspecting they might be kindred spirits—only to find that Ebert panned Lynch’s early work and praised his latter ones. I digress.

Roger Ebert presents an American life, and I was pleasantly surprised by how progressive Ebert was. There’s always a risk that public figures of the era botched their involvement in the civil rights movement, and while Ebert didn’t stake his claim to fame, I appreciated that he reported on his involvement and engagement in anti-racism initiatives. While grappling with questions of faith, Ebert demonstrates a great deal of thoughtfulness, doubt, and concern with issues of religion, and self-consciously slips out of easy categorization. He brings that up in the context of defending the LGBTQ+ community, and again I found myself heartened by Ebert’s outspokenness on historically oppressed groups.

To return to the personal level, though, the book is touching and funny, as well. Some chapters recount stories with old friends and build towards what is essentially a punchline. The humour extends into character studies of famous personages. There’s a chapter about John Wayne, for example, that reads like a Gatsbyesque character sketch. His chapter about writing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is an absurd read, but also has a thoughtfulness and reflective aspect that feels wonderfully sincere.

But wait. I’ve drifted away from the personal again.

Life Itself has a number of touching accounts of Ebert’s personal experiences. In an early chapter, for example, he discusses the death of his beloved childhood dog and that classic tragedy of an American boyhood hits hard. There are a number of other personal topics discussed with such candor that it gives the book a special sizzle. Some of these topics are light and beautiful: his characterization of his wife Chaz and their relationship is lovely and it’s clear from the way he describes her just how enamored he was with her. One of the ways that comes out in his discussion of his alcoholism and the way Chaz helped him through it. The memoir reflects on the power of AA in Ebert’s life despite his initial reluctance. He discusses his regular attendance at meetings and the way he was able to find AA meetings anywhere he went essentially within ten minutes. The memoir takes an optimistic and inspiring stance towards recovery and offers some good insight into addiction as a whole.

Ebert’s health is a focus in the latter part of the book. He discusses his weight, but more so in terms of public perception. He reflects on how he was seen (the fat one), especially in contrast to Gene Siskel (the skinny one). Ebert offers an engaging perspective about how media and society reinforces expectations around weight and health. There’s a pain there in recognizing how cruel people were, and seeing it from a man’s point of view (and not from a toxic man) gives a fresh dimension to the conversation. Following that, there’s also a lengthy section about Ebert’s cancer and the impact on his life (i.e. losing a portion of his jaw, losing his ability to eat, losing his ability to speak). In one section, he discusses his interview with Esquire and the photo they chose of him: one that put on full display his facial deformity. Based on his narration, I feel really compelled to go back and watch his television appearances following his cancer to really appreciate the courage and strength it took for Ebert to return to public life after losing his ability to speak, which was clearly a devastating transition for him—but not one that ever reduced him to self-pity.

On the topic of Ebert’s television appearances, it was entertaining to hear about the frenemyship Ebert shared with Gene Siskel. He recounts times of their disagreement (and there are some clear public and televised ones) and the way they challenged each other. He characterizes their relationship as one of challenge, critique, and ribbing. In Ebert’s account, Siskel always had clever and cruel comments to make about Ebert and made him a punching bag of sorts. At the same time, Ebert perpetually asserts the depth of their friendship despite and perhaps because of their friction. It’s a nice insight into what became one of the most recognizable duos of the 90s—up to and including a reflection on the passing of Gene Siskel.

Life Itself offers a great deal of humour and tenderness towards Roger Ebert’s life. It’s clear he was a thoughtful, reflective man, and the sheer breadth of the text has a lot to offer. I sometimes wonder if a memoir is meant to serve as an ad of sorts for a person’s career. If I take that premise, I would say that Life Itself is an effective one: I feel more driven to revisit Ebert’s oeuvre and television show. He is a critic that has a lot to offer—ironically, perhaps, he keeps his commentary on film to a relative minimum in this memoir—and hearing more about his perspectives on life helps to elevate his significance to me.

May we all live our lives so fully. Happy reading!

Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin

  Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin is a novel about two sisters caught between worlds—and replicates that experience for readers. The essential premise of the book is that sisters Lark and Robin (yes, really) have a tumultuous relationship with their mother Marianne, which drives Lark to study in the United States. Later, Robin follows and Lark acts as her substitute mother. Robin is a piano prodigy; Lark is a filmmaker. It does get more complicated than that, but those are the basics to keep in mind.

The novel has some moments that stand out as impactful, but I’ll return to those shortly.

