Thomas F. Cook

I went to one of the shows that Joel Edgerton appeared afterward for a Q&A, but it was not a Q&A from the audience, but a series of questions from an obnoxious and loud host of some radio station. Actually, I didn’t resent that at all. Indie movie houses need all the help they can get, and his appearance for this talk gave it a sold out house in the middle of the afternoon.

Paul Schrader is one of those writers who has become “important.” So much so that his movies are called “A Paul Schrader” film.

Taxi Driver was my first introduction to his writing and Martin Scorsese, because my film teacher at the time (and I could probably find her name because most of my teachers were famous in one way or another), said, “Well at least we know they (Scorsese and Schrader) have no problem telling us how they feel.”

Through the entirety of this long and boring movie, I kept thinking about Travis Bickel and other Schrader men who are probably what this one is: white supremacists that don’t have a dime and can’t make a buck. Where this anger comes from is a mystery to me. But this is why I felt privileged to hear Joel Edgerton talk. He said, among other things, that his character had to have learned his racism at a young age: it was given to him as a kind of evil gift. He said he was constantly fascinated by the references to racism, but that it was never talked about. And he said that Paul Shrader’s way of directing is to ask his actors not to use their “tricks.” He’s almost Hitchcockian in that way. Hitchcock loathed actors and he loathed what they had been taught to do: show emotion in the Stella Adler school — or basically Stanislavsky. Edgerton said that he had been directed to not reveal emotion on his face, as well as the other actors (Sigourney Weaver and Quintilla someone.)

And therein lies the strangest mystery of this movie: how did this guy, with a white supremacist background, a member of a group like the Proud Boys, (although this group seems a little more serious than the Proud Boys, who seem to like parades more than actual engagement) — how did this guy go from that reprehensible character to a man in love with a young black woman, with a kind of intermediary in the form of the racist character played by Sigourney Weaver.

She is a woman lost in the illusion of plantation life and slave holding life. And apparently, at some point, and FBI agent comes to her and asks her to “hide” in her dilapidated Louisiana plantation as the master gardener. She is still a slave holder, and Schrader uses the scenery to make it clear. He lives in a shack and she lives in a mansion across the road. She has servants. He is a sexual servant. But her house is also devoid of decoration — there’s almost no art or color. There is one maid and I don’t remember the food but it wasn’t lavish. Pointedly, when the Sigourney Weaver character tells him to take her up to her bedroom and make love to her, she says “Take off your clothes,” first, because she wants to stare at his racist tattoos. Later, when he reveals himself to the black girl he’s fallen in love with, she demands that they can continue to be together, but that he must remove them.

Edgerton said that he thinks the reason he kept the tattoos was to remind himself of his past. But he had nothing to say about what caused that change. And that’s where I finally have trouble with the movie and probably many of Schrader’s movies. If we don’t get a chance to understand what’s driving these characters — if they don’t reveal themselves to us with, basically, a way of expressing their innerness — why are we watching them? Yes: action is character. What a person does tells you everything you need to know about their character: what kind of person they are. But sometimes that inwardness can be very rewarding and even surprising, if it’s revealed.

I learned, also, that his named is Edge-r-ton. Not Ed-Ger-ton as I had previously thought.

The IMDB page

That Guardian quote is a pretty exact description of this pretty amazing movie. The story is essentially about two friends that live in the alps north of Turin. They meet, initially, because the father of one, Pietro, wants to get away from the pollution of the city, so they buy a house in a small town in which Bruno, a farmer’s son, is the only child.

Pietro’s father and mother make a somewhat ham handed attempt to bring Bruno back to Turin to get an education, stating that Pietro’s friend needs a fair chance at having a life. This makes Bruno’s absent father angry, and instead he takes Bruno away and makes him become a construction worker in Turin. Their friendship is over and they grow up to be young teenagers or perhaps they are in their early twenties, when they happen to see each other at the same cafe. They barely acknowledge each other — just a not and a kind of wave. And again, a period of time passes before they reunite because Pietro’s father dies and leaves him a dilapidated stone house in the same area as the town where they have their getaway apartment. Bruno, who now lives back where he started, suggests that they rebuild this stone house, and that’s when Pietro discovers that his father had a friendship with Bruno, and that they often spent time together: far more time than Pietro ever spent with him. His father liked Bruno better, and basically took him as a son. Pietro’s girlfriend also seems to like Bruno better, and eventually becomes his wife and the mother of his children.

I don’t remember when, exactly, Pietro decided to move to Nepal, but he finds a wife there, and I was struck by the fact that both friends have found their homes high in the mountains. Pietro, on one of his visits to his stone house, tells his former girlfriend and Bruno about the fact that they can’t cremate people in Nepal because of the lack of wood, so they have sky burials. This is where they place the body high on a stone peak and let the elements take the body. Then, he claims, they go up to retrieve the bones, grind them into a powder and do something I can’t remember. I looked this up and it’s only true of some Buddhists.

Anyway, I won’t belabor the story because it’s a quiet one and beautifully sad. What struck me so acutely is that friendship between men is rarely spoken about or depicted. It either becomes Brokeback Mountain, which is an entirely different friendship, or it’s kind of jokey and palsy like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Rarely is a regular friendship between two straight guys handed to us with great sensitivity and reality. The reality is that straight guys don’t talk very much about their feelings and especially with each other. They often find that they can only talk about deep thoughts or feelings to their wives. And these guys are not really very different, but the unspoken feelings between them are almost palpable. Pietro doesn’t voice his hurt about his father sort of adopting Bruno, but you feel it. Likewise when Bruno takes his girlfriend, or rather, she moves away from Pietro and toward Bruno, you understand perfectly why Pietro had to go find a life in Nepal, without him saying anything at all. I think that’s where this airy feeling comes from.

Anyway this was a wonderful movie.

(I would have called this episode “In mourning,”)

There’s a second period of time after the initial shock of someone’s death, and then all the preparations that have to happen to bury someone honorably (please re-read The Iliad to see how the ancient world understood love and death — it is basically the Trojan war happened at all,) when you finally get to the emptiness phase. And that’s how this episode felt, which probably makes it a brilliant piece of writing. And this time it was Roman who stepped up and used all the power he had to express that emptiness. Perhaps it is because he is as empty as his cousin Greg, who thinks he’s growing in power, but is still nothing but a weirdo. Or perhaps he really felt some actual love for his horrible father.

In this episode, I think the writers purposely distracted the viewers from Kendall (Ken Doll). But they did say in their post episode interview that they opened the series with Kendall driving to work, and in this episode, they open with him driving to work. In this episode, Roman got to vent his spleen, but Kendall, I still think, is fighting the fight that was established by the title. At this point, I just hope that he doesn’t turn into Trump. But that’s a definite possibility.

By the by, I found a strange video on Youtube of celebrity commercials, which included one that TFG did. And the commercial, filmed 30 years ago maybe, shows him fucking everything up. I think it was for a Wendy’s Hamburger. Yes America. Re-elect this idiot. You’ve made so many great choices these days.

Unfortunately I had to put this one down, and it was only due to the fact that every other chapter is written in the mind of a character who is schizophrenic. Maybe McCarthy is so great that it will one day be seen as a masterpiece — Faulkner narrated a story from the point of view of a dead person. But I can’t follow or even muster up the tiniest bit of care for someone who is mentally deranged. It’s like trying to feel sorry for a drunk who is crying because of something terrible that happened in their life, that’s causing them to drink. I’m actually thinking now of this woman who was a friend of some friends (she was Swiss) who went to sleep with a candle burning next to her pillow, and an empty glass, cigarettes, an ash tray and a bottle of something like schnapps or rum. She explained that she would wake up in the middle of the night and in order not to have to get out of bed, would have all her needs right there: her cigarettes and her drinks. She was a severe alcoholic and one night we made the mistake of indulging her and let us tell her all about the story of her baby that died in the hospital. It went on for hours, and it never got anywhere. She just repeated the same thing over and over and over. And later we learned that she did this to any new person she met. There was no forward motion and she was really just a broken record using this excuse to not face her problems.

That’s sort of how I felt about every other chapter in this book. For the first several chapters I could tell it was a woman’s mind, but then I finally just did a quick search and learned that it was the main character’s sister, who was dead in the “real time” part of the book. So because she was crazy, and dead, I didn’t really feel the need to read this book. If it was just his (the brother’s) story, I would have read it entirely, because we learn, early on, that he is still in love with his sister and that she’s dead. I’d love to know what that character thinks about his own obsession. But I don’t need to read the rantings of a crazy person UNLESS they make some progress. But I didn’t see it coming, and it was too hard to read: not Finnegan’s Wake hard and not even Ulysses hard, but more like Mrs. Dalloway when the “impressionism” that Virginia Woolf was trying to capture became so confusing, you couldn’t tell if you had just swept from one head to another.

So that’s one I had to put down. Currently reading, “Up With the Sun,” and enjoying it. It’s an imagined biography of the real actor and antiquarian Dirk Dallman (I’ll correct that name later), who was found murdered along with his lover Stephen in about 1980 or 81. In real life, (I think that’s now written, IRL, they did catch the guys and they were hustlers who decided to prey on some wealthy fags who bought their cocaine and grass.) Gay men have always had this interesting willingness to venture across class lines: so it was perfectly fine for an extremely wealthy gay guy (or at least one who was pretending to be wealthy) to dip into the impoverished world of the hustlers. I just hope this guy is up to the task.

I seem to be in strong disagreement with most people with recent movies. First example is “Showing Up,” with Michelle Williams by Kelly Reichardt. This movie is basically about a sculptor trying to do her work. The brief professional description is that an artist must balance her creative life with the daily drama of family and friends. Well who doesn’t have to do that? The problem is that her family and friends’ dramas are simply not that interesting until it gets to her possibly mentally deranged brother. Their mother thinks he’s genius, but he might just be a borderline personality. He digs large holes in his backyard and says their “ears” for the earth. When he enters the picture, there is at least a sense of danger. It doesn’t come to pass thankfully, but it adds some tension to what was an utterly boring movie. I’ve said somewhere else in this blog, that the artists life is not very interesting and probably not even worth studying. Maybe someone like Van Gogh or Picasso. But for the most part, writers, painters, sculptors and the like (I’m not going to include actors because they are usually bombastic and drunk, so they get into funny situations), just toil away, as unappreciated as housewives. This movie has already been talked about as a possible Best Picture.

The second example is Carmen, written by three people. There was, at least, some plot in this one. A woman who is doing some dancing on a plywood platform is being approached by some thugs in cars. When they arrive she is dancing furiously. They ask, “Where is she?” and when she doesn’t reply, they kill her.

I don’t know if the “She” is Carmen, who shows up a little bit later and somehow manages to dig a grave, bury her mother and burn the house down, all by herself. She takes off to the northern border of Chihuahua to crawl under the fence and make her way to her aunt’s house. At the same time, Aidan, played by Paul Mescal, whose star seems to be on the rise, is cajoled by his sister to go work at the border fence with the border patrol as a volunteer. It sounds like the actual border patrol is giving these volunteers (most of whom just want to murder someone) permission to assist in patrolling the border at night. Paul Mescal’s friend is a trigger itchy psycho that he knew in the army in Afghanistan. When they catch some “illegals” this friend shoots and kills 2 or 3 of them all while Aidan is screaming at him to stop. When the crazy friend turns his gun on Aidan, Aidan kills him. Carmen, who seems not to be aware of anything related to illegalities or crawling under a fence, steals their patrol vehicle and Aidan hops in the back and lies down. He lies down because he knows she will eventually run out of gas (something else she seemed not to have any understanding of). Of course she does, so she abandons the truck and starts walking. (Again, they are literally 600 hundred miles from Los Angeles. This girl does not think at all.) Aidan grabs the gas can out of the back and fills the tank, catches up with her about a mile down the road, and persuades her to get in. From there, a romance develops. They arrive at this crazy club where Carmen’s aunt encourages everyone to dance the way they feel. I kept closing my eyes in one long narrative, but would open them every so often to see if she was still talking about the same thing. She was. It literally stands perfectly still while they sing or dance or do all this nonsense about “feeling.” There is no story movement until the very end when they are trying to run again, and Aidan gets shot. He doesn’t die in real time, he dies in an exuberant dance which constitutes the ending. I was just glad it was over, but then people applauded.

So who knows. Maybe I’m an idiot.

This will be a short entry, as from here on out, based on my belief that Kendall has been the main character for the entire series, I will only point out what matters in that regard.

It’s still very possible that someone else has an ace up their sleeve, but at the end of this episode Kendall had pushed his sister out by promising her that she would be equal. (She immediately understood this lie as soon as it was announced that Kendall and Roman would be co-chiefs.) (I’m suddenly remembering an episode of The Office where the brilliant (haha) David Wallace decided that Dunder-Mifflin should have two co-managers. Oscar, the only smart person in that place made a joke, “Yes, what country doesn’t have two presidents? How about the two Popes?” — something to that effect.)

Anyway, once Shiv was shivved by Kendall and Rom, the announcement was made by the board of directors and everyone knew before the opening bell of Wall Street on Monday, Kendall made his next shiv. This time it was to tarnish his father’s image by using soft (Trump would call it “fake”) media to spread the rumor that his father was losing it and his children had been making all the decisions. This went against everything that Ken’s brother believed, so this was a power move, ultimately, against Roman. He hasn’t knifed him well enough, and he now has an enemy in his sister, but it’s a start.

The next episode will see how well they can stand up to the Viking. And the ending credit music, by the way, was absolutely spectacular. I hope the writer of the music makes an orchestral piece of it. The opening music is good, but it’s just bing da bing da bing da bing da. The end credits was worth a listen on its own.

I actually enjoyed this episode because so much of this happened when my dad died in 2002, (21 years ago). Some guys who had been his investors had brought paperwork for my mom to sign the day after he died. A single day they waited. I saw them come in with their manila envelope and approach my mom and tell her she needed to sign some papers dealing with the business. She was in mourning, trying to “entertain” at a wake, and these papers that they had her sign were papers that turned her shares into non voting shares, which gave them the power to run the companies he owned as they saw fit. It put her into a passive role which she could nothing about. I remember wanting to get up and stop her from signing them, but I was also so confused about my position in the family and my relationship to both my mother and father, I decided against action. If I had acted at that moment and stopped her from signing the papers, we might have avoided 5 to 10 years of lawsuits. But, in my defense, my mom would have told me to go away and she would have signed them not to “cause any trouble,” just the same way she accepted the Beckett family’s offer of $400k for my dad’s 30% of Beckett Gas, a company that my dad predicted would be worth 50 million in 20 years. Guess what? It’s worth 50 million. He was very smart.

OOOfff. This became a diary entry. Oh well. Maybe it’ll get picked up by google and will appear on page 1123 of their search results.

I’m going to keep this in draft form until I remember the proper spelling of the writer’s name and until I can actually figure out what I saw. I read a Times review which I think was pretty accurate. Horror films are usually about waking up in a relatively normal state. Something might be off, but you go about your day, then suddenly something happens and your day either immediately turns into a nightmare, or does so gradually. The monster comes out of the closet or from under the bed. Jason starts killing her friends until he finally turns his sights on Jamie Lee Curtis. This movie flips that concept over. Beau is living in a nightmare, where there is a dead body in the street which no one has bothered to collect, some naked man is going around stabbing people to death, another bum seems to be caught in an eternal fist fight with another bum, and a gay guy is samba dancing, endlessly, to an audience of no one.

He has no friends and the only person he seems to visit is a therapist (Stephen McKinley Harrison — who was so good as a Catholic teacher in Lady Bird.) But he’s also a completely unreliable protagonist and you don’t know if what you’re seeing is “real” or not. I don’t think gets in the way of the film but it leaves it open to interpretation.

One thing you must know if you’re going to watch and Ari Aster movie is that it’s very possible that every character will die.

In an early scene, because he’s been prescribed some pills that ABSOLUTELY MUST be taken with about a half a litre of water, Beau has to run across the street to get some water from the deli because his building’s water has been shut off. While in the deli, drinking the water that will prevent him from dying, almost everyone on the street enters his building through the door he propped open, and they all go up to his apartment and have a party, fuck, fight, burn things, cook and the two bums continue to choke each other.

When they are done, he returns to his apartment and gets a call with the news that his mother has died. His mother, it turns out, is key to his predicament, but he doesn’t know this. And then he begins on one of those nightmares you have where you can’t get to someplace, like an airport, because so many things keep getting in the way, and then you finally wake up, relieved to no longer be frustrated. There are 4 major settings after he leaves his house: a suburban home where a surgeon and his wife have rescued him — I can’t recall what happened that he ended up unconscious, but it’s not important. This suburban couple is going to take care of him. One thing we notice when he gets into a bath is that he has enormous testicles — like the size of grapefruits — and the doctor (Nathan Lane) mentions this.

The second major setting is in a forest where some people who call themselves faerie people (they’re just hippies) welcome him and invite him to watch a play. The play triggers some memories.

The third but not last setting is his mother’s near mansion. It’s clear that she’s an accomplished and powerful woman. He has his first sexual experience with Parker Posey (who is really one of the most talented comedians), a childhood sweetheart for whom he has never lost his desire. She makes an absolutely brilliant face when he orgasms and his grapefruit sized nuts explode into her, but then wants to finish herself. She does while she’s still on top of him and then immediately dies. (This mirrors a lie that his mother had told him all his life — that his father died the moment he orgasmed the sperm that would become Beau.)

But it turns out that she’s not dead, but that her maid had died for her — to fool her son to see what he would do. See she’s been listening to recordings of all Beau’s sessions with his therapist, and through him, has learned that her son hates her. Through some sort of accident, Patty Lupone ends up dead as well.

He gets in a boat, goes through a cave (symbolizing, I think, the vaginal canal, which, I forgot to mention, opens the movie. His birth is depicted as first a heartbeat and darkness, and then glimpses or reddish light and then finally the camera is pushed out of the uterus and we see a baby’s bottom being spanked. As he putters through this cave in his little boat, he comes to the center of a large arena or stadium that is filled with people. This is his judgment room and there is a prosecution and a defense. The defense “lawyer” if that’s what he should be called, is thrown over the edge of the stadium and killed on a rock at the bottom of it. So there is only the prosecution. The engine of the boat starts sputtering and sparking and Beau, standing in the boat, finally realizes that it’s over. The engine explodes, the boat capsizes, traps Beau underneath, and after some struggle where we see the boat rocking a little, it subsides and Beau is dead. The audience starts to leave as the credits roll, eventually leaving a completely empty stadium.

What this is all about I can’t tell. But it’s very hard to tell with Aster’s movies what exactly he’s trying to accomplish. I’m fairly certain that this movie is about how an overbearing mother’s “love” can cripple a person. But I’m not sure if there’s much more to it than that. Just as at the end of Midsommer (another disturbing and genre defying movie by Aster), Florence Pugh decides to burn her boyfriend alive as he’s dressed in the skin of a bear (by force, by a crazy Swedish cult), it doesn’t really come to mean anything, except perhaps something rather simple. In that instance, it was something like, “Don’t take your girlfriend for granted.” In this it’s, “Don’t smother your children.” I don’t know. But the genre is horror and I think it can be forgiven for not having big and possibly unnecessary themes. The title tells us the theme. Beau is afraid. He’s afraid of his mother. That’s what the movie is. But like his other two movies, it’s fascinating and watchable.

This is a spoiler from the start, like from now, so don’t read until you’ve seen the movie. You’ve been warned.

Every movie has its rules and the one rule that’s made abundantly clear at the end of Don’t Worry Darling, is that if a person is killed in “Victory” (the simulation), their body dies in the real world. When Florence Pugh accidentally kills her husband in the simulation there begins a high speed chase because she’s got to run to that central mound and press her hands against the windows in order to “wake up.” Because of the nature of the film and the basic premise (that women are being enslaved through ‘real world’ eye hypnosis and other horseshit), we think throughout the movie that ALL the women are enslaved and trapped in their beds like Florence Pugh and her neighbor.

But almost toward the end, the wife of the “guru” played by Chris Pine (I think his name was Frank), is stabbed and killed by his wife. This means that she knows he will die in the real world and she doesn’t care. So either she leaves every day, like all the dutiful husbands who pretend to go to work, OR, she has the ability to wake herself up, OR, there are people attending to her body as she exists in the fictional virtual world of Victory. There’s a possibility that she has committed murder, like Pugh, against the man who is feeding her body in the real world. And there’s also a possibility that Frank (if that’s his name) is the one trapped in the bed. (I don’t think this is likely because we hear when we are in the real world Harry Styles listening to him talk on the radio.) But she says, “It’s time for a woman to take over” and she also seems to know about the rules of the world.

I was glad I didn’t think about this too much — like I said, it just occurred to me. But it strikes me as an interesting take on marriage and relationships. Whether or not you know you’re in a simulation, you will still keep acting like a human being, with desires, but much more jealousy, envy, disappointment, and all those other deadly sins.

So that was a surprise. But as I said in my previous post, he was going to die either by someone’s hand or death’s, and that the conflict was between Logan and Kendall. I would go further to say that the main character is Kendall, not Logon. Logon is a “force of nature,” as they say, but he is not on a particularly journey, except to his final one.

It is still true, in my reading of it, that Kendall has the hardest journey and is the main character of the series. This is based on an archetype that still exists psychologically: that the son must kill the father and take his place. It’s in the animal kingdom all over, as males fight for dominance and older males eventually get driven from their top spot when they are weaker physically from age or just constant fighting. This is what happens with the animals closest to humans genetically, and people who study this sort of thing says it has to do with mating rights (control over women). But in humans I don’t think it’s necessarily about DNA or mating. With humans it seems to always be about power, including the power over women’s sexuality, and although there are some people who will give up power for a younger generation to take over, this is an extremely rare phenomenon. For most of human history, people with power have to be fought physically, by those who have less or none at all. Slavery, and what followed after the civil war and Lincoln’s assassination, was about the power of West European people over other skin tones. What’s happening now, all these years later, is still the follow-up to the emancipation as well as women’s suffrage. The forces of power, and power’s effect on people, is intense but also predictable.

From this point on, the show will probably go through many conflicts of people trying to take some of that power. In fact it’s been that way all along. The money and the ventures and the stocks and all that hooey is not the point. The point is the power. But now that Logan is out of the way, the scrambling that was so well depicted in The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, is going to take place and the person who finally wins that power could either be Kendall or any of his other siblings. My money’s on Kendall because he seemed like the heir apparent. But like any succession, abdication is possible, as well as assassination, and Shiv might end up as queen.

Brian Cox said in an interview that it will be hard to watch the show after the loss of its main protagonist, but I think that’s because he’s an actor and not a literary analyst, or a psychology student. Bombastic behavior, back stabbing, attention seeking and telling everyone to “fuck off” may make him interesting to watch, but it doesn’t make him the main protagonist. Kendall is the main protagonist, and now that he has vanquished his opponent with the help of the grim reaper, it’ll be interesting to see if he can keep what arguably should be his.

I’m curious if I will be right, that this show can only be resolved with the father dying either at Kendall’s hand or not, with Kendall in charge. At the end of the last season, Kendall had nearly completely broken down and was probably in the middle of a mental crisis. They went in to visit their father only to discover that he and his daughter’s husband had conspired, somehow — the machinations are mostly lost on me — to cut out the three kids forever.

But then this season started and all that seemed to be water under the bridge. The three kids are starting a new company called The 100 and as far as I could tell it was going to be a kind of Angie’s list or Yelp of the top 100 rated companies. But I’m not sure what it was or how they intended to make money from it. Shiv and her husband are in the middle of a divorce (they’re separated). The useless older one who was running for president and was afraid of the polls dropping him below 1% seems to think his future wife has left him.

Anyway, I’m only interested in seeing if I’m right. I’m not really interested in this family anymore. Power is power is power. It’s unrelenting. People who have it won’t give it up. People who lose it are forever trying to chase it and persuade it to return. I’ve never had power, that I know of. I’d like to think I’d never become as crazy as some of those Trump lunatics like Roger Stone or Steve Bannon or Rudy Guiliani.