A sweep is as lucky as lucky can be

Ok, everybody sing along:

So you think that you've got trouble?
Well, trouble's a bubble,
So tell old Mr. Trouble to "Get lost!".

Why not hold your head up high and,
Stop cryin',
Start tryin',
And don't forget to keep your fingers crossed.

When you find the joy of livin'
Is lovin'
And givin'
You'll be there when the winning dice are tossed.

A smile is just a frown
that's turned upside down,
So smile, and that frown
Will defrost.
And don't forget to keep your fingers crossed!

What do you mean you don’t know the tune? Of course you do.

It’s stuck in your head now, isn’t it?

That the show’s theme song was a song with lyrics is something I learned from reading Dick Van Dyke’s memoirs, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. I also learned the lyrics were written by Morey Amsterdam who played Buddy Sorrell on the show.

Something else I learned was that Van Dyke’s lover and companion for thirty-five years was Michelle Triola, the plaintiff in the infamous Lee Marvin palimony suit. Which means that I learned that for thirty-odd years Van Dyke wasn’t married anymore to his wife, Margie. That bit of news had passed me by. Of course at the time it became news I wouldn’t have been paying attention. I probably thought I knew everything I needed to know about Dick Van Dyke.

He was the head writer for The Alan Brady Show. He and his wife Laura lived with their son Ritchie at 148 Bonnie Meadow Road in New Rochelle, New York. Their best friends were their next door neighbors Jerry and Millie Helper. He grew up in Danville, Illinois, had a brother named Stacy who sleepwalked and played the banjo, often at the same time, and served in the Army and was stationed at Camp Crowder where he was boxing champ of his barracks and where he met and fell in love with his future wife, Laura Meehan, who was a seventeen year old dancer with a USO troupe when they married. He was a brilliant comedy writer but didn’t consider himself a real writer and worked on and off on writing a novel.

Before you “Oh, Rob!” at me, I know. But I’m sure I’m far from the only fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show for whom Rob Petrie and Dick Van Dyke might as well be the same person.

The confusion is actually built into the show. The Dick Van Dyke Show’s creator, chief writer, and guiding spirit, Carl Reiner not only gave Rob Petrie pieces of Van Dyke’s biography, including the brother who sleepwalked and played the banjo. He worked important aspects Van Dyke’s personality into Rob’s.

There are differences. For instance, Rob is a bit of a klutz because Van Dyke wasn’t. Rob had a tendency to bump into things, trip, stumble, fall , touch hot objects, knock things off shelves, break things (like a tooth or a violin over his head), and otherwise expose himself to pain and embarrassment because Van Dyke was a brilliant physical comedian and Reiner and the other writers were always on the lookout for an opportunity to show off his talent for making pain both funny and as graceful as a dance by Fred Astaire, who was a Van Dyke fan, by the way.

And five or six years of Dick Van Dyke’s life weren’t given to Rob Petrie (which makes Rob five or six years younger than Van Dyke), so Rob didn’t have time between getting out of the Army and starting work on The Alan Brady Show to travel the country as a peripatetic nightclub comic, turn down a contract offer from a “manager” who was actually a front man for the mob (although at one point Rob, Buddy, and Sally were asked to write a monologue for a mobster’s nephewwho wanted to break into show biz), put in several stints on live television, local and network, and get his big break starring in a Broadway musical which led to his getting his own sitcom whose devoted fans mistook him for the character he played to the point that they believed he was actually married to the actress who played his TV wife.

Another difference between the two men is that Van Dyke is the more spiritual and for a long time the more conventionally religious. He is also the more politically engaged. There are hints that Rob and Laura are nominally Catholic, but they seem to spend Sunday mornings at home and the only time I recall their going to church was for Laura's cousin’s wedding. When he was young, Dick Van Dyke was a regular attendee at whatever Dutch Reformed Church was nearby and when he was working in television and then on Broadway in New York City he found time to teach Sunday School.

How many young actors teach Sunday school? How many young actors are awake on Sunday morning?

Rob was involved in various worthwhile local causes and even ran for city council. But Van Dyke shared a podium with Martin Luther King, campaigned for Gene McCarthy, spoke out against the War in Vietnam, and cheerfully and proudly declares that of the Presidents he’s met, and he’s met four of the nine who served since 1963, Barack Obama is his favorite.

At eighty-five, Van Dyke seems to have scaled back some of his political and social activism, and he eventually drifted away from organized religion. (The drift began when he quit the church he belonged to because the board of elders balked at inviting members of the congregation of a neighboring black church to their services.) But he is still curious and thoughtful on the subject and reads and re-reads books on theology, spirituality, and philosophy. What exactly he thinks and what questions he wants answered, however, are left somewhat vague. Van Dyke shies away from self-examination and self-reflection whenever things threaten to become intensely personal. He does that on almost every aspect of his life, including the biggest difference between himself and Rob Petrie, which I’ll get to.

One more difference, not as big but still important considering that this is a book review. Rob is a writer not an actor, and he writes a lot like Carl Reiner. If he wrote his autobiography, it would be more like Reiner’s My Anecdotal Life than like Van Dyke’s My Lucky Life. Which, it almost goes without saying, means it would be funnier. But it also means that it would be a writer’s book and writers, because they can’t help themselves, tend to see everything as a story. A comedy writer, like Rob or Carl Reiner, will see it as a funny story.

Van Dyke has a sense of humor and, obviously, knows how to tell a joke, and he writes well. But he isn’t a storyteller. He knows he has a story to tell and diligently sets about telling it, but it’s one big, long story, the story of his life, and he tends to treat major events and minor incidents, the things that happened to him and the things that he did, as pieces of the larger narrative rather than as stories or anecdotes in their own right. For instance, a visit with President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office that Reiner and Van Dyke made together takes up half a chapter in Reiner’s book but gets a couple of paragraphs in Van Dyke’s. Now, that visit is really Reiner’s story to tell because the focus is on how the President and Reiner’s brother Charlie hit it off (and Reiner tells that story beautifully), but Van Dyke doesn’t even mention that Charlie was there. The point of telling us that he met President Clinton is that it happened.

And that’s how the book goes. This happened, then that happened, and then the next thing happened. There’s something very journalistic about My Lucky Life and I mean that it often reads like an extended magazine article (think The New York Times Sunday Magazine not TIME or The New Yorker and definitely not People or Entertainment Weekly, earnest, thorough, informative, not particularly stylish but not trivial, chatty, or phonily personal either) but also that it reads like a fleshed out journal.

Readers used to contemporary memoirs being confessionals might find themselves perplexed by how little confessing Van Dyke does. There’s much recounting and accounting but not much in the way of revealing or unveiling. One thing happens after another because that’s how it went, and along the way, as the players in his life make their entrances and their exits, we’re introduced to the people Van Dyke got to know, professionally and personally.

Gene Hackman makes a cameo appearance as the annoying kid cousin of Van Dyke’s best friend back in Danville, tagging along after Van Dyke and his high school buddies, two of whom weren’t, apparently, Donald O’Connor and Bobby Short, even though they were in the same class.

Walter Cronkite storms in, demanding to know why Van Dyke is firing him from the morning talk show they’re working on together, Van Dyke hosting and Cronkite delivering the news.

Cary Grant stops by to admire his tailoring and offer him a part in That Touch of Mink and to this day Van Dyke can’t understand why he turned it down.