First, I want to address two aspects of the book that I think don’t entirely work. For one, I can’t pinpoint whether it’s Lark’s voice or some other element, but the novel feels rather cold. I found it difficult to connect with the characters, particularly their mother Marianne. Lark offers very little sympathy to her mother and it’s hard to see past Lark’s narration and find the positives in Marianne for ourselves. The same applies for the other characters, too—it’s hard to tell whether they’re just unlikeable or whether Lark’s narration colours them so convincingly that they feel distant.

There are two elements in the dynamic between Lark and Marianne that I found edifying. Partway through the novel, Lark starts filming her mother for a one-on-one interview. The description of the filming sessions and Marianne’s openness show that brief glimmer into her that feels human. Later in the novel, Marianne has dementia and feels compelled to constantly clean. At the end of a tense interaction, Lark narrates, “She gave me a broom and together we swept away invisible dirt, wiped invisible cobwebs. Afterward we shared the pastries and drank the weak, cold tea she had made” (195). There’s something tender in that moment where both attend to an absence and have a shared vision of life that they generally don’t have. That tenderness seems to fade, though, when her mother passes. It lacks fanfare and even feeling, returning to a coldness that chills the novel.

The second issue is that I think the book lacks coherence. The focus of the novel is much harder to pinpoint than I implied in my opening paragraph. The book is a reasonably tight 272 pages in my edition, but it’s so jam-packed that it’s the longest short book I’ve read in a while. The first part reads like a bildungsroman of Lark setting out on her own and going to school. It’s Victorian-ish to start and we get a reasonably lengthy section of her learning about film and dating her first boy. Their relationship is annoying but well-developed; it felt like one of the more authentic and sincere elements of the book. Then there’s also a section about her horrible roommate, Robin arriving, and the roommate’s old cats dying while in the sisters’ care and the roommate’s reaction when she finds out. That, too, was a compelling moment that was reasonably rich in character development. From there, we get another lengthy section about Robin and Lark’s respective studies and dating lives; Robin becomes a piano prodigy that studies at Juilliard and then goes on to tour Europe before leaving her agent in the lurch and sending a postcard to Lark that reads “Don’t try to find me.” Meanwhile, Robin goes back to her studies in film, working on her own, and apprentice-editing for an established artsy filmmaker. The descriptions of the films, I found, were compelling. The images they inspired for me felt rich and I could imagine engaging in film analysis for films of that sort. Later, we see a fraught relationship between the filmmaker and his daughter and his daughter and Lark. The filmmaker and Lark start dating; they stop dating; Lark wants a child; Lark can’t have a child, and there’s lengthy discussion of it. There’s a section where Marianne becomes senile and is clearly in decline—again, there’s a great moment, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. The weirdest thing is that Robin essentially starts a wolf sanctuary and she has a barn where all the stalls house broken pianos—again it feels a little bit Victorian (I think about the wolves peppered throughout Wuthering Heights and the pianos in the barns feels like a Gothic secret). Of course Robin becomes a surrogate for Lark. Oh, and there’s a part about nursing a wolf back to health.

To me, the book is trying to tell too many stories at once. The parts just don’t seem to fit together and instead it feels like a piecemeal approach. To be generous to Ohlin, I’m going to accept that it’s intentionally structured to mirror Lark’s filmic experience. Film distorts time—like in a film, Dual Citizens allows us to jump across years. Like film, we jump cut between topics. Filmmakers splice and juxtapose. The filmmakers in the novel also have an intense focus; one of Lark’s mentors is an ardent feminist whose views are given voice through the characters, and the other has an intense focus on slice-of-life moments and holds an intense zoom. That also felt like Ohlin’s approach. Consider, for example, this description of Lark’s mentor’s film Potato, “which was released two years later, but not widely seen. It’s not hard to understand why. The film is slow, densely composed, exquisite. Every shot shows how he labored over it, and this is perhaps part of the problem: his fingerprints are on every frame, urging the view, Look how beautiful this is” (104). I would argue that the structure of this novel is similar: it is slow and densely composed. It is, in some ways, laborious to read with its intense focus. The passage describing the film continues, “It’s as if you’re not allowed to see anything for yourself” (104), which I think is how Lark’s narration makes me feel: we’re offered judgment and we have to follow her perspective on the other characters in the book. The passage continues as follows: 

The other problem (besides the title, which encouraged bad behaviour among writers, unable to restrain themselves from headlines like Spud Flick a Dud) is the film’s level of abstraction. The tight composition focuses on the threshers, the planters, the rolling escalators in which the trembling potatoes are fed into the gaping maw of the processor, the camera so close to the equipment that it becomes difficult to tell what the machines are doing. The whole experience is aestheticized, and for all the nearness, there is no intimacy. (104)

I think that the novel does very much the same, though not to the level of abstraction. Ohlin does, however, keep intense focus on particular moments and details. The amount of time dedicated to Lark’s first relationship: is it necessary? I’m not sure, but the novel seems unable to look away and, “for all the nearness, there is no intimacy” (104).

