Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)

by Edward Montgomery

Young Adult (2011)

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN.

by Danielle Lee

I was a little worried, going to see Young Adult during a visit to my suburban California home town, that I would too readily identify with main character Mavis Gary, played by Charlize Theron.

A 37-year-old that too easily wriggles into the shallow high school characters she writes for a once-popular YA (industry shorthand, she explains to Sweet Valley-deficient philistines) series, Mavis is a mean, divorced, depressed alcoholic. So, instead of solely prompting the giggling, knowing nods of recognition I expected, Young Adult’s story of Mavis returning to her small Minnesota hometown to win back her high school sweetheart earned cringes, guffaws and tears.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t moments of intense familiarity.

One of the comforting bastions of enduring singlehood is routine. And I’m not talking to-do list, book club, Crock-Pot routine. Though that’s nice and important, too.

But the Mavis routine: the spitting in your dying ink cartridge, passing out clutching a wine glass stem, eating gas station junk food and chugging Diet Coke for breakfast, no-one-can-see-or-judge-me routine.

And essential to this safety is our net. Director Jason Reitman rightly lingers on these rituals, as well as their environs.

After Mavis, prompted by the birth announcement of her former flame and his wife, rashly jumps into her Mini Cooper, travels back to town and checks into a hotel, she sets up camp. She plugs in her MacBook. She hangs up her authentically late-20s-early-30s single woman clothing; a mix of enticing leather, flattering corporate chic and grubby hoodies and jeans. She unzips her Pomeranian from her carrier bag. She flips on the TV, hilariously continuing the endless Kardashian death march she had just hours ago flipped off back in her sloppy Minneapolis apartment.

This camera inventory is important. From the all-important bathroom sink dump of too-large toiletries and hair products to the soothing shriek of Kourtney Kardashian, Mavis has rooted herself - and is now prepared to set in motion a series of bad decisions, triggered by a faux-casual voicemail to ex-boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson).

He returns her call, fumbling with a breast pump in his kitchen as she enters the local bar, promising to catch up with her at dinner the next day.

Filled with sudden confidence in winning back this wholesomely nice yet contentedly married ex, and then with plenty of whiskey after entering the dimly lit dive, Mavis soon confesses her diabolical plan to fellow patron and former classmate Matt. Crippled back in high school by a quasi-hate crime (they thought he was gay), Matt would already be a sympathetic character, but a wonderful Patton Oswalt gives him more dimensions, as Mavis’ equally bitter but scrupulous foil.

He voices us, the audience, as we watch Mavis, the next night, don a plunging black cocktail dress to meet Buddy at Champ O’Malley’s, famous for their popcorn shrimp. Talk about how busy and important she is in the city. Enthusiastically accept a future invitation to attend the concert of his wife’s band at that very sports bar establishment, in hopes of then sealing the deal.

And what we’re all saying is: Aghghghghhhhh!

Mavis doesn’t hear much though, from Matt or any other adults. Instead, she hones in on the asinine conversations of teenagers around her as chatter to plug into her book, the last of the series she ghostwrites.

As well as a realistically hilarious send-up of the YA genre, I like to think these scenes are a sly nod by writer Diablo Cody to some of the backlash she endured for her Oscar-winning script for Juno (which also paired her with Reitman). I was a part of that chorus, appreciating Juno’s heart but rolling my eyes at dialogue unfit for the photo-caption puns of a high school yearbook. Considering Cody’s otherwise zeitgeisty ear and appetite for pop culture, I wouldn’t be surprised if she sneaked in some of these overheard conversations (“textual chemistry” is one) as both a reminder that some of us critics are just out of touch with how the Facebook generation speaks and an acknowledgment that she was having some fun.

Either way, the moment when Mavis eventually uses the worst of these pubescent gems out loud, instead of on her MacBook, in a painful seduction of Buddy, is the apex of her humiliation.