Fred Astaire slips onto the set of Bye Bye Birdie unnoticed just for the pleasure of watching Van Dyke dance.

Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s former press secretary, enlists him in his ultimately losing campaign for United States Senator from California.

Warren Beatty calls and not just refuses to take no for an answer but refuses to even hear it and so Van Dyke winds up cast in Dick Tracy despite himself.

He meets and becomes friends with Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. Harold Lloyd wants him to play him in a movie version of Lloyd’s life, a movie I wish had been made instead of The Comic, a rather strange tribute to Laurel, Keaton, and Lloyd that gives aspects of all their careers to a a fairly unlikeable character named Billy Bright.

Frank Sinatra makes dinner but refuses to sing. Debbie Reynolds tells Van Dyke he doesn’t know beans about making movies. Cloris Leachman does her best to help him quit smoking cold turkey. Michelle Obama gives him a big hug and declares that The Dick Van Dyke Show is still her favorite of all time, a statement President Obama is on hand to confirm. The President also asks Van Dyke to teach him some moves.

Julie Andrews, Chita Rivera, Carol Burnett, and Angie Dickinson sing, dance, mug, and slink their way onto his life’s stage to, pointedly, not have affairs, despite what some people assumed, and become instead Van Dyke’s very good friends.

And I wrote about how he met Charles Nelson Reilly in an earlier post.

After a while, a pattern becomes noticeable. All these famous people come and go without being the subjects of stories. Van Dyke doesn’t tell stories about them. It’s more as if he’s showing us their photographs in the family album and then, hurriedly, turning the page. And then it begins to dawn that he’s deliberately avoiding telling stories and even that not telling stories is part of the point.

Of course, what I’m saying is that this is a show business memoir that is surprisingly lacking in gossip.

And it begins to seem to be the case that it’s because Van Dyke doesn’t have any gossip to dish.

A theme of the book is that Van Dyke deliberately tried not to live a life that would make him a topic of gossip or a witness to others making themselves topics of gossip.

Not that he would dish it if he had to dish. Van Dyke comes across as someone who wouldn’t say anything about an enemy let alone a friend that he wouldn’t say to their face and that he hadn’t cleared with them first to see if they minded if he said it. Even the dead are protected by his inherent tact and discretion and compassion.

There are exceptions and one of them is the great character actress Maureen Stapleton who we learn was eccentric, phobic, and, when she’d had too much too drink, and she drank too much too often, sometimes carrying fortification in a paper bag on the set, inclined to making clumsy plays for other women’s husbands in front of those women.

About Stapleton Van Dyke does have a story to tell and he tells it. During the filming of the movie adaptation of Bye Bye Birdie, in which Stapleton was playing Van Dyke’s mother, despite being his exact same age, thirty-eight at the time, Van Dyke and his wife, along with Stapleton and another Bye Bye Birdie co-star, the acerbic character actor Paul Lynde, went to a party at the director’s home, at which Stapleton got drunk and embarrassed herself and her friends in a variety of ways before winding up naked in the director’s swimming pool and calling on all the other guests to join her.

Not the most salacious or scandalous of tales, but just about nobody else in the book is shown at so much less than their best as Stapleton in this instance, and the question is why her?

The answer is that it’s the party Van Dyke is writing about not Stapleton, he just appears to have decided he couldn’t write about it honestly without telling us what Stapleton got up to or down to. Possibly if he could have thought of way to disguise her he would have, but there may not have been any point, either because the story’s well-known and oft-told in Hollywood or because Stapleton herself was in the habit of telling it. The important thing is that that was the Van Dykes’ first Hollywood party and while it wasn’t their last, it was their introduction to a side of the movie business and celebrity-hood they resolved never to become part of.

But there’s another reason for his telling the story. Stapleton, along with Lynde, who, although he didn’t wind up naked in the pool, also wasn’t on his best behavior at that party, and Dean Martin, shown arriving drunk on the set of Van Dyke’s next movie, What a Way to Go!, were what Van Dyke thought alcoholics looked and acted like, which is why it took him so long to recognize the alcoholic who was threatening to ruin his life.

Himself.

That’s that big difference between Dick Van Dyke and Rob Petrie I was talking about.

In his acknowledgements, Van Dyke thanks his collaborator, Todd Gold. But that’s the only credit Gold is given. There’s no “as told to” or “with” on the title page implying that Gold was a true co-author if not the actual writer. There’s something about the writing that suggests Van Dyke did most of it himself. There are no signs of a ghost writer’s touch. No rhetorical effects, no narrative or dramatic surprises. No mixing it up for variety’s sake. One sentence is crafted like the last. Paragraphs are neat, well-ordered, exemplary, but too much so. This isn’t prose you’d pay someone to write. It’s prose you’d pay someone to correct or, rather, to make sure was as correct as you intended and worked hard to achieve. And from the impression Van Dyke gives of himself, I think he wouldn’t have undertaken the book if he hadn’t felt he could do most of the work himself. This would have to be his book, as in his job to do, his responsibility to meet. This was a book written out of a sense of duty.

I’m not sure who all he feels he owes this duty to. His children, obviously, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His fans. But also, I think, to his ghosts. His parents. Michelle Triola, who died of lung cancer in 2009, just as he was setting out to write the book. Margie, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2007 and with whom he appears to have felt still married in a strange but still deeply loyal way until the end of her life. His grand-daughter Jessica, a budding poet who died of Reye’s Syndrome when she was only twelve.

The first epigraph in My Lucky Life is an exchange between Van Dyke’s comic idols, Laurel and Hardy, from their movie Block-Heads:

Stan: You remember how dumb I used to be?

Ollie: Yeah?

Stan: Well, I’m better now.

But as a second, he’s chosen to quote himself:

If I’m known for giving people decent entertainment and raising good kids, that’s all right. I’ll have lived a good one.

With that, of course, he’s setting himself up to be judged. With the Laurel and Hardy quote too. He has to show us. Has he lived a good life by his lights and ishe better now?

As I said, My Lucky Life isn’t a confessional, either in tone or effect, but it is an accounting. Van Dyke has given himself the job of honestly laying out the facts of his life that would allow readers to judge whether or not he has led his life the way he intended to live it, and honesty requires him to face up to the ways he failed at that. He did, after all, cheat for years on his wife and then leave her for the other woman, and he was an alcoholic---emphatically was. Van Dyke is not a graduate of AA, he dried out on his own and doesn’t feel compelled to say is an alcoholic, not after nearly thirty years of sobriety. But his point isn’t that he overcame his drinking problem but that he had one and he counts himself lucky that it didn’t destroy him.

That’s the other reason Maureen Stapleton appears in the book the way she does. It’s not her that Van Dyke wants to call attention to her as much as to her behavior that night, self-abusive, self-destructive, because it portended a way Van Dyke’s life could have gone, should have gone.

That he was able to get away with so much that so many alcoholics can’t---a stellar career of uninterrupted work, a happy family life, a lifelong reputation as a good, decent, responsible and reliable adult---is one of many reasons he considers himself to have been lucky.

My Lucky Life isn’t just a title. It’s a statement of one of the book’s main themes.

Van Dyke writes with a healthy dose of humility. But although he’s a humble man, he’s not a falsely modest one. He’s aware of his considerable talents. He knows what he was able to do and he knows its value. He believes the work speaks for itself. He’s willing to give himself credit where credit is due, but only in order to share it. He knows the difference between himself and his idols like Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton and Carl Reiner. And an honest accounting of his life requires him to show how lucky he was in having met and been able to work with so many people who were, by his lights, more talented and more dedicated and more deservingly successful in their ways than he was.

