Out Of Control

I'm too lazy to do some sort of retrospective of cinema this decade (although I will say briefly that this decade gave us, amongst other films, In The Mood For Love, There Will Be Blood, Talk To Her, Hidden and The Son's Room; not bad, right?), so I want to round out the decade - and this much-neglected blog - with a post about three wonderful films I've seen fairly recently, that have given me many great moments to mull over and delight in. I keep coming back to these films, in my mind - with visions of their worlds, snatches of dialogue, some fragments of colour or some sort of mannerism, coming back to me again and again. These are the best films - the ones whose reel continues to unspool in your head, long after the first projection. Those films are: The White Ribbon, by Michael Haneke; A Serious Man, by Joel & Ethan Coen; and Where The Wild Things Are, by Spike Jonze.

Thinking about these films, it strikes me that some of the best cinema is concerned with central characters struggling to create order out of chaos, to pin down the rules of the world, in order to create something controlled, that is understandable. That's - for instance - what Synecdoche, New York (by Jonze's former collaborator Charlie Kaufman, and another serious highlight of the year for me) is about: the director's inability to make his life fit into any recognisable pattern, and the impossibility of representing our human existence, in all its complexity, futility and grandeur. Synecdoche - and indeed all of Kaufman's work - takes a sort of perverse delight in noting how we cannot arrange our world according to our own vision (think of Jim Carrey trying to re-write his and Kate Winslet's existence, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and in that sense the cinematographer's attempt to nail down our world into a pretty narrative is a quixotic one (and here you might think of Charlie's inability to adapt Susan Orlean's book, in Jonze's film Adaptation.; life overtakes him, and his efforts are overpowered by external circumstances).

The Coens, likewise, have often depicted this sort of scenario. Jeffrey Lebowski - the Dude of the Brothers' brilliant The Big Lebowski - finds his slacker existence thrown into pandemonium after a heist goes ridiculously awry; Marge Gunderson spends the entirety of the film Fargo trying to find the criminals, but still cannot answer, by the end of the film, why people would wreak such havoc in the lives of perfectly ordinary people, while in the same film, William H. Macy's character wrestles with the way his life has spiralled totally out of control. This theme makes it all the more surprising to me that people have seen A Serious Man as such an anomaly in the Brothers' filmography. It shares with many of their other films this sense of life being unknowable, and humanity being a mere pawn of fate. Larry Gopnik - the serious man of the title, played by the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg - finds his whole life taking a turn for the decidedly hellish, as his wife leaves him for a smarmy arse, his backward brother is arrested for various offences, his bid for tenure at University is under threat, he's blackmailed by a student, and he appears to be suffering from some unknown illness. It's actually classic Coen territory - especially considering the generally absurd treatment of Gopnik's woes - which recalls their film The Hudsucker Proxy, with its treatment of fate and time. In that picture, Tim Robbins is rescued from tragedy by a ukulele-playing angel; Gopnik, in A Serious Man, goes to ask three rabbis for assistance, hoping they'll be more clued up about matters of fate and man's place in the world. What sets this film apart is not so much the theme - life, with its various comedies and tragedies, is an absurd or cruel joke - but the way they've anchored their film in Jewishness. It gives the film a certain weight - something to anchor the whimsy - and makes it one of their best yet. Everything is perfect, from the lightly stereotyped characters, filmed in vivid cartoon colour, to the Coens' depiction of this world, which makes absolute sense and yet no sense at all. It is a very funny film - another thing reviewers have strangely not noted - while retaining great humanity and pathos. The Coens can appear snide (think of O Brother Where Art Thou?, with its disgusting depiction of the KKK as inept buffoons), but in this film we've invested so much emotionally with this family, it almost makes the whole joke of the film (the joke being that life itself is a joke - to look for meaning or order in it is self-defeating) somehow charming. All of it is so cleverly and intricately woven together, it makes the mind reel to think about it. I cannot wait to see it again.