Here her past trauma, only hinted at before to Matt as an attempt to cruelly shake him of the continued haunting of his attack, is predictably revealed. Less predictable in its nature than its existence, as her character—jabs at Matt and passes at married men included—had gotten so unsympathetically awful at this point that both catalyst and empathy were desperately needed for the audience.

But Mavis’ personal struggles are thankfully no immediate salve to her behavior, a testament to both the writing and Theron’s great performance. Any redemption arc at the end of the movie is as realistically self-serving as most of her actions preceding it. It helps that those around her, even at her lowest point, still treat her as a wondrous big-city celebrity. Two even function as actual mirrors, in those final scenes.

These two are overjoyed at Mavis’ intense concentration on their faces, their long overdue chance to be fully seen by the popular bitch from high school. But in those earnest faces, Mavis sees herself, and her choices. They reflect her past glory faster than the hotel mirror had earlier captured her age-defying beatification routine.

Among people so eager to serve and glorify her, Mavis can either take this as an opportunity to finally let go of her “baggage,” as she calls it, and at least work toward these exalted expectations…or she can continue her internal retreat, now with echo chamber.

The question of whether she grows up, asked in the film’s tag line, isn’t answered—and shouldn’t be. There is no endpoint, but a series of reflections. Some are ugly, some subtle, and some made in the hideous lighting of a hotel bathroom.

I had a few, slinking out of the theater in my familiar leather jacket. Maybe my defensive, big-city bravado was tempered by the realization that I would soon return to my couch in New York, free-styling country lyrics over Bravo reality TV outros and eating pineapple out of the can.

If I looked closely at the scattered faces glancing over at me on our way out of the theater, I could see that, too.

Danielle Lee still wonders how Charlize Theron’s character planned to win her man back without adorably crashing into any potted plants or face-planting a glass door. She tumbls (less than adorably) here.

5 Perfect Uses of Music

by Andrew Root

Film scores and soundtracks can be cynically derided as telling the audience what to feel; a cheap shortcut to poignancy or a false sense of excitement. It’s kind of an unjust argument. The music is meant to enhance and support the emotion of a scene. Simply put, that’s its job. But music can be used in some innovative and thrilling ways which elevate the sequence and create moments of brilliance.

I’m focusing on the use of pre-existing songs, because selecting the perfect song is arguably more difficult to nail than writing a piece of music specifically tailored to the scenario. These selections are not meant to embody the ONLY perfect uses of music, or the MOST perfect uses of music, but rather five examples where the soundtrack of a movie marries seamlessly with the action, the scene, and the characters to create a moment so exquisite that it can only be described as… perfect.

1. The Departed - Jack Nicholson Turns the Music Off.

You’re nearing the conclusion of your film, and you’ve spent the majority of the running time establishing that your central antagonist has forces slowly closing in on him from all sides. Traps have been laid by friends and foes alike, and it seems inevitable that the big bad baddie is going down. How do you, as a filmmaker, maintain the power and authority of a character when their screen time is quickly running out? You give him control of the movie itself.

In a move so daring and metafilmic that it caused a theatre patron to shout out “Hey now!” Jack Nicholson wrenches the wheel out of Martin Scorsese’s hands. Nicholson’s Frank Costello is on the way to a drug deal. He’s being tailed rather conspicuously by members of the State police, supposedly being controlled by his mole, Colin (Matt Damon). The Dropkick Murphys’ “Shipping Up To Boston” thunders on the soundtrack as Colin frantically tries to explain that he’s losing his ability to keep both Frank and himself safe, but Frank wants nothing to do with it. Gripping the cell phone in his murderer’s paw, he barks, “GET RID OF THE FUCKING TAIL!” … and the music we thought was independent—was separate from the characters—stops. Costello is so powerful that he transcends his closed world and enters into ours. Only after Colin agrees to call off the pursuit does the music resume. The fight isn’t over for this dog. You can almost see him rise up off the page, grab writer William Monahan’s pen and whisper, “You’d better give me a good death scene.”

2. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind – The Who Set the Scene.

In one of the most captivating character studies ever put to film, George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind tells the true story of a man who created The Dating Game and also murdered 33 people for the CIA… maybe. As the film progresses, Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell) is constantly looking over his shoulder. When his CIA boss, Jim Bird (Clooney), stops by Chuck’s house to warn him that agents are being killed and there is a mole in their midst, he covers their conversation with the first word in early-1970’s loud—The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The short scene plays out in subtitles, emphasizing the volume of the music. In and of itself, the scene adds an interesting texture to the movie and highlights the slightly over-the-top secret agent mechanics of the film, but Clooney elevates this technique through a clever repetition.

In the second scene, Chuck’s life is falling apart. His shows are being cancelled, his colleagues are being assassinated, his most significant relationship has reached its breaking point. One way or the other, he’s losing all of his friends. Late at night, a dark figure sits on the diving board over the swimming pool, and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” blasts on the stereo. Chuck emerges in a bathrobe with a loaded gun, and we know exactly what he and Jim are going to talk about. The music sets the scene elegantly with charm and wit, and showcases the intelligence and talent in this actor’s directorial debut.

3. Reservoir Dogs – A Little Light Torturing Music.

When something terrible happens to a “good” character, some part of you is hoping they’ll get out of it. This pathos makes King Kong more than just a giant ape, and turns Simba into a worthy king (of the lions). Storytelling 101 says that we must feel pity and fear for our protagonist, especially at the hands of a powerful antagonist. Rarely has an antagonist had so much power as Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs.

Mr. Blonde’s psychopathic tendencies are hinted at earlier in the film, but in this scene he is given an opportunity to fully indulge himself. His quarry is duct-taped to a chair, and the only witness is bleeding out on the floor. He declares that he finds torturing a police officer “amusing,” and that begging and pleading will bring Officer Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) no avail. Mr. Blonde goes so far as to put on the cheery swing of “Stuck In The Middle With You” by Stealer’s Wheel, highlighting his cavalier madness. The helplessness of Nash’s situation is bad enough, but then Mr. Blonde says he’ll “be right back,” and goes outside to get a can of gas from his car. What happens next is chilling. As the camera follows Mr. Blonde out of the warehouse, the music fades out. The sound doesn’t carry into the street. No one can hear what’s going on. No one can hear Marvin Nash plead for his life. He’s got kids. He’s got a family. He’s begging and no one can hear him except a madman with a razor blade.

4. Magnolia – Everyone Agrees It’s Hopeless.

When the emotion of a situation becomes too great in a traditional musical, the actors are allowed to break into song. These songs serve as a cathartic release, expressing inner feelings which would otherwise be unspeakable—a device, if nothing else (a thoroughly toe-tapping device, but a device nonetheless). So what merits a song about hopelessness, about inevitable defeat—a song filled with crushing depression at its heart—in a movie billed as a straight drama?

How about nine separate characters each dealing with profound loss and self doubt? Magnolia strives to simultaneously depict Claudia (Melora Walters) unable to fathom why a nice guy like Jim (John C. Reilly) would ever want to date her, and Jim praying not to screw it up; Earl and Lily Partridge (Jason Robards and Julianne Moore) ending their lives in a swamp of guilt; Quiz Kid Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) and current wunderkind Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) both trying to deal with the fact that they’ve peaked far too early and are totally alienated from those around them. There’s death, heartbreak, and painful loneliness all coming to a head, so Paul Thomas Anderson borrows a convention from another genre, and the isolated characters join in a rendition of Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up.” Uniting the various narrative strands thematically as they are coming together on a more literal level, the song delivers an emotional wallop. Everyone’s got their problems, and even though they’re not together, they’re not alone.