So he’s emphatic that he owes his having had any sort of show business career at all to his first partner, Phil Erickson, who almost literally dragged him out the door to take their act on the road. That he was able to enjoy and depend on a relatively calm and normal family life is due to his having been lucky to have met and married Margie who saw to it that their children grew up happy and fairly well-adjusted. He was also lucky to have Margie there to help and support him when he faced up to his drinking and set out to stop. His Tony Award-winning performance in Bye Bye Birdie was, as far as he’s concerned, pretty much all the doing of the director and choreographer Gower Champion who saw something in Van Dyke he didn’t see in himself and brought it out onstage. Mary Poppins couldn’t have been what it was without Julie Andrews and Walt Disney and the composing and songwriting genius of the Sherman Brothers. And, of course, The Dick Van Dyke show was, when you got down to it, Carl Reiner’s show.

But even as he’s expressing his gratitude to people, Van Dyke maintains a detachment and reticence as if he’s afraid to say any more about them because he’ll wind up saying too much and revealing things about them, and about himself, he doesn’t believe it’s his business to reveal.

There are, however, a few individuals for whom his feelings are so great that they carry him away despite himself and cause him to open up in ways that not only enliven the book but fill it with joy. One is Triola, another is Margie, and a third is Reiner, who comes across here (and almost everywhere else I’ve heard or read about him) as everybody’s over-achieving, too good to be true big brother who is successful at everything he does, including and especially at loving you and taking care of you in exactly the way you want and need to be loved and taken care of.

Another is, hilariously but also touchingly, Van Dyke’s co-star in my second favorite Dick Van Dyke movie, Lt Robin Crusoe U.S.N. No, not his leading lady, Nancy Kwan. The actor named Dinky who played his sidekick, an astronaut Crusoe finds marooned on the island he washes up on.

Well, not an astronaut, exactly.

An astro-chimp.

Van Dyke and Dinky hit it off on the set and developed, Van Dyke persuasively insists, a real friendship. Dinky gets almost as many pages devoted exclusively to him as Carl Reiner, a fact I like to think Reiner has noted and takes pleasure in pointing out every chance he gets. One of the more heartwrenching scenes in the book is when Van Dyke and Dinky say good-bye for the last time in the zoo where Dinky has been, you want to say, imprisoned.

But the person who rivets Van Dyke’s attention, the one who makes his heart and his prose soar, the one who makes him happiest to write about, is Mary Tyler Moore, with whom he is still, after fifty years, madly, wildy, and joyfully in love. And she with him.

Theirs is and has always been a completely innocent and Platonic love affair. The two seem to have been made for each other, although neither---they were each married to other people when they met---would ever have done anything about it. But they couldn’t help letting their feelings show when they were on camera as Rob and Laura. And it wasn’t just as if, like their fans, they confused themselves with the characters they played, at least for the time they were playing them. It was, and still is when you watch, as if they were and are in touch with that alternative universe where Rob and Laura are real people, where it is still and always will be 1961, and Sally and Buddy have come over for dinner and they and Laura and Ritchie are waiting for Rob to arrive home a little late from work, and that ottoman is in exactly the wrong, which is to say, the right place.

Photo of President Obama adjusting Dick Van Dyke’s tie by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House.

______________________

Luckily, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir, published by Crown Archetype, is available in kindle and hardback from Amazon.

______________________

Excerpt: “This chimp was a pro.”

In the movie, he played golf and he was incredible. We also played poker. One day he was sick. I think he had a temperature of 103. In the scene, we were playing cards. He was supposed to be able to see my cards in the shaving mirror behind me. Amazingly, he looked up and smiled on cue. But the second that [Byron Paul, the director] said Cut, he would groan and lie down, ill.

I turned to the trainer and Byron. I wanted [Stewart, the trainer] to help him and Byron to praise him. This chimp was a pro.

The downside was that when he misbehaved, the trainer took him away and hit him. I hated that. In one scene, I came sliding down a coconut tree, but I startled Dinky, who was seated at the base of the tree. I saw all of his hair suddenly stand on end. So did Stewart. He balled up a chain he kept with him and threw it at the chimp. He saw the look on my face. It was one of surprise and anger.

“He would’ve attacked you,” he explained.

I never got used to that part of working with the chimp. To me, he was a doll. I forgot that he was an animal being cajoled, if not forced, into performing acts that did not come naturally to him. Later I heard he was doing a Tarzan movie in Mexico and bit an actor in the face. I was told the actor picked him up and pinched him, an in turn Dinky nipped his face. That was the end of his film career.

He was ten years old, so he was pretty close to retirement anyway. After I heard he’d been placed in the Los Angeles Zoo, I went there to see him, knowing he had been raised in a house---he had never been in a cage. When I got there, he was sitting in the middle of a large circular pen. It was outdoors, but it was still a cage---and I saw the effect it had on him.

I called out his name. He looked up and recognized me immediately. He ran over as close as he could. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was asking me to get him out of there. It looked like he was saying, I’m in here with a bunch of monkeys. Take me home.

The whole visit upset me. I knew he thought that I had come to take him out, which I would have if it had been possible.

I had to walk away. I couldn’t look back.

---from My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business by Dick Van Dyke.

Lance Mannion on Friday, July 08, 2011 in Ruining my eyes, Too Much TV |Permalink

A hobble in the woods

A few years ago, when I first heard that Robert Redford had started planning to direct a movie version of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods starring himself and Paul Newman, I was baffled. My first thought, “They’re too old!” My second thought was “Which one is going to play Katz?” a question I’d have asked even if they’d both been the right ages to play the mild-mannered writer Bryson and his eccentric, irascible, and totally unreliable college buddy with whom he set out to hike the entire twenty-one hundred mile length of the Appalachian Trail. Bryson more or less did it. Katz went his own way, even when he and Bryson were hiking together.

After our summer in Europe, Katz had gone back to Des Moines and had become, in effect, Iowa’s drug culture. He had partied for years, until there was no one left to party with, then he had partied with himself, alone in small apartments, in T-shirt and boxer shorts, with a bottle and a Baggie of pot and a TV with rabbit ears. I remembered now that the last time I had seen him was five years earlier in a Denny’s restaurant where I was taking my mother for breakfast. He was sitting in a booth with a haggard fellow who looked like his name would be Virgil Starkweather, tucking into pancakes and taking occasional illicit nips from a bottle in a paper bag. It was eight in the morning and Katz looked very happy. He was always happy when he was drunk, and he was always drunk.

I figure Newman would have had to play Katz. A character like Katz is way outside Redford’s comfort zone. Well into his old age, Redford has managed to continue to play Redford-esque leading men, although, fortunately, while showing the sense to avoid making those leading men romantic leads. (I’m disappointed to note that his long-planned Jackie Robinson movie isn’t listed as being in pre-production at imdb.com anymore, which I guess means we won’t get to see him as Branch Rickey.) Newman always allowed himself a little more range and even his leading men had more than a little touch of eccentricity. In his late middle-age, he started ranging a little farther and became something of a character actor. I think he’d have gotten a kick out of playing Katz---if he could have done it as a follow-up to Butch Cassidy or Henry Gondorf.