Where The Wild Things Are, by Spike Jonze, has a shot at this question. The key line in the film, which does not appear in the book, comes from Max's mother, who - when he bites her - says, "What's wrong with you? You're out of control!" Or perhaps she says it the other way round. At any rate, in Sendak's book, the line is simply, "Wild thing!" - making Max one with the monsters whom he sails off to meet in the foreign land of his imagination. In the film, Max is not one with the monsters, and the tone is very different - less roustabout, more melancoly. Mas is decidedly at odds with the monsters, who do not see him as one of them, but as someone significantly different. This is a world where owls can be friends, and where humans do not exist. The idea of being out of control is key to the film, which sees Max attempt to exert some sort of control of his own over the wild things in his mind. Where the film builds on the book most significantly, it sees Max plan for the monsters a proper living space - a clear act of civilisation, aiming to turn this tribe into a society. The monsters are at once facets of Max's mind, and the aspects of other people that he does not, cannot understand. It is a classic trope of innocence and experience - except that Max undergoes his coming of age in the company of himself, pretty much. Only when Max has managed to control himself, as it were, can he return to the real world of civilisation. The film's fantastic conclusion, though, is that a lot of this is unknowable; the monsters of Max's id cannot truly be helped, and it is not his role to help them or order them. The child must not try to know; the fun of things and the feeling of things, are a good enough substitute for understanding. This is where the film really does succeed most brilliantly: its grasp of the importance of feeling - and by this I mean the literal sense, of grasping textures and sights and sounds; the film has a very wonderful raggedness to it, where twigs are knobbly and snap with a crack; where rocks slip and crash and crumble. You can practically feel all these sensations through Max. Again, another triumph of the film is its proximity with its subject - Jonze trains his camera on the hypnotic Max Records, capturing rays of sun in his hair, the dirt n his face - but everything is filmed at his height, from his perspective, so that we approach the monsters with the same apprehensions and wonder as he does. It makes it a terrifying film in those moments where it has to be - when Max must confront the aggression of the world, and try to fit into his own perception - justly because the fears are very real, and we are psychologically invested in the characters. It's a beautiful film - and I mean beautiful in the sense of visually beautiful, with a wonderful palette of colours and gorgeous shots in counter-light - that captures quite astonishingly the awkwardness of childhood; its boredom and its sense of alienation, but also the wonders and delights of it, even in trying and failing to make things fit a very narrow framework of understanding.

From the out-of-control Max to the almost demonically wayward children of The White Ribbon feels like a big step. Haneke's film is the stylistic antithesis of Jonze's broad, colourful, quirky film, instead shot in rigorous black and white, with great formal mastery. It is a quite lugubrious film, but incredibly involving right from the start, with that very strange tone typical of Haneke's best films, where you are involved despite the characters being only briskly sketched, and despite being plunged immediately into some horrible sort of situation. In this instance, strange and horrible goings-on in a German village at the turn of the century, seem to be connected to odd behaviour in the town's children. A horse is maimed and a Doctor severely injured; a woman likewise; a barn is burnt; a field's entire crops destroyed; a family bird is tortured to death. In the midst of all this confusion, the town's teacher is trying to work out what is going on, and the parents of some of the children attempt to control their children by making their two eldest wear symbolic white ribbons on their arms to symbolise their wickedness, and tying up their elder son at night to prevent him from masturbating. It is an almost relentless circle of retribution, with harm begetting harm. Through this nastiness, Haneke weaves an astonishingly delicate narrative, that of the teacher's courtship of a young governess.The scenes between them are beautifully acted, and shot with such respect and attentiveness - I'm thinking here of a one-take scene in which the two are out riding in a carriage, and take a turn off the path; he seeks to kiss her, and she asks that he does not, and they ride on. To see the dynamic between them work in this particular way, as the camera follows them off the road and they are presented in a seemingly stiff frame shot, is to note Haneke's genius: he crafts a sense of wonder - the obverse of dread - in very small goings-on. His eye for detail is peerless, and his sense of greater rules at large in the world (specifically, how all human actions are political, and therefore impact on the world in ways which are unpredictable) gives his films wonderful depth. The White Ribbon is a glorious masterpiece, in which every scene, every shot, is beautifully thought out and composed, and every line finds something to delight in or be unsettled by. The film's implied conclusion - and again, Haneke spells nothing out, but allows his ideas to emanate from his film - is that this generation of children added controlling behaviours to their cruelty and wrought havoc on the world. There is no tyranny in this film's creation though - the control that Haneke exerts on his subject is humble and natural, of a piece with its subject matter.