5. Wayne’s World – You Headbang to This Song.

How do you introduce the ethos of a group of characters whose core values include partying, goofing around, rock music, and foxes while simultaneously setting the irreverent tone of the film? A bold, brilliant use of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” that’s how! Wayne’s World changed the way a generation experienced this song, and I challenge anyone to describe this scene in any other way than “perfect.”

Andrew Root lives and writes near Lake Ontario. He apologizes to his editor, Elizabeth Cantwell, for including Magnolia instead of American Psycho. Andrew’s previous entries in the “5 Perfect Things” series can be found here and here.

STORM SYSTEMS OF GROUP SUFFERING: A 2011 YEAR END LIST AND CATCH-ALL OF THE ZEITGEIST USING EPISTOLARY FORMS

by Evan Scott Bryson

Of the two people I’ve ever loved—the one is in Afghanistan, and the other I dumped on Tuesday. I’m ready for 2012. I’m ready for anything.

—

5 December 2011 

Hey Evan,

[…] also, mom said you got quite emotional on the phone last night. So, like a good investigator that I am, I’m asking if everything is going okay for you right now, if your emotional and psychological well-being is on shaky footing. Are you regular? Sleep is key.

loves,

aj

—

The best thing to come out of the Occupy Movement, for me, has been M83. “Midnight City” was posted and reposted by my estranged friends in Manhattan, kids I’d gone to college with in the Midwest. (One friend—Nathaniel—drove from Albuquerque to live under tarpaulin in the small gray park.) I’m not certain how a band that emulates yuppie boho discotheque from the height of Reagan’s bubble has become the go-to for my déclassé peers, but I really like the double-album. I listened to the song over and over again with my boyfriend last week. We drove through Nashville holding hands while I tried to make the chirpy-balloon-busty beats: “A DOOT DOOP deep DOOP! A BEEP boop BEEP DOOP!” Then after a day of silence I broke up with him. Now he’s my ex-boyfriend. I still listen to M83 but the resonance is different. He really liked the song “Raconte-moi une histoire”,so of course now that song makes me seize with shame and remorse—and it’s about licking a fucking psychedelic tree frog.

—

My Facebook wall has become a who’s who of those who have a vested interest in occupying and those who reply with photos of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, photos of blond boys holding an assault rifle in one hand and in the other an “I am the 1%” placard: “I love God, my country, my job. I worked hard for everything I have and I count my blessings. You trustfund hippies don’t know how good you got it. Get a job, get a life, stop asking for handouts.” I should say that since entering graduate school, I’ve been on Facebook a lot more.

My great friend Jeremy has been in Kandahar for a little over three months now. He’s attached to the JAG unit of the 82^nd Airborne as a paralegal, and graduated top in his class at jump school, and has won several merit awards. I think he’s cocky and silly and soulful. Here’s an example of our enflamed, self-righteous, liberal, bigoted Facebook patter:

EVAN: Jeremy plz circulate “we are the 1% pictures” like othr enlistees!!!!1 it’s killing me to see all these 20yrold soldiers holding guns and talking about hardwork. I don’t doubt the hardwork, but i wonder about their employment during peacetime. (heck, during war time.) poop in my pants, that’s what i feel like.

JEREMY: I havent seen these pics. But as for enlistees holding guns… probably 95% would be unemployable(?) during peacetime. And they all hate President Obama for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. It blows my mind how uninformed most service members are. I blame facebook. And the Republican presidential race.

We are being—yes—disgustingly unfair and unapologetically so. We come from a small town in a small county in a small state. A disproportionate number of the kids we went to high school with have joined the military, come back home, married, spawned, divorced, married again, gone back to Iraq or Afghanistan. I have degrees in English and art. Jeremy has eight credit hours of Chinese to finish before he get’s his BA in whatever—economics? But first he ran into debt.