Similarly, Lark’s own approach to filmmaking (and indeed life), is that she “gathered tidbits—things I read, a picture that lingered, the memory of an afternoon in a movie theatre, the face of my sister as she laughed—and sometimes my head felt cluttered as an attic with them” (101). Dual Citizens embodies that piecemeal approach to storytelling. For Lark, “stitching a film together satisfied this collector’s itch perfectly, [her] magpie treasures woven and spackled into a nest” (101). The book is a series of moments, but loosely joined.

When the plot does have a “twist,” I feel like it was obvious. For instance, when Robin disappears from her European tour with the note not to find her, I immediately suspected it was an issue with an unplanned pregnancy. Probably a hundred and fifty to two hundred pages later my suspicions were confirmed and rather than it being a moment of shock and pathos, my reaction was more…”well, yeah.” I just hoped for something a little more cohesive and a little more surprising. The book trailed too far into the quotidian without offering the sorts of philosophical explorations of minutiae that I find so compelling in other similar works.

Overall, Dual Citizens had a few charms and a couple of moments that felt like highlights, but as a coherent project it felt a little flat and cold. Ohlin’s writing style is certainly descriptive enough and has flashes of inspiration that elevate its status in the literary world—but I was just hoping for something with a little more force, a little more complete.

Nonetheless, happy reading!

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

It’s hard to write about the books that are most finely wrought. I finished Han Kang’s We Do Not Part a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been letting it sit with me because there are so many elements that all play off of one another. It’s hard to explain the craftsmanship of the book in a way that is both succinct and that does justice to Kang’s vision.

We Do Not Part is a novel that teeters on the edge of documentary and dream sequence. Some portions are narrated like investigative journalism, focused on fact and unravelling the threads of a messy history. Other portions read more like a dream sequence in which ghosts appear, the past and present are seemingly not in cooperation, and the impossible presents itself as a matter of course. At times, it felt reminiscent of The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, where we are perpetually waiting for a resolution that is not, and never was, forthcoming (silly us for thinking so). The way Kang navigates these different registers is impressive and makes the book feel satisfying in more ways than one.

The timeline of the book might be a barrier for people’s immersion in the text. The novel jumps around into different times in Kyungha’s life, developing in particular her friendship with her colleague Inseon. Kyungha seems to imply that their relationship is not close, and yet there’s an intimacy between them that runs deep and, quite honestly, is beautiful in its quiet tenderness. Inseon is a filmmaker, and Kang’s accounts of her films are so vivid that it’s hard to imagine that they don’t exist. Years earlier, Kyungha shared an idea for a film, based on a recurring dream, with Inseon. The two have long planned to create the film, but, as in life, there are perpetual excuses not to start the project. The project is simple: place a bunch of cut-down trees upright again in the earth during a heavy snowfall and film as the snow piles up. It is, as Kyungha realizes, perhaps too late, an image of death.

At the start of the book, for reasons largely unexplained, Kyungha feels compelled to draft her will. She writes draft upon draft only to rip them up and realize she does not have anyone close enough to whom the will should be addressed. In the midst of the process, Inseon sends her a message asking her to come see her immediately. It turns out she is in the hospital having severed her fingers in an accident with her workshop—it turns out that she injured herself because she decided it was time to start their project and was cutting logs. It feels prophetic and poetic that she loses her fingers. Kyungha visits her in the hospital, where Inseon has to have her severed digits poked with a needle every three minutes or so to ensure her nerves don’t die before they can reattach her fingers.

As I mentioned, the friendship between them comes across beautifully. There’s a surreality to it that I really appreciate—and even just in terms of writing style alone, I would put We Do Not Part nearly on par with the author’s award-winning The Vegetarian. During Kyungha’s visit, Inseon asks her to go care for her bird. It’s been a few days and she’s worried that her pet will have run out of water and will pass away if Kyungha doesn’t go immediately. So, Kyungha makes a reluctant trip to Inseon’s remote village.