Still, Bryson and Katz were approaching fifty when they set out, not past seventy and eighty. Supposing the book had been written twenty-five years before, though, when both Redford and Newman were middle-aged, Newman still wouldn’t have been the best choice for Katz. Among Redford’s contemporaries, Dustin Hoffman would have been off the list because I’m pretty sure that after All the President’s Men Redford wasn’t in the mood to work with Hoffman ever again, but Jack Nicholson, Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, and George Segal would have made great Katzes.

And those would have been Redford’s best choices if he’d only wanted to go with a leading man in the character actor’s part. If he’d wanted a character actor who could also be a second male lead there was Bruce Dern, Alan Arkin, and Peter Falk.

Redford and any one of those guys would have made a more interesting pairing than yet another Redford-Newman bromance. For my money, I think I’d have liked to see Redford and Dern or Redford and Gould best.

But you know who else would have been nearly perfect?

Nick Nolte.

The fun for me in this pairing would have been in that on screen Nolte often played an eccentric and more temperamental version of Redford. In fact, to a great degree, his career in the eighties and into the nineties was the career Redford could have had if he hadn’t pretty much given up acting during the decade after Brubaker and The Electric Horseman. Nolte began as the guy you went to when you wanted a Robert Redford type but had no hope of getting Redford himself and eventually became the guy you got because Redford wouldn’t have been up to the part.

Nolte started off with a string of movies that easily could have starred Redford instead. The Deep. Who’ll Stop the Rain. Heart Beat. (Not hard to imagine Redford as Neal Cassidy if you’ve seen Little Fauss and Big Halsey.) North Dallas Forty. Teachers. Under Fire. Teachers.

That changed with the movie that makes it easy to imagine Nolte as Katz, Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

But even after that, Nolte took on roles that Redford would have been just as right for, in Cape Fear, The Prince of Tides, Jefferson in Paris, The Golden Bowl, and The Good Thief. I think Redford could have handled Affliction although he probably wouldn’t have risked it, just as he decided not to risk The Verdict.

So it could have been fun watching Redford playing opposite his not quite evil but definitely wilder and less well-behaved twin.

Interestingly…

Of course, it’s not often that kind of perfectly compatible material crosses any actor’s inbox. But this could be one of those moments … if there is any truth to the tentative report in today’s LA Times that Redford and Nick Nolte are poised play the lead roles in an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.

Redford would play Bryson and Nolte would costar as his college buddy, Stephen Katz, who accompanies the expat author on an epic hike along the Appalachian Trail.

Better late than never?

Here’s the thing.

The point of turning Bryson and Katz into a pair of grumpy old men was so that they could be played by Redford and Newman. The movie was being made to give the two one last chance to work together again and it didn’t matter who played Katz since both would really have been playing themselves. The controlling joke of the movie would have been that they were too old to be doing this, they being the characters and the actors. “Bryson” and “Katz” would have been too old to make the hike and Redford and Newman would have been too old to play men making the hike. The movie would have been Redford and Newman’s acknowledgement that they were long past being the handsome and dashing leading men we last saw them together as. Hopefully, this would have been done without too many old geezer jokes.

But once illness forced Newman to drop out, there was no longer a good reason to make “Bryson” and “Katz” a pair of grumpy old men. The point was the reuniting of Butch and Sundance, not in watching a couple of old coots having a good time making fools of themselves. Anybody who wants to see that can watch The Bucket List.

Besides, Redford has already done his farewell to being a leading man in Spy Game and his I’m getting too old for this turn in the little known but well worth seeking out An Unfinished Life, in which he co-stars with the great old geezer Morgan Freeman. So we’ve seen him do the dueling old coots act .

I’d hoped when Newman dropped out that if Redford still wanted to continue with the project he’d reconceive it as being about the real Bryson and Katz as portrayed in the book and cast leads who were the right ages or close to them. I even knew who should play Bryson.

Every movie Redford has directed (except for, possibly, his most recent, The Conspirator, which I haven’t seen yet.) has featured a Robert Redford part that in his better efforts isn’t played by Robert Redford, starting with a two-fer with Donald Sutherland and Scott Doebler as Timothy Hutton’s father and brother in Ordinary People. In The Milagro Beanfield War Christopher Walken plays a parody of Redford’s character in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. Ralph Fiennes is very much a young Redford as flawed golden boy in Quiz Show. Matt Damon takes on the role in The Legend of Bagger Vance. But the quintessential Redford role that is most perfectly cast and played is Paul McLean in A River Runs Through It.

Which is why Brad Pitt would be me choice for Bryson.

Redford can have his pick of Katzes. If he wanted to go the Redford-Newman route, George Clooney might work as Katz. Clooney hasn’t done it often enough, but he clearly enjoys stepping out of his comfort zone and poking fun at his leading man image. But I think another, better way to go would be to take the Redford-Nolte route and cast a Redford against another Redford.

If you can’t see Matt Damon in the Nick Nolte role, I recommend you watch or re-watch The Informant! Damon is another leading man with an inner goofball he’s itching to let loose.

Lance Mannion on Sunday, June 26, 2011 in Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

The rooftops of Paris at Midnight in Paris

There has to be a website that lays all the shots of Paris street scenes in the opening montage of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris side by side with the famous paintings they pay homage to.

Allen and his cinematographer set up their camera at the same spots where the artists set up their easels or stood or sat with their sketchpads and filmed the scenes from the same angle at the same time of day depicted in maybe a couple of dozen paintings.

At least I think that’s what they did.

I’m not anything close to an art historian, but I’m sure I recognized a Manet or two, a bunch of Monets, the painting above by Gustave Caillebotte, possibly the one below also by Caillebotte…

and at least one…

…two…

three…

…Pissarros.

Or was that a Cortes?

I’m also pretty sure they worked similar homages into the movie and that the scene at Maxim’s includes something from Degas and of course the scene at the Moulin Rogue cribs from Lautrec. Allen is cagey enough not to show it but I suspect his Lautrec may be sketching one of the Lautrecs Allen’s scene designer used as models.

Two actual Picassos appear, along with Picasso, who looks like himself.

This portrait of Gertrude Stein, which provides a funny moment when we see Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein sitting in a chair beneath it…

And one I haven’t been able to turn up with the Google, so maybe it isn’t a real Picasso after all, which is ok, since we learn isn’t what art historians think it is.

Anyway, back to Paris itself…

The problem with trying to identify the paintings I think I saw in the montage is that Paris itself looks like a painting…

…and it has been painted so many times by so many different artists…

…that every shot of Paris looks like it must have been a painting.

For instance, there's a shot of some rooftops with rows and rows of orange chimneys. I thought I know that one! But do I really?

Do I know that painting or did the shot look so much like a painting that my mind was convinced it "remembered" that painting?

I think I need to see the movie again.

Or go to Paris.

_________________________

Make sure to click on the pictures. They’re what they call in the video game trade Easter Eggs. Most of them will take you to more to see than just an enlarged image.

Originally posted at LanceMannion.com.

Lance Mannion on Monday, July 04, 2011 in Arts, crafts, and stagecraft, Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink

Lance Mannion

Lance Mannion

Posted using ShareThis

A very neat sort of monster

Dexter Morgan, the vigilante serial killer of serial killers who is the hero of Showtime's darkly comic mystery series Dexter, describes himself as a very neat sort of monster, and he is.

Neat and a monster.