—

Earlier in the year n+1 ran Kent Russel’s essay “Ryan Went to Afghanistan”. Jeremy was at Fort Bragg waiting for overseas deployment, and pushing paperwork mostly to do with on-base sex scandals, prostitution and drugs and what-not, and hanging out with lesbians. (Isn’t it intriguing that before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed, gays were totally overrepresented in military legal offices?) I wanted Jeremy to read the essay but he couldn’t get a hold of a copy of n+1. I sent the editors an email that went like so:

Hi Editors,

I’ve been trying to get my friend Jeremy to read “Ryan Went to Afghanistan” for a while now, but he’s adamantly against paying the for a digital subscription (he cites “bills … and hoes in different area codes” as strains on his finances); also the PX at Fort Bragg doesn’t stock your fine journal. Jeremy’s reference to hoes is used as a pat jocularism—he is a gentleman and a scholar.

Jeremy deploys for Kandahar in September. He told me this via text message Friday night while I debated seeing Pirates of the Caribbean 4 by myself. Here is a portion of the exchange:

Evan: No one wants to see new pirates movie with me. What is wrong with this country?

Jeremy: Haha… too much pirates may be a part of the problem.

Evan: Im already in line in my heart for the fifth installment. Nevertheless.

Jeremy: I’m holding out for the Michael Bolton version.

Evan: Well. As long as its pirates! … … … :’(

Jeremy: Deploying to Kandahar Sept 10. Just found out today. Haven’t told the rents yet. Mom is going to be a wreck.

Evan: Is that like a Thai food place? Like a really shitty Thai food place?

The movie did not recover my spirits. I’m a little in love with Jeremy, since like high school, etc. And he really isn’t a cheap ass, I swear. He just gave 14,000bucks to Sallie Mae. (He joined the army in part to pay off insurmountable student loan debt; he hopes to use his G.I. Bill to pay for law school.)

And anyway! I was wondering if n+1 could do a Memorial Day bonanza, allowing our august soldiers of the awful War on Terror either a military discount or a free article—perhaps articles exclusively to do with War(s)? It will probably be seen as in bad taste (“Torture and Its Known Unknowns,” while beautiful, virtuosic, amazing, is liable to make readers cry; “Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy” about same), but eventually people will understand that the PX lit vendors have historically underserved n+1 (though they do stock Harper’s), and your side is working in good faith to correct this, if “for one weekend only!” Logistically, I have no idea how this could work. Interns?

I think our soldiers need to read Kent Russell’s story. It may help them to understand the depths of the compassion and confusion of the friends they leave behind when they go to fight far from our United States. And for those soldiers who have yet to deploy, it may in some small way, in some capacity of its wisdom, prepare them for the incalculable strangeness of war, the way war makes strangers of friends.

Have a great holiday weekend,

Evan

Carla Blumenkranz—angelic Carla—replied:

Dear Evan,

Thanks for your note. I’m glad to hear you liked the piece. I’d be happy to send a PDF for you to pass on to Jeremy, if you’d like. And the Memorial Day series—good idea. We’ll try to figure out we can do it.

Best wishes,

Carla Blumenkranz

I got Jeremy the PDF and then he bought a Kindle and then a mag subscription, so it was in fact cost-effective for everyone involved. Then Jeremy shipped out one evening when I was unawares—he just got on a plane and left the country, and it’s really really scary over there. Over Facebook message Jeremy thus describes:

Afghanistan is seriously lacking in generally everything but dirt.

And rockets. FUCK!

So many rocket attacks throughout the day.

They lob them onto the base from the surrounding mountains.

Just wooden shoes flying everywhere on impact

—

I began an essay about Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and it went something like this:

In Architectures of Time, a very difficult (nigh, unreadable) study of “the modern history of time,” Sanford Kwinter makes at least an interesting contribution to this essay. Addressing Kafka’s story “The Great Wall of China,” Kwinter notes “that it exemplifies a fundamental movement underlying all of Kafka’s work: that it dramatizes the movement of God turning away from humanity as humanity turns away from God.” Isn’t that beautiful? As if man and god were performing the quadrille, and upon the dance floor found better partners with to touch hands, and then politely, skeptically, mozied off.