This is where the dream-like quality of the book really shines through. In the transitional, (dare I say) liminal space, we seem to shift to a dreamlike unreality. There’s an extended section, for example, where Kyungha is waiting for a bus that does not come. There’s an elderly woman waiting for the bus that seems to know the score, but it’s taking forever. And the snow just keeps coming down. It’s the kind of static, directionless, scene that might present as a dream. When Kyungha eventually disembarks from the bus and tries to trace a path to Inseon’s remote workshop, she falls in the dried up river and awakes ready to move forward—it’s unclear how long she was unconscious in the snow; in fact, it’s unclear whether she survived the fall at all.

From there, Kang develops a motif of death and rebirth. As one might predict, Kyungha arrives too late to save the bird. She takes the time to dig away the snow near the tree she thinks would be suitable for the bird’s gravesite and buries the bird with a great deal of care—only for it to return to life the next day. Later, Inseon arrives unexpectedly—after Kyungha attempts to contact her in the hospital and eventually a nurse answers the phone only to tell her to call back later. From there, it’s a Beloved-like surreality where it’s not clear if Inseon is a ghost or a spirit or living, breathing Inseon—if she’s a figment of Kyungha’s imagination, she seems to know far more than Kyungha possibly could.

The motifs in the text cycle and overlap in an intricate pattern. There is much about birds—Kyungha traces the shadows of birds on Inseon’s wall and the palimpsestic approach feels significant to the overall project of We Do Not Part. The book is infused with poetry throughout, but one moment in particular stands out where Inseon has encouraged Kyungha to feed the birds and she gives them some dry noodles: “Each time the birds bit off a piece of the noddle with their beaks, I felt the faint impact on my fingertips, like the lead of a mechanical pencil as it breaks” (102). There’s a fragility to the birds—to life—that carries on throughout the text.

Another motif, of course, is snow. This is one of the coldest books I can think of and, if you’re reading this on the 25th of January, it is entirely appropriate. The documentary angle of the book is giving a family history that intersects with the Jeju uprising. I’m no expert; my understanding is that the United States was influencing Korean elections and the Workers’ Party organized a general strike. The resistance of the ‘communists’ (including women and children) was violently put down by the Americans. The inhabitants of Jeju were summarily executed and hidden in mines. One of the most powerful moments, I thought, was when Inseon’s aunt and mother were away from the village while everyone else was rounded up, taken to an elementary schoolyard, and killed. Inseon’s mother and aunt then had to then go through the bodies, wiping the snow off their faces to find their relatives. There’s a ghostly parallel with snow accumulating on Kyungha’s face when she falls into the dried river. There’s a double-ghostly parallel when Kyungha and Inseon go lay down in the snow as it falls and they stare up at the sky, confusing stars and snow. The book is full of these stunning moments.

The book delights in its ambiguity. For instance, the opening of the book reveals that Kyungha has written a book about a massacre in South Korea and feels afflicted with a post-traumatic kind of response. It sounds like it could be autobiographical if you’re familiar with Han Kang’s Human Acts. There’s enough in We Do Not Part to separate it from reality, though. As I mentioned, there’s also ambiguity whether Inseon is a ghost or not. At the end of the book, it becomes unclear whether Kyungha is dead, Inseon is dead, neither, or both. Even the title, We Do Not Part, is given some commentary: Kyungha wonders whether it means that they do not separate or whether they never get the opportunity to ‘part’ and say goodbye as they should. The motif of not being able to say a proper goodbye is critical, given the political context and the Jeju massacre.

We Do Not Part offers a rich account of both political and personal experiences. It’s a stylistic masterpiece where everything is so densely packed into just a few hundred pages. It’s the kind of book that when I read the closing lines I thought, “Well, darn, I’ll never write anything that good.” It’s the kind of book that warrants, probably, endless rereading and interpretation. It requires you to sit inside its pages and watch the snow accumulate. Unfortunately, for now, I must trudge on to new territory.

Happy reading!

Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker by David Mikics

        Better start by ripping off the band-aid: I love Stanley Kubrick’s films. I know that that sometimes sparks controversy because of his association with mansplaining and his reportedly demanding behaviour on set, driving actors into utter exhaustion (cf. The Shining and Shelley Duvall or Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut). The fact is, though, I find his films fascinating, unnerving, and visually compelling. Okay, Band-aid ripped off. Let’s talk about David Mikics’ Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker. It’s a biopic but made of words on a page (is there some kind of word for that?).

        Anyway, Mikics provides an overview of Kubrick’s life as a filmmaker, with each chapter grounding its narration alongside a film or set of films, going in chronological order throughout Kubrick’s filmography. It’s quite a nice overview of the genesis of each film, often supplemented by comments from actors or other crew members and sometimes populated with amusing anecdotes. One in particular that stood out to me was when they were filming with dozens of extras, Kubrick retreated to his place overlooking the field to imagine (?) what to do next. The waiting game went on and on and when extras spoke, Kubric came down to confront them. Mikics paints an intimidating picture of Kubrick, but then an extra makes a joke and Kubrick burst into laughter and the tension dissipated.