Neatness is his chief virtue, of which he has many. Of course he’s neat when it comes to his murders. He cleans up carefully after he’s done, naturally, so that there’s no evidence. But he’s also very neat when it comes to the planning and the execution of his...executions. He makes sure that he has the goods on the murderers he murders before he murders them. As a private detective, who has his victims’ victims as his clients, he’s meticulous about gathering evidence and following the procedures he’s late adoptive father, a great police detective in his day, taught him.

But he’s neat in the other areas of his life too. He dresses neatly, he’s well-groomed, he’s neat in his manners, that is he’s careful to be polite and cheerful, he picks up after himself, he’s as meticulous about his day job—he’s a blood spatter analyst for the homicide division of the Miami police department—as he is about his work as a serial killer. And he’s always ready to help his family, friends, and colleagues pick up after the messes, large and small, in their lives.

Dexter himself (brilliantly played with the right mixture of neatness, charm, and heartless glee by Michael C. Hall) wouldn’t describe his neatness as a virtue. He wouldn’t call any of his other virtues virtues either. He doesn’t think monsters like him can have virtues. As far as he's concerned, his neatness, being as coldly calculated as his murders, is part of his disguise.

He’s disguised as a human being.

Because when Dexter calls himself a monster, he doesn’t mean he’s a human being who does monstrous things. He means he is a monster, the way Frankenstein’s monster is a monster. Something not human. A creature who might as well have been created in a laboratory or fallen to earth from outer space, a strange being from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

I’m not being sarcastic with the Superman reference. Dexter’s story is a sinister twist on the superhero myth. Like Clark Kent, Dexter is an orphan who is taken in and raised by strangers and taught by his adoptive father to use his strange powers for good, it’s just that Dexter’s powers happen to allow him to track, trap, torture, kill, and disarticulate small animals.

Like Jonathan Kent, Harry Morgan recognizes his adopted son’s “special” abilities and teaches him to hide them, to pass as a regular person, but to use his abilities to help fight crime.

But it’s not just because he has this ability to kill without regret or remorse that Dexter thinks of himself as not human. His insatiable need to murder and butcher is the least of his problems.

Dexter is lost in an alien world without a guide book to tell him how to deal with the natives and their strange and apparently absurd customs. His survival depends on his passing as human, on no one seeing through his mild-mannered disguise to the monster beneath, and since Harry died ten years ago (although he’s a regular character in the show, recurring in flashbacks and dreams) Dexter has had no way of knowing how to fit in except by taking his cues from the humans he encounters—and they are, as it turns out, mostly nuts.

Trying to be human means mimicking human emotions. Dexter is empty inside (he thinks), he has no emotions, and, as he’s smart and logical, relentlessly, remorselessly so—he can make Mr Spock look whimsical—Dexter has a lot of trouble pretending that he does. Human emotional responses make no sense. People laugh when they should cry. They take pleasure in what hurts them. They love what hates them. They don’t even seem to understand their own emotions, which they routinely mistake for rational thoughts. They are always doing things they would call thought-full when they are being driven by appetites and desires they dislike and condemn when they see other people driven by the same appetites and desires.

Deb, Dexter’s adopted sister, an up and coming young detective, thinks of herself as a smart, tough, hard-nosed cop simply following in their father’s footsteps. In truth, she is a marshmallow, a wreck of insecurities and contradictory impulses, a lost little girl who is using her career to win her dead father’s love and approval. She is also emotionally and professionally dependent on Dexter.

Lt LaGuerta, the head of their homicide unit, thinks she is a cool professional’s professional. She is aware that she’s a calculating careerist, but she thinks that’s simply a fact of life for an intelligent and ambitious young Latina trying to make her way in the face of the old white boy’s net. But she is just as driven by petty jealousies, narcissism—to take her eyes off the prize for a second means taking her eyes off the image of herself holding the prize—lust—it’s probably not the case that she’s slept her way to the top, as Deb and some of the other cops believe; it’s more likely that she’s been too happy to reward men she likes who have helped her in her career with sex—and, to her own confusion and surprise, principle, professional pride, duty, feelings of compassion she has told herself she’s beyond, and more tender emotions—she’s got a terrific schoolgirl crush on...Dexter!

Rita, Dexter’s girlfriend (He claims to be dating her only because he’s learned that normal men his age have girlfriends. So she’s part of his disguise.), thinks she’s finally escaped her emotional dependency on her abusive and alcoholic ex-husband and has made long strides towards becoming an independent and self-reliant person in her own right. But to the degree she has achieved this she has done it by transferring her dependence onto Dexter, and the masochism and insecurities that caused her to stay with her ex-husband long after it became clear what he was are now blinding her to what Dexter really is. By the final episode of last season she had developed some doubts and this season she’s going to figure out that he is hiding a dark secret from her—his drug addiction. She makes him go into rehab.

Dexter of course would never do anything so un-neat as use drugs.

And Detective Sergeant Doakes thinks he’s a righteous cop out saving the weak and innocent from the bad guys, but he’s driven by angers and memories that quite possibly are turning him into a less rational, and much less neat, version of Dexter, a murderer of murderers. It’s no wonder he’s the one person in the department who can’t abide Dexter. Of course Doakes thinks he’s got Dexter figured out. What’s likely going on is that he’s afraid Dexter will figure him out.

Nobody in this crowd is really thinking at all, which makes Dexter, because everything he does is thought out with monstrous rationality—even his killings, which have method and purpose and require intense self-control and discipline, at least before and after the actual slaughters, are rational—the sanest person he knows.

That’s one of the themes of the show and the source of much of its humor. Our emotions, the qualities that make us most human, that is normal, also make us crazy. Much of the comedy arises from Dexter the Monster’s utter bafflement in the face of human beings acting emotionally, crazily, and expecting him to react in kind.

But beneath the humor is pathos. Dexter describes himself as empty of feeling. He doesn’t know that his emptiness is a feeling. If he were truly without emotions he wouldn’t miss having them as much as he does.

Dexter needs to seem to be a normal human being. But he also wants to be one. Another feeling he doesn’t know is a feeling.

It’s not true that he has no emotions. It’s more as if he has downloaded them into a computer that he keeps in another room but with which he is in unconscious contact, wirelessly, at a frequency too low for him to always hear. Startled, though, the right buttons pushed by circumstances or by other people’s insistent hands, the connection will suddenly intensify and all at once Dexter will feel. Love, anger, guilt, compassion—he experiences them all. They are just over too fast for him to think about at the moment, and they go without leaving a trace. He can remember having felt, but he can’t feel having felt. And because he doesn’t understand how human beings work, he doesn’t recognize the feeling he’s remembering as an emotion. He remembers it as a sensation, usually as an unpleasant sensation he’d prefer not to experience again.

Another thing that Dexter doesn’t understand about us human beings is that quite often a feeling doesn’t exist until after we act upon that feeling. Hugging someone causes us to want to hug them. Acting as if we love them, makes us love them.

Dexter wishes he loved his sister. He wishes he felt for Rita the same passion as she feels for him. He wishes he cared about her children. He wishes he could get angry about the crimes he’s solving and avenging.

He doesn’t know that he is loving his sister and Rita by going through the motions of brotherly concern and sexual passion. He doesn’t realize that he is caring for Rita’s kids by taking care of them.

Dexter has ideas about what it’s like to be normal. Those ideas are wrong. But because what goes on inside him doesn’t match up with those ideas he rejects himself instead of the ideas.