This flavor of deism pervades Pirates of the Caribbean, even if not much else about the series is Kafkaesque. The idea of the British Crown extending itself into the Caribbean has not the missionary zeal of its Spanish corollary (manifest in On Stranger Tides), and most of the divining bureaucracy is many months of mail-cargo away. The government outpost on Port Royal, Jamaica, is more Elizabeth Swann’s girlish play-island, where her father’s stature as governor affords her free reign on its beaches, and many splendid dresses. The usual heathen dangers have been expropriated by the lower whites on the island, soldier-types in carmine velvet and brass buttons, ivory whigs, carrying swords. Other subalterns operate tack repair or man the ale houses under the palm fronds. The absence of a slave trade eases many of the local tensions, and clues us to the pervasive fantasia of these movies if its supernatural pirates could not. The polity of this Eden is somewhat undermined in Elizabeth’s relationship with Will Turner, whom she befriended as a young girl when she helped recover him from a shipwreck. Like herself, Turner grows into a canny person and handsome figure. Any class disparity between the young man and woman (he is, after all, the son of a pirate!) will seal up with a kiss, although it will take many hours in the motion pictures to officially marry off the couple.

For the record—Pirates of the Caribbean is a franchise that I celebrate. I can stand to watch all eight hours of it, in peaks and troughs of glee.

On its opening night, I came out of the third sequel knowing Rob Marshall’s On Stranger Tides is boring, muddy, and shallow, yet something of its surface effects began to break apart on the drive home. The viewing underwent a half-life in my mind, and as its images disintegrated the skeleton of a larger, enigmatic structure took shape in the night. What the hell did I see? I saw empire. But I couldn’t make a convincing essay out of it. Even the scrap I’m sharing bores me and doesn’t feel true. Putting it in context with Jeremy and Afghanistan does feel true. Movies—what the fuck.

—

I spent the year hiding in movie theaters by myself, or sitting beside Cody, whenever he came into town or whenever I drove down to see him. In May, the week Osama bin Laden was assassinated, Jeremy and I were heatedly discussing the events—I called him a “hoary cunt” at one point—and also in our exchange, I said this about Source Code:

I saw Source Code this weekend—I think I might be writing about it soonish; I’m shaping a response; my reaction Sunday evening to your post was definitely a continuing feeling out—and if you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll just tell you that it is about a government agency that has hijacked the corpse of an American captain slaughtered in Afghanistan, and having rehabilitated this corpse, makes it do ghost work in the field of quantum mechanics.

The movie is also about a ticking bomb on a train to Chicago, but that’s a surface account.

It was a nightmare scenario to me through and through. I bought my own fucking ticket. I was hungover and expected to nap through it. The pounding score and the lakeshore vistas of Chicago kept me awake. Then shit hit the fan. Things got debased, philosophical.

My reaction was visceral. Unheeded. You would have been embarrassed to have sat beside me—and I’m pretty sure Cody was just like, “Why the fuck is my boyfriend a choking mess over here? Jake Gyllenhaal just saved the world and got the girl…” I think mostly, I was reacting to the existential quagmire of the premise—that we have so little insight into the psychic turmoil of soldiers coming back from the War on Terror, that we make movies that recursively embellish and then loop their suffering. A very backhanded way of criticizing the establishment, the war, and its means, while banking on the banal everyday lives lost along the way. For all its horse-shit feel-goodery, gaping ontological black holes, and hackneyed romance, the biopolitics described in Source Code are some of the most subtle and heinous I have yet encountered in the films of this war. Near the film’s end, we realize that the captain has not been communicating with a voice but with text on a computer interface. This detail was soul-crushing. Vera Farmiga co-stars and, as is typical, her understatement is heartbreaking. Gyllenhaal was just such a broken young man. Literally. His remains are kept in a hypovat and hooked into wires.