Mikics’ book has a similarly breezy tone. The book is informative, but casual. It’s a very accessible text that avoids technical language. Mikics does touch on some of the common motifs in the films (the bond between a child and parent, the ambitiousness of central characters, and so on), but a deeper analysis of the films is somewhat lacking. I suppose that’s not the purpose of this book. This book is meant to give you an overview of Kubrick’s career, not a full theoretical approach to his filmography.

I will say, though, that I appreciated Mikics’ characterization of the films. I’ve seen most of them, but discussion of the ones I haven’t was still engaging. Even some of the films I appreciate less were given their due and elevated by the commentary. Barry Lyndon has never been my favourite, but Mikics highlights why the film was important to Kubrick, how it went against the grain, and why it’s worth a rewatch.

On the topic of Barry Lyndon, I really appreciate Kubrick’s subversiveness. He had always wanted to do a period piece and was told that nobody wanted to watch films where people wrote with feathers. Then, after the sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey gained a huge following and A Clockwork Orange was essentially a cult classic, Kubrick just drops Barry Lyndon out there as the most different film imaginable (in some ways). I also like the subversiveness that arose in Spartacus. Reportedly, it was supposed to have the saccharine heroism of Hollywood that Kubrick hated and he tried to undermine it at every turn.

Having read all of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, I was interested in the origin of Lolita as a film. It’s a pretty wild story that involved backroom deals, dropped agreements, and bringing in Nabokov himself to write the screenplay, a type of writing he had never done before and which he returned as an (essentially) reworked version of the novel three hundred pages long. I was also interested to know that at one time Kubrick had wanted to make a film adaptation of Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark, which would have been perfect. It’s the perfect novel for a dark, noir-influenced film. I looked it up years ago (and just now) and a film version of Laughter in the Dark is still in pre-production with Anya Taylor Joy set to star (she will be perfect, mark my words), but it’s a shame Kubrick’s vision for it won’t ever see the light of day.

Actually, learning about Kubrick’s dropped projects is almost as interesting as the ones he completed. I imagine many people are familiar with AI: Artificial Intelligence, ultimately handed over to Spielberg by Kubrick after some time of working on it and leading to a happier ending than Kubrick would have done, although Mikics suggests that Kubrick proposed the uplifting ending. The other project Kubrick dropped was a Holocaust film, The Aryan Papers. He worked on it for decades before abandoning it in favour of Eyes WIde Shut. He heard about Schindler’s List, figured the movies would come out around the same time, and left the project behind.

As an aside, I feel like I should note that Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker is part of a series called Jewish Lives. Throughout the chapters, Mikics makes at least one reference to Judaism in some capacity. In my opinion, these references are somewhat shoehorned in, especially since the first reference to Kubrick’s Judaism underplays it, suggesting he would not have characterized himself along those lines.

If we think through the filmography of Kubrick, all of the “big hits” are here. Shall I attempt my own personal ranking of the filmography?

1. Eyes Wide Shut

2. A Clockwork Orange

3. The Shining

4. Full Metal Jacket

5. Lolita

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey

7. Spartacus

8. Dr. Strangelove

9. Barry Lyndon

10. Four-way tie between all the ones I haven’t seen.

As a result, I found the chapters on those films the most interesting and engaging. But even barring that, I was interested in the anecdotes of Kubrick’s life. For instance, I had no idea he would phone people to talk for hours about Hollywood gossip, or that he essentially third wheeled with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman for months, or that he would make actors do multiple takes, over-and-over-and-over again, without giving them any instruction. That last one is a weird power move and, though I’m sure it was terrible for the actors, it’s very entertaining to me in the abstract.

In any case, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker is a good little book to get an outline of Kubrick’s life and work. It’s not particularly deep. It’s not particularly challenging. It’s just a fun, interesting book for fans of Kubrick’s films. Go for it.