He doesn’t understand that by being pretending to be normal he is actually making himself normal.

In one of the episodes last season, Rita is seen tucking her kids into bed after having read to them from one of their favorite books.

Pinocchio.

Dexter thinks of himself as a puppet for which he himself is the puppeteer pretending to be a real live boy. The question is will his pretending turn him into one?

Emotions, after all, are so messy, and killing can be so neat, and...satisfying, for a very neat sort of monster.

Besides having a wonderful cast, smart scripts, and a great look---lots of gorgeous shots of South Miami Beach at night---Dexter has one of the best theme songs and wittiest opening credits since Get Smart.

Dexter starts its second season this week. Here’s the schedule.

Download Season One or catch up on on DVD.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

Monday, October 01, 2007 in Too Much TV | Permalink

High School's Revenge

Have a confession to make.

Maybe it's more of a boast.

Nobody ever done done me wrong.

Oh, I've had my heart broken. Friends I counted on have failed to come through. There are a few things I'd still like to talk to my parents about. And I'll never understand why when we were ten Tommy Hawkins devoted an entire year to making the game in the neighborhood Let's make fun of Lance. But he couldn't get enough kids to play along and then he took up smoking cigarettes which got him in big trouble with his parents and they grounded him for a month and after that his family moved to Cincinnati so I felt he'd gotten his comeuppance and shrugged it all off.

My first grade nun hated me and emotionally tortured me, but she hated and emotionally tortured just about every kid in our class and what she did to me now and then was nothing next to what she did to Frankie McClintock and Virginia Lamb every day.

She was my first encounter with a crazy person that few supposedly sane adults realized was crazy. Prepared me for Dick Cheney, I guess. Some philosopher or psychologist or novelist must have written about this. Crazy people who are allowed to roam free as if they aren't crazy are as common and as obviously screwy as chipmunks but it's mostly children who recognize them. Adults not only don't seem to notice these crazy people are crazy, they actually go out of their way to give these crazy people power and responsibilities.

Don't know why that is.

At any rate, people have hurt my feelings, they've caused me all kinds of trouble, a few have gone out of their way to do both. But I've never taken it personally. I've either been able to forgive them or excuse them or get over them and chalk up what they did to experience. Mostly this has been because from the time I was three and told my first lie I've always felt a desperate need to live by the Golden Rule. I treat other people the way I want to be treated because I need them to forgive me or excuse me or get over me far more often than I've needed to forgive, excuse, or get over them.

But it's also the case that, while I claim to think people stink and they are stupid, I actually know we are all weak and thoughtless and trapped inside ourselves in a way that makes it difficult to remember that there are other people in the world whose needs and hopes and desires are not the same as our needs and hopes and desires.

Finally, though, the real reason for my saintly forbearance is the truth that I've always been my own worst enemy. Nothing anybody's ever done to me has ever hurt me as badly as I've hurt myself.

Which makes me a very lucky guy.

And probably explains why I don't have much sympathy for people over the age of eighteen who can't get over what happened to them in high school.

I'm not talking about people for whom high school was literally four years of living hell, people who were bullied relentlessly and unmercifully, people who were abused physically and emotionally by adults they trusted, people with undiagnosed learning disabilities that got treated like behavior problems or dismissed as simply proof they were stupid, people whose home lives were nightmares for any number of reasons, people who were suffering from mental illnesses that nobody, not even they themselves, knew they had.

I'm talking about the apparently vast numbers of people who are still smarting because they weren't popular with the kids they wanted to be popular with.

Comment thread regular and blogger, and my source for all things related to climate change, Kit Stolz left a link on my Kerouac post yesterday to an article in the LA Times rounding up a bunch of contemporary writers' reactions to On the Road. Worth reading for what it is, although I was dismayed to find that the writer who best shared my opinion of On the Road was Cynthia Ozick. I respect Ozick as a critic and essayist, but as a novelist she's a writer whose works leave me far, far, far colder than anything Kerouac typed out on his most automatic and self-indulgent day. Nevermind. My reason fro bringing up the article here---my reason for writing this post---is this quote from one of the other writers:

I read it in 1965, as a high school senior, expecting to be hit by the weight of this cool Beat book. I wasn't. I read it in the decade of Dylan and the Beatles, and in its boozy, self-conscious, priapic posturing it seemed a boy's book, as it does to this day. Its central conceit, Sal's adoration of Dean, means that if you don't dig Dean, the book is lost on you, and, frankly, Dean is very hard to dig if you're a woman. He and Sal were supposed to be veterans of life and war, but even then they seemed like the same jerky males I knew in high school. That's what "On the Road" taught me: You don't leave the boys you went to high school with. You go through life with them.

You don't leave the boys you went to high school with. You go through life with them.

Really? You do? That's very sad.

Forty-two years later and she's still annoyed at On the Road because it reminded her of some twerp who knocked the books out of her hands in the hallway?

I stopped counting the number of people I've known over the years, smart, sensitive, sophisticated, supposedly grown-up people, who have let their pleasures in life be dictated and limited by how much or how little something reminds them of kids they didn't hang out with in high school.

Like I said, I know high school was a combination of jail and boot camp for some people, and I know that for others it was heartbreaking, soul-crushing, and physically painful, even deadly, for others. But unless there was something my friends and acquaintances weren't admitting to, what was bothering most of these people is the fact that there were kids back in high school who didn't like them and never suffered for not liking them.

These people now have their own auteur. Judd Apatow seems to be set on making his career's work cinematic revenge on the cheerleaders who went to the junior prom with football players instead of with nice but schlubby guys like himself.

Am I missing something? Is there something more going on here than that ten, twenty, thirty, and more years later they haven't gotten over the fact that the guy they hoped would ask them to a movie called them four-eyes instead or the girl they wanted to laugh at their jokes laughed at their pimples instead?

Is it symbolic of a larger societal rejection? The mean girls and jocks who rejected them and marginalized them in high school went on to run the world are in many ways still rejecting and marginalizing them?

Or is the case that it's true what they say about all of life being high school continued and that no matter what happens to us we never really stop being seventeen?

Friday, September 28, 2007 in Ideas in search of a post | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)

Amazin' and Phantastic

Desperate note to any fellow Mets fans in the Philadelphia area: Can somebody please lure Susie Madrak into a bar or restaurant where the game is on this weekend? Susie's convinced that the reason the Phils are on a tear is that she hasn't been watching any of their games.

Hey, it ain't over till it's over, but at this point I'm almost hoping the Mets don't make the playoffs even as the wild card. The baseball fan in me trumps the Mets fan. (Sorry, Tom.) I like every post-season series to go the limit, five games in the first round, seven after that, and the Mets, if they sleepwalk into the playoffs and don't wake up, will be done in three. And I like to see good and deserving teams in the post-season.

The Mets' collapse wouldn't be seen as the historic disaster it is if the Phillies weren't playing such terrific baseball. If you're a fan of the game, you want to see a team like the Phils, talented, bouncing back from injuries, recover and go all the way, and you want to see a team like the Mets, sloppy, unfocused, dazed, listless, and confused, get booted from contention.

And not to take too much away from the Phils, but this is the Mets' second collapse this season. They really went to work throwing away the season just after the All-Star break, just that time around it looked as though Atlanta was the team that was going to benefit.

Sour grapes, and of course if the Mets wake up tonight and remember they're in a pennant race, I'll be singing a different tune...maybe.