Anyhow, I was thinking particularly that not having combat experience, I don’t actually have an experiential vocabulary to assess my extreme reactions to this genre, to these stories. What I have is confusion; turmoil; angst. It is unplaceable, implacable. Pending my enlistment (don’t count on it), I think the next closest emotional loci informing my violent reaction is the application of these fictive experiences on to people I do know who are in/were in/will be in combat zones, people who will be at the mercy of the American military industrial complex. That’s yourself (and Jerrod), right now. So Afghanistan has been in my head. What is happening there, what may end there.

—

I watched Attack the Block with Cody in September. I had this to say about it: “I understood maybe one out of every three words spoken in the film’s dialog but loved it just the same, with the same ferocity I reserve for British period fare.” Marginal Gloss, a contributor to A Bright Wall in a Dark Room, left these comments for me:

[…] 2a. Attack the Block is good isn’t it. It’s hard to understand even if you’re from London but it feels authentic. My gf is from the area of South London where it was shot. We had great larks recognising some of the locations. But it’s not as bad as the film makes out around there! (okay it kind of is but still.)

2b. Then again people used to talk like that when I was at school, so at the same time it’s kind of a second or third-hand reading of that culture — Joe Cornish, the director, is better known over here for being part of a (very fine) comedy podcast duo with Adam Buxton, and if you know their work it’s fairly clear that the dorky middle class pot smoking kid in the film is a stand-in for his own experience.

2c. Also it made a woman physically sick in the screening we were in. And those are my thoughts on ATB.

—

5 December 2011 

A.J.,

[…] I’m like not on a precipice or anything, if that’s what everyone is worried about. (She’s worried about that.) Mom’s soothing voice just pierced me, especially re Todd being home for a few days in December. Also, I was reading to her the news that J had died—D (white witch) had posted the most treacly bit of In Memorium-like poesy, and the cheesiness activated on me. I think it was, “And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you gave away.” I’m not certain that 1) that’s aphoristically true, w/o necessarily being logically effective, and 2) if it is true, I was getting emotional about how one can for certain calibrate the facts of possessing love or relinquishing it—if it’s only after you’re dead; if death provides objectivity, or if this is magic religious thinking? I know my terms aren’t quite the same as “taking” and “giving,” but. I was wound very tightly around this tortured logic. It came very fast. It was wildly inexplicable and fairly embarrassing. I don’t know how Mom lives with such volatile young men falling to pieces hither and yon.

And truthfully, I was upset about my relationship w/ Cody. I don’t need to elaborate the blinking blackhole I’m feeling about that, but it was of apiece with the sentiment “the love you take is equal to the love you gave away,” even though as I type that tripe again my heart begins to carbonize. And actually my chest gets this big wet weight in it and begins to pull at my eyes. I think my ballsac is the only thing not cantilevered to psychic pain in this regard, because my arms feel very tired and my nose runs constantly. On the other side of that, my house is consistently 56 degrees, so this could all be the downside of being very cold all the time.

I met a young man for lunch yesterday—it was a platonic lunching, after the party I don’t remember. P is a friend of a friend, affable, intelligent, witty, empathic—studied architecture, now does contract work elsewhere; handsome, wears his hair long, it’s a very British cut. He came into town on Friday specifically to go to the party on Saturday, and, in some respects, I gathered, to meet this mythical me. Isn’t that flattering? I think it’s flattering. At the party—and I have multiple corroborators—I was, for 90% of the time, the usual mythical me of the party scene, and then 10%, near the end, I was by myself outside on the steps looking fargone and very sad, trying to sleep. Katie told me her only thought was, “Oh, this is what a Bryson boy looks like when he’s sad!” and that it was very romantic and striking. I staggered into someone’s doorway, whirled back to a corner of the cement balcony separating apartments, and threw-up on a landing (I do remember this—I remember thinking, with my hand holding me up against a wall, “Why is there stuff on my shoes?” and then answering myself, “Because you threw up”), which is when Katie gathered me up and took me home. (Beth and Meg were also at this party—they had fun, they say. They say the gays were jubilant, interested, and affectionate.) Even in this wrecked state, I was, apparently, fascinating and controlled, so win/win. And this P guy still wanted to get lunch/coffee the next day. So despite the brown out, I’m giving myself “extra credit” for looking trim and acting polite whilst locomoting on a lizard brain, or at least a brain soaked in Goldschläger. (It was a “Fancy Dress Party”—I thought the gold flakes would be really fancy. I wore a tie all evening. When I danced I threw it around like “ice,” or “floss,” I’m told.)