…Also, maybe it’s time to rewatch the filmography…

The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Judith Halberstam

The Queer Art of Failure is an immediately engaging and productive work of literary theory by Jack (Judith) Halberstam—I’m surprised it was never required reading in my theory courses throughout University or my Master’s. The introduction to the book does an excellent job of outlining a kind of queer epistemology and its relevance to theory and society. The thesis of the work is essentially that what we often perceive as “failure” runs against a heteronormative and hegemonic standard, offering a viable alternative for the production of knowledge and societal configurations. The introduction hints at and then explicitly mentions Samuel Beckett’s phrase from Worstward Ho!: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Ironically, people often adopt Beckett’s phrase as a kind of motivational poster mentality: we’ll fail less dramatically next time and teleologically get better. We’ll fail, but get closer to success. This is a misreading. The real goal is to fail, to escape the standards that have such deep control over our lives and, which Halberstam shows, reproduce heteronormative biases across society.

To justify the thesis, Halberstam draws on “low theory” and the “silly archive,” texts that we generally would not accept in an academic setting. For instance, Halberstam spends a great deal of time addressing Pixar films like Wall-E and Finding Nemo, other animated films like Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit films, and even Dude, Where’s My Car?. It makes the analysis simultaneously subversive and accessible. As much as we could bring in esoteric theorists like Jacques Derrida or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (and indeed Halberstam does), the film commentary offers concrete examples to illustrate key concepts in Halberstam’s work.

There is some interesting metacommentary on film production and why Pixar lends itself to stories of subversion. For instance, Halberstam reads Chicken Run as a kind of Marxist parable that presents a feminist utopia where the chickens take control of their own lives and resist the exploitative systems of the farmers. When it comes to animation, though, the most compelling piece of analysis to me was Halberstam’s reading of Finding Nemo, a film that I have seen approximately zero point seven five times, but know the broad strokes of. Halberstam takes particular care to address the character Dory and her inability to remember details. In that failure of memory, Halberstam notes all kinds of possibilities for new, queer arrangements for being. He makes special note that in the story, Nemo has lost his mother. His father takes on a motherly role in trying to find him and Dory serves as a companion—but not a replacement mother. Nonetheless, they become an alternative kind of family wherein Dory is specifically not a romantic interest. Because she can’t remember how things are supposed to be, new social arrangements are able to emerge.

Halberstam continues the discussion of memory in the “classic” (?) film Dude, Where’s My Car? wherein Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott can’t remember much about the previous night—indeed, they are caught in a cycle of forgetting. One of the results is that they seem to have escaped what is so ingrained in our society—their failure to remember social norms leads to them engaging in a kiss-off competition against Fabio, which Halberstam celebrates for the unabashed open-mouthed kissing of two men on screen, a kind of queer relationship that emerges between the central characters. Of course it’s all not hugs and kisses; Halberstam also addresses the racism of the central characters (but notes that the characters written as Asian stereotypes are also the sources of knowledge and clarification for the man-children).

The point is, though, that there’s a strategic forgetting—a failure of memory—that is a prerequisite for abandoning normative modes of being. Halberstam comments on the way that the 2SLGBTQ+ community sometimes takes on the wrong tactics for advancing their causes by trying to appeal to the normative modes of being. For example, he refers to the way that the fight for marriage rights was somewhat misguided. Essentially, queer people were fighting for access to a normative familial arrangement rather than the more promising option of reimagining what families actually are. Families might be fostered around non-romantic relationships, for example, or have multiple people involved romantically, or a more fluid configuration than is implied by heteronormative marriages. Halberstam suggests that the queer cause to be seen as “normal” is less promising than accepting that queer relationships are different from heteronormative ones and leaning into the genuine alternatives that emerge.

I particularly appreciated the way the theory applies to academia. Rather than conforming to the modes that have existed for ages, Halberstam proposes a different method for engaging in analysis than the paranoiac reading practices established by the likes of Foucault, Zizek, and so on. Part of the practice, as I mentioned, involves a reliance on the “silly archive” and on “low theory.” Halberstam also engages in “surface reading,” offering a great deal of plot summary and offering commentary on the plot alone. Rather than diving into the weeds of particular word choices or examining connotations “against the grain” that nobody would ever think of, Halberstam’s approach is comprehensible and accessible while still finding a different angle for examination. He finds the generative possibilities of queer narratives and in queering narratives. 

If I have a complaint about the book, it’s his chapter on Nazism. I can understand why it’s included in the book—more on that momentarily—but the commentary was less incisive than that which would truly grip me. He explores the not insignificant relationship between Nazism and homosexuality, but ultimately it was not the most useful or applicable section of the work. It serves as an example of the nonlinearity of queer history. When people try to present queer history as a completely teleological, increasingly positive narrative of success, it actually devalues the reality of queer existence while simultaneously trying to make it conform to heteronormative visions of success.