Funny thing is that I haven't been following the Mets closely all season. "You gotta believe!" declared the greatest Mets reliever ever (who, although he was a great reliever for the Phillies too, was not Billy Wagner), but I just haven't believed since they picked up Moises Alou last winter.

Alou is a very good ballplayer, the kind of very good ballplayer who will inspire some fun debates over the next forty years about whether or not he belongs in the Hall of Fame. (No. At least not until the sportswriters come to their senses and let Jim Rice in first. After that...still, no.) But a team with the best offense in the league already and a bunch of talented young outfielders and no reliable pitching does not need to go out and acquire a forty year old right fielder with a history of leg and ankle injuries.

When they signed Alou I said to anybody who would listen around here, which means I said to myself, "They're not serious."

But you know when I really gave up on them? The first series against the Phillies back in April. Not because of the games. The Mets swept. Because of the fans' and New York media's laughing reaction to Jimmy Rollin's prediction that his team would be the team to beat this season.

But Rollins was only making the not unreasonable observation that a team that has himself, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Aaron Rowand in its starting line-up has a pretty good chance of winning a ball game on any given day.

Mets fans scoffed and said Rollins was tempting the baseball gods to punish Philadelphia for his hubris.

But I thought it was more likely that the baseball gods would punish Mets fans for theirs.

_________________________________________________

_________________________________________________

Family loyalties: What I'm really rooting for is that both the Mets and the Phils make the play-offs, preferably with Philadelphia as the wild card. Then I'd like to see them take out the Cubs and Diamondbacks and face each other for the league championship, although that will make things a little tense around the Mannion house.

Going to be a little tense this weekend.

The blonde is a Phillies fan.

She's been trying to keep that to herself all season. Not for my sake. For the teenager's who's been having his heart broken just about every morning since school started when he's rushed out to fetch the newspaper to see how his Mets did last night and found out the answer's the same old story---the bullpen blew another one.

Good mother that she is, she's been trying to hide her delight around the teenager. She even pretends to be disappointed on his behalf and if the Mets do manage to stumble into the World Series, she'll be cheering right along with her son (unless the Red Sox stumble in too) but I'm afraid that if what the baseball gods have apparently been arranging to happen since April---Jimmy Rollins at the plate with the deciding game on the line---happens, her facade will collapse.

A mother is only a mother, but a Phillies fan is a Phanatic.

Friday, September 28, 2007 in Sports Squawk | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

That's not writing, or typing, it's driving---and in circles

I have my own dreams of the open road. But although I dream them all with a literary finish----not necesarily with a Fitzgeraldian passage of interior monologue summing up America and my place in it, but definitely with a writing down of my adventures---my dreams are inspired by driving not by reading about other people's driving.

Travels With Charley captured my heart because I already wanted to do what Steinbeck had done, pack light, call my dog, jump into the car and drive.

As for Kerouac...

Well, Kerouac.

I read On the Road when I was exactly the right age and in the right mood to take it to heart. I was twenty-two and I was spending a lot of time alone with my typewriter, making what I've come to regard as the biggest mistake of my life, trying to turn myself from a guy who wrote plays sometimes into a novelist and short story writer. I should have been trying to turn myself into a lawyer or an accountant, but nevermind. As long as I was trying to turn myself into a species of professional writer, I probably would have been better off getting a head start on the way things worked out and tried to turn myself into a journalist, especially since in what I was doing to turn myself into a writer, writing a lot, I was mostly practicing a kind of journalism.

Since I was already pretty adept at dialog, I'd decided that what I needed the most practice in was turning what I'd seen into prose. I needed to learn to be descriptive, I thought, so I spent a lot of time typing out descriptions. I wanted an audience though, so I put all my descriptions into letters. My friends became resigned to receiving 15 and 20 page letters from me. Typed. Single-spaced. I didn't keep copies of my letters but I'm pretty sure that taken together they amounted to a proto-blog, a disorganized, unedited, rambling mix of politics, book reports, romanticized reminiscences, anecdotes that didn't adhere strictly to the facts, self-conscious snippets of prose poems I couldn't bring myself to think of as prose poems and so never shaped into anything, and logs of that part of my day that wasn't spent typing up my letters, which, since I didn't sleep much, included a lot of time watching old movies late into the night, which I dutifully reviewed for my friends who I was sure were dying to know what I thought of My Darling Clementine and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

All this typing, it wasn't writing, had an underlying message.

"I'm dying of loneliness here. Come save me."

Every now and then one of my friends, usually Nora, sometimes Meg, and, when she was in the country, Cathy, would try to save me. And of course I would type up their attempts to save me and send them off in letters to other friends.

I didn't always stick to the facts.

I don't stick to the facts even now. I just changed all their names.

Sharon, the friend I most wanted to come save me, knew better and kept her distance.

I wrote about her anyway.

Although I didn't recognize it, what I was doing in my self-referential, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing letters was writing---typing---the first draft of my own On the Road and so you might think that when I read the book I slapped my forehead and said, This is what I should be doing!

I didn't. I don't think it even occurred to me that there was anything in what I was typing remotely like what Kerouac had written in On the Road.

It wasn't the case, though, that I was fixating on the most obvious differences, that I was nowheres near close to Mexico City, jail, the merchant marine, or San Francisco. I spent a lot of time in New York City, but not Kerouac's New York City, which I'm sure I was convinced was as dead as Peter Stuyvesant's. But I was a long way from Joyce's Dublin, Conrad's Malaysia, and Graham Greene's Africa, and that didn't stop me from thinking I could learn a few tricks from Dubliners, Lord Jim, and A Burnt-Out Case, which I read at about the same time.

I just didn't like the book.

Dean Moriarty---Neal Cassady---was a bore and Sal Paradise was a drip.

I was disappointed...in myself. I "knew" On the Road was an "important" book. I "knew" I "needed" to read it if I was going to be a great American writer. So I thought I had failed somehow, either as a writer or as a reader, in not liking the book. I had assigned myself the job of reading On the Road, as homework for my self-taught course on becoming a writer, and I finished it with a sense of relief, as if it was homework and I was glad to have the task over and done with it.

I was a savvy enough reader to understand that I was being unfair to the book. I was judging it against my expectations and not on its own terms. But I was expecting, and I needed to read, a book that was a dream of the open road, which is to say a book about escape, and On the Road is a book about being trapped.

The point keeps getting made again and again throughout the novel: No matter where you go, there you are. There being stuck inside your own self.

On the Road isn't about being on the road, it's about being in the car and not looking out but looking up, into the rear view mirror, and seeing the same damn face looking back every time.

Since I was already spending far too much time looking in a symbolic mirror in hopes of finding somebody else more interesting looking back and not enjoying it at all, it's no wonder On the Road didn't strike me as a useful literary model.

Ten or so years later, when I was teaching and looking around for books and authors to put on my reading lists, I decided to give Kerouac another chance and I picked up On the Road again, and The Subterraneans, and Big Sur, and Desolation Angels, and Dharma Bums.

And they all had as one of their themes the same unattractive (to me) theme as I saw in my first reading of On the Road, Kerouac's self-disgust and his wishing that he was another, more interesting, happier, or at least more well-adjusted, man.

The trouble is that what makes the men Kerouac wishes he were interesting at all is the work they produced on their own, and so it's more profitable and enjoyable to read their books and their poems, listen to their music and look at their paintings, than it is to read Kerouac's extensive chronicling of his man-crushes on them.

In an essay on On The Road in the New Yorker, Drive, He Wrote, Louis Menand looks at this theme as it appears in On the Road in a more sympathetic light:

Satire and polemic are, on some level, defensive. It’s possible that something about the Beats simply made people uncomfortable. For the nineteen-fifties images of the Beat—Partisan Review’s bohemian nihilist and Hollywood’s hip hedonist—are almost complete inversions of the character types represented in “On the Road.” The book is not about hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists, rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the nineteen-sixties. And the book is not an anti-intellectual celebration of spontaneity or an artifact of literary primitivism. It’s a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other guys...

The car is also a male space. The women who end up being driven in (never driving) the car are either shared by the guys (Marylou, for example, whom Dean hands off to Sal, as Cassady handed off LuAnne to Kerouac) or abandoned (as happens to the character Galatea Dunkel, and as happened to her real-life counterpart, Helen Hinkle). But the car is not an erotic space. Driving is a way for men to be together without the need to answer questions about why they want to be together. (Drinking is another way for men to be together, and there is a lot of drinking in “On the Road.” There is a lot of drinking, period.) In this sense, “On the Road” is a little like another sensational road novel of the time: Humbert and Lolita drive obsessively back and forth across the continent because that is the only public way for them to be together. As long as they’re driving, they’re not doing anything they shouldn’t be doing.

But maybe we should not understand the sexual themes in “On the Road” too quickly. Maybe the best thing to say about those themes is that they are murky and underrealized, not entirely within the author’s control. Sal has a crush on Dean, in the way that attractive but insecure men can form attachments to gregarious and self-confident men. Sal gets close to women vicariously by being closer to Dean than Dean’s women are (until he, too, gets dumped, in Mexico City). This is perfectly consistent with the “Ocean’s Eleven” genre of buddy stories: there is always a dame, but the real bond is between Brad and George. They have something with each other that neither could have, or would care to have, with a woman.

Menand also sees that On the Road is not about being on the road. The road isn't taking Sal and Neal and the various women they pick up and drop off anywhere. They all want to go somewhere, but they can't get there because the road they want to take to get there doesn't exist anymore, it's lost in the past, recoverable only through memories and regrets, and the point becomes simply being in the car and being on the way to somewhere:

Nostalgia is part of the appeal of “On the Road” today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When “On the Road” came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac’s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads “Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,” few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn’t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.

In fact, the characters in “On the Road” spend as short a time on the road as they can. They’re not interested in exploring rural or small-town America. Speed is essential. The men rarely even have time to chase after the women they run into, because they’re always in a hurry to get to a city. A lot of the book takes place in cities, particularly New York, Denver, and San Francisco, but also Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Even there, the characters are always rushing around.

The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country—“ramblin’ round,” in the Guthrie song—following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank’s photographs in “The Americans,” taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar affluence and consumerism.

The sadness that soaks through Kerouac’s story comes from the certainty that this world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders—the world of Neal Cassady and his derelict father—is dying. But the sadness is not sentimentality, because many of the people in the book who inhabit that world would be happy to see it go or else are too drunk or forlorn to care. They do not share the literary man’s nostalgie de la boue; they are restless, lonely, lost—beat. “There ain’t no flowers there,” says a girl whom Sal Paradise, the Kerouac figure, tries to pick up in Cheyenne by suggesting a walk on the prairie among the flowers. “I want to go to New York. I’m sick and tired of this. Ain’t no place to go to but Cheyenne and ain’t nothin in Cheyenne.” “Ain’t nothin in New York,” Sal says. “Hell there ain’t,” she says. She wants to get in the car, too.

Nothing worth staying at home for. Nothing in their destinations that make them worth the drive or worth sticking around in once they get there. Nothing to see out the windows or stopping along the way to explore because all that's worth seeing and exploring has vanished. Nothing to do then but drive.

On the Road is one of the most claustrophobic and static novels not written by a French existentialist.

Menand clearly admires On the Road much more than I do, but he sees the book's importance as being primarily biographical and historical not literary. He doesn't try to argue that On the Road is a great American novel. He does point out that it's a better written book than is sometimes thought. It's the stuff of literary legend how Kerouac typed the first draft of On the Road on one long roll of paper in a frenzied and caffeine-(not drug)-fueled three weeks. That's not why Truman Capote dismissed On the Road as typing not writing though. Kerouac may have banged out the first draft in a blur, but he took his time with the following drafts, polishing and revising the book over the course of ten years. Kerouac, says Menand, made a deliberate aesthetic choice in shaping On the Road that his one hundred and twenty-five foot page of paper helped him achieve:

He saw that this-happened-and-then-that-happened had literary possibilities, and the scroll was a way of forcing himself to stick to this vision. (A little later, Frank O’Hara made poems using the same theory. “I do this, I do that” is how he described them.) The scroll was therefore a restriction: it was a way of defining form, not a way of avoiding form. In religious terms (and Kerouac was always, deep down, a Catholic and a sufferer), it was a collar, a self-mortification. He did, after he finished the scroll, go back and make changes. But first he had to submit to his discipline.

Capote was probably refering to Kerouac's "this-happened-and-then-that-happened" approach to his subject. But he might just as well have been referring to something else. On the Road is a written book. But it is not an imagined one.

I mentioned Joyce and Conrad and Greene earlier as writers I was reading for the first time around the same time as I read On the Road. Coincidentally, all three of them, like Kerouac, drew heavily on their experiences and personal biographies in their fiction.

But unlike Kerouac, the other three managed to see and re-create their experiences as having shape and meaning apart from their original sources. Kerouac worked hard at not letting that happen to his stories. I don't think Capote was right, On the Road isn't just typing, it is writing, but in the end it's a particular kind of writing. It's journalism with a get out of the facts free card attached.

Conrad, Greene, and Joyce aren't American writers, of course, and I think it's best when comparing Kerouac to other writers to see him as part of the American grain. Menand mentions Hemingway, Pynchon, Updike, and, not as oddly as it might at first seem, Nabokov---after all, Lolita is the other notorious American road novel from the period. And there's no getting away from or around the other Beats and their sons and heirs, particularly Ginsberg and Burroughs, but also Gary Snyder and Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

Gee, no women. What a shocker.

But the American writer who always springs to mind whenever I think about Kerouac preceded him on the road, although he didn't go very far down it, by a century, his fellow Massachusettsan, Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau is another one who took himself as his main subject. But unlike Kerouac he was never tempted to write up his adventures as fiction and, as cranky as he could be, and as unforgiving, he was basically a cheerful man who got a kick out of other people, even if he didn't always like them very much. He was egocentric, but not self-absorbed, and so he was a more active and more objective observer. Makes him more entertaining and more informative company. Thoreau famously traveled extensively in Concord. He got up to Maine too, and over to Cape Cod, but mainly he stayed at home. Kerouac went back and forth across the continent several times. But of the two of them Thoreau did travel. He got away. On his short hikes and lazy canoe trips, in his bean patch, and during one night in jail, he managed to escape. From himself and from his demons.

Kerouac went a long way to get nowhere.

Done and done.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of On the Road and Tom Watson salutes it by taking a more Thoreauvian position and celebrating the pleasures of Staying Put.

Your turn: What reputedly great book have you read that disappointed you?

Wednesday, September 26, 2007 in Fragments of an autobiography, Ruining my eyes, Writer's Workshop | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)