Let’s refer to Mating? An early chapter, “Why Do We Yield?” has the pertinent description: “I feel like someone after the deluge being asked to describe the way it was before the flood while I’m still plucking seaweed from my hair, Denoon being the deluge. Despite my metaphors, the last thing I want to do is fabulize Denoon and make him more than he was. I hate drama. I hate dramatizers. But it was distinctly like a building falling on me when I met him. Why? Why do we yield? I’d like to know as a [man] and a human being, both.” There was the night when I fell in love with Cody. And it was gigantic and still burns over-bright in memory, and seems to have used up a great deal of its warmth in keeping us gravitationally bound-up with one another, despite growing far distant and maybe even disinterested. If I’m the disinterested and distant party, that’s well enough—I’ll own up to it. I feel very changed. I feel (cf. Mating) “sexually alert,” and “[w]anting company [has] entered into it.” I do feel like a “detached white [man] with a few social graces, even someone feeling very one-down.” I meant to suggest, earlier, that meeting this P fellow “was distinctly like a building fall on me.” I cannot adequately express the gallantry of the enterprise—the IHOP lunch, the bucket of coffee/Diet Pepsi I consumed, the easy and interesting conversation. His eyes are very intense and are slightly close-together (the bridge of his nose is somewhat skinny, I think). Anyway. It brings P’s eyes closer, in a way that suggests seriousness and depth, and possibly striving. A total coup de foudre. I think he is also a lot smarter than I am, in material ways that I’ve long lacked. (I didn’t know, for instance, that Comcast price-gouges everyone in this area, because they lack competition. Maybe it’s dumb to be impressed by this stuff? He also likes the architectural work of Philip Johnson, although he did not know that Johnson is a fellow gay! But I did. Because I do know some things, like, mainly the scandals.) Also he is a polyglot—he’s done a comprehensive undertaking of Romance languages, and speaks fluent Parseltongue to boot.

All to say—what I had been feeling suddenly crystalized around this dopey possibility of something else, maybe not something better, but different, and that had a confusing force and appeal. I went back to Katie’s apartment after the meal so she and I could dissemble the night’s events, and also my luncheon, and then P called just to tell me—should he have?—that he knows that I’m in a relationship, but that he wouldn’t forgive himself if he never told me that if the situation were different, he would of course have asked me out, for a night in the city, or whatever. It was very affecting. I said, “Oh, why, thank you,” feeling gnawed on, cored, like an apple full of worms.

Obviously I pooped hugely yesterday!

Obviously I’m not in Gaborone! I guess it’s overblown to quote Norman Rush so much. I was switching rather frantically last night among Mating, Mortals and his stories in Whites, to dredge up something like wisdom re my “situation,” which might, in essence, look like “I don’t love Cody anymore,” but is rather that I simply love him in a different way, that should no longer constitute a long distance romantic relationship. So this sensation—the sensation of this fact—over-came me while I was discussing w/ Mom J’s death, which was, in fact, me sounding to myself the death of something else.

So. I’m just thinking through these things right now. I’m a little angry and a little displeased with the pain these thoughts are causing me, and with the real likelihood that I’ll be causing another person severe pain, as well, with these thoughts. I’