In Halberstam’s words, queerness is often seen as a “dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility, and awkwardness.” While he notes that “nothing essentially connects gay and lesbian and trans people to these forms of unbeing and unbecoming, [...] the social and symbolic system that tether queerness to loss and failure cannot be washed away. Some would say: nor should they be.” In setting up this negativity, Halberstam notes that “to simply repudiate the connections between queerness and negativity is to commit to an unbearably positivist and progressive understanding of the queer.” It’s a refreshing and authentic revision to how we typically think about queer life. We tend to, in pop-culture in particular, reduce the uniqueness of queer life and present it in heteronormative codes. Rather than erasing the difference, Halberstam commits to acknowledging that by the standards of heteronormativity, queerness is failure—and when it strives not to be, it ends up replicating erroneous stereotypes. Halberstam mentions “the perky depictions of lesbians in The L Word or the reduction of gay men in film and on TV to impossibly good looking arbiters of taste.” Instead, Halberstam dwells in “darkness [as…] an interpretive strategy.”

Halberstam draws from animation, photography, film, and historical phenomena to present a more authentic, that is, fraught, story of queerness. I also appreciate that Halberstam points to some central differences between feminist theory and queer theory, as I often have a difficult time articulating it to my students. Halberstam discusses “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, most likely the most important essay I’ve read in my life, and talks about searching for a kind of feminism that allows others to speak, a flexible epistemic project. He wants to reject rigidified feminism and know “how not to sacrifice the other on behalf of his or her own sovereignty” with the goal of engaging in “a feminism that fails to save others or to replicate itself. A feminism that finds purpose in its own failure.” The vision of success as teleological progression is presented as a product of patriarchy, one that is often replicated by rigidifying identity. Halberstam discusses how feminism can hold a younger generation of women—especially women of colour—at bay. He discusses how the model of passing knowledge in women’s studies is often “from mother to daughter” in a “white, gendered, heteronormative” mode. “Mothers” get frustrated in trying to make the daughters understand and the daughters “struggle to make the older women see that regulatory systems are embedded in the paradigms they so want to pass on.” It becomes patriarchal in that the mother is placed in the position of being history, memory, tradition and the daughter becomes inheritor of a static system “which she must either accept without changing or reject completely.”

It seems to me that Halberstam successfully carves out a “third space,” willingly eschewing convention in order to produce a different model for thinking and being. I really appreciated a clear elucidation of the methodology of the book in the introduction and the case studies of Pixar films, simultaneously reading with and against the grain in a generative way. Seeing the methodology at work is a great example for reading—a model I hope to show my students to give them yet another way of reading, a way of opening possibilities for themselves and others without replicating hegemonic logics.

And on that note—happy reading. I hope you fail at it. Productively, of course.

Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

    David Lynch is such an incredible force in the world of art and film, having spent decades cultivating his distinct voice—and voice, both figuratively and literally, is an important component of Room to Dream. I listened to the audiobook of Lynch’s biography / memoir, co-written with Kristine McKenna, and hearing Lynch himself speak adds a unique charm, given his voice’s unique charm.

    In terms of structure, the book is pretty engaging. McKenna writes sections of more objective biography and reportage and then David Lynch ‘corrects the record,’ as it were, giving his own perspectives and anecdotes that would generally not warrant inclusion in a biography. Those moments standout as particularly endearing, narrated kind of like grandpa Simpson talking about tying an onion to his belt, which was the style at the time, where the main narrative is suddenly interrupted by David Lynch talking about the best chocolate milk or donut he has ever had, or his discussion of being in France and how he “found out how great these pommes frites are, these French fries, and they coaxed [him] into doing these interviews by giving [him] all these pommes frites, which were incredible”.

    One of the things I find so engrossing about Lynch as an artist and personality is his capacity for finding an exuberant pleasure in such simple things. His films explore such bizarre depths that it seems a contradiction that something as simple as French fries are a transcendent experience. It points towards Lynch’s focus on minutiae. The grand vision of his work is comprised of details significant, sometimes, only to him. In one section, for instance, the book notes that Lynch hides things around the set that would never be noticed and yet are supposedly crucial to the scene—coffee beans under the bed, for instance. The book suggests the intensity of attention that drives Lynch’s work and that is demanded of his audience. One witness to Lynch’s early art career describes how Lynch was creating an oil painting of a boat by a dock: “He was putting the paint on really thick at that point and a moth had flown into the painting and as it struggled to get out of the paint it made this beautiful swirl in the sky. I remember he got so excited about that, seeing that death mixed in with his painting.” 

    In fact, a central tension of the text is between the divine and the macabre. Lynch finds such beauty in all facets of life: light and darkness in equal measure. In the beginning of the book, there are scenes of Lynch playing in the street with his friends in a vision of classic Americana juxtaposed with chilling moments, including one in which he encounters a naked woman wandering in the street who has been beaten. Not to give too simplistic a reading, but there are parallels with Lynch’s filmic language. I’m picturing a scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that presents a similar vision to the one narrated about Lynch’s youth. In another scene, he talks about driving high at night where the darkness surrounds the road and narrows his vision: for that, it’s almost as though his teenage shenanigans are the inciting force for Mulholland Drive: the iconic shot of the centre lines in the road and the irresponsible young drivers that cause the crash that saves Rita’s life echoed in my mind’s eye.

    As expected from the biography of an artist, there is thorough account of Lynch’s various projects. Given the opacity of his works, the book does not reveal their meaning, of course, but gives a glimpse into the world of filmmaking. The projects with which I’m most familiar are the sections of the book I was most invested in, particularly Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks. While I’m familiar with Eraserhead, Dune, and Lost Highway, I’ve only seen them once each and my memory is less faithful. That said, the behind-the-scenes anecdotes are all compelling either for revealing how the projects come together or how certain choices came to pass. The coincidences behind casting Mulholland Drive, for instance, are pretty serendipitous to the project. There’s also accounts of projects that never materialized which are evocative to the imagination in compelling ways. Poor, poor Ronnie Rocket.

    Some details I knew—Lynch being asked to direct a Star Wars sequel, for instance—but I didn’t know the depths of their connection. He was also offered American Beauty, and I can’t help but imagine what a different film that might have been with him at the helm. As I mentioned, the sections that David Lynch narrates himself are incredibly endearing and add to the humour of the book. He narrates an anecdote in which Marlon Brando was given a private screening of Lost Highway (Lynch had wanted him to be in the film). Hearing Lynch tell the story is hilarious: “Marlon came in and the man who owned the theater had a bunch of treats [...] and Marlon filled his pockets with all sorts of candies, this man told us, and then Marlon went in and he also had hamburgers and different things in his pockets, so basically, he was eating during the whole screening—hamburgers that he brought on his own. So, after the screening he left and the next day he called me and he said, “David, it’s a damn good film, but it won’t make a nickel.’” It’s such an absurd image. Imagine a guy with pockets full of hamburgers just pulling out burger after burger the length of the film. Now imagine David Lynch’s voice saying that. I laughed every time I listened to it.

    The same is true when Lynch went on tangents about his own affectations. I’ll fail to reproduce the full effect, but in one moment Lynch describes his personal style and its rationale: “I button the top button on my shirt because I like the way it looks but also I don’t like any air on my collar bones. For some reason, that really bothers me. I don’t like, anyone, you know, fiddling with my collar bones, and I don’t like air on them.” Why are people fiddling with your collar bones, David?!

    Actually, reading the book would suggest that Lynch has had his collarbones fiddled with a fair amount. He’s a charming man—and a bit of a philanderer. You can get the impression of his habits early in his life, a throughline you can trace through the accounts given by his four wives. If there’s something that will retroactively challenge Lynch’s artistic achievements, it will be his relationship with women (though, to be clear, none of the women seem to bear ill-will towards him, just a recognition that he loves love and he loves his work). If there are two things that will retroactively challenge Lynch’s artistic achievements, it will be his confusing political affiliation.

    Yet, in some ways, issues like politics seem beneath Lynch. Again and again, Lynch returns to an endorsement of transcendental meditation. It arises at critical moments in his life and he presents a pretty persuasive case for engaging in the practice. He refers to the brain research of transcendence, offers it as a means for ensuring we treat others well, and an avenue for creativity. In his words, “I always say that negativity is the enemy of creativity and this conduit through which ideas flow, stress and all this tension, it squeezes that conduit and blocks the little beautiful little ideas from flowing through so you can catch them.” Transcendental meditation brings us to the level of consciousness that allows for inner happiness, external happiness, and, by extension, our creative faculties flourish. And, judging from Lynch’s manic productivity, it really does inspire you to make the art you want to make.

    Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend who is very much not a fan of Lynch, for understandable reasons. When she asked me why I liked Lynch, and my answer was that I am drawn into the not knowing. When I think of books that I love, films that I love, and so on, there’s a kind of unanswerable mystery at the core. I am compelled by what requires deciphering, particularly when it evades a conclusive response. Even though Room to Dream gives some answers to Lynch’s life, it does not do so in a way that diminishes his art. Despite the fact that this biography is as likely as we are to get to a definitive account of his life and work, it maintains the impression that there is always more to discover, always more left unsaid.