A Decade In Music

When I think back to music this decade, I get such an almighty headrush recalling all the joy - and some of the sadness - that accompanied my listening. My most important musical memory of the decade is this: driving to Coventry with Ben and Laura, singing 'Wagon Wheel' by Old Crow Medicine Show. I've never sung so loud in my entire life, and they too were braying at an inordinate volume, and I have an exact visual memory of whizzing past a roundabout as we sang, "But he's a-heading west to the Cumberland Gap - Johnson City, TENNESSEE!" I could feel the happiness warming my body and hurting my cheeks.

This is to say that context is so important to understand music - where you were when you heard it, what memories it brings back, what significance it had, who you associate it with; perhaps just as importantly these days, how you heard it. You need to have some sense of fluidity in music: what music led you to what, what your path was. I'm pleased to say that all my discovering of music, practically, happened this decade. When other people think of their formative years, and the music that most influenced them, they often go back to their teens - but I was such a boring little prick when I was a teenager, and all of my sense of discovery, of awakening and hunger, my sense of myself: I attribute really most of it to this decade. In the first half of the decade, I lost two friends and a grandmother, at least two sorts of virginity, and so many illusions and preconceptions about the world. So this is my self-built soundtrack - what shaped me, and what I chose to shape me.

This decade, I didn't just hear the Strokes, Kanye West, Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom and Dizzee Rascal for the first time - I also discovered Joni Mitchell, Orange Juice, Robert Johnson, Jonathan Richman, Bessie Smith, Public Enemy, Kate Bush and Hank Williams. So I feel a bit funny picking music from this decade, because all of this was happened upon at the same time - and I'm grateful to my age that it made all of this available to me at a time when I was anxious to strip myself down and start over. Pitchfork, Myspace, Last.fm, Salon, Spotify, various downloading sites and blogs: I read up on everything, and tried to be in touch. It was also a way of trying to work out my thing, like Tigger eating thistles and honey and all sorts before settling on cough medicine. The old came in with the new: Rufus Wainwright got me onto the McGarrigles and Loudon, and Leonard Cohen; I heard about Elizabeth Cotten on Pitchfork; Fiona Apple covered Bessie Smith, Blossom Dearie and the Boswell Sisters, so I hunted down the originals; likewise Fleet Foxes with Judee Sill, Final Fantasy with John Cale. Not counting friends and their influence: all the country music, gospel and Devon Sproule from Laura; Dave and Bonnie Prince Billy; Sophie and her Joni; Stef and Bright Eyes; Ben and - jesus - all that indie stuff I had a go at, and some of which stuck. I first heard Rufus on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, for crying out loud. It just feels like such a whirl, this decade, that picking out albums seems not quite right. But I'll give it a go.

My best music this decade is probably not the actual best music of the decade. In fact, it's definitely not. But I suddenly got that thing, in or around 2005 - that tingly feeling of music speaking to me, and just to me. What I was going through that year, Rufus Wainwright voiced exactly in 'Foolish Love' and '14th Street': not just in words - although they were also spot-on - but with the tone of the music, with its cadences and instruments. I suppose that's the teenage rush.

Go on then - let's attempt a list. Of music merely from this decade. Which is wrong:

Albums:
1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
2. Rufus Wainwright - Poses
3. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender
4. Kanye West - Late Registration
5. Bjork - Vespertine
6. Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days
7. Gillian Welch - The Revelator
8. The Arcade Fire - Funeral
9. Antony & the Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now
10. Denison Witmer - Are You A Dreamer?

Some songs:
Rihanna - Umbrella
Jens Lekman - You Are The Light
Kanye West - Jesus Walks
Cat Power - Salty Dog
Outkast - Hey Ya!
Beirut - Postcards From Italy
Fiona Apple - Not About Love (Jon Brion version)
Lupe Fiasco - Go Go Gadget Flow
Britney Spears - Toxic
Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken
Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On
Dizzee Rascal - Dream
Dirty Projectors & David Byrne - Knotty Pine
Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game (acoustic)
Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel
Ol' Dirty Bastard feat. Kelis - Got Your Money
Devon Sproule - Plea For A Good Night's Rest
The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize?
Shivaree - Goodnight Moon
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
The Strokes - Hard To Explain
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Raining In Darling
Ghostface Killah - Shakey Dog
Ryan Adams & Emmylou Harris - Oh My Sweet Carolina
Micah P. Hinson - She Don't Own Me
Rufus Wainwright - Dinner At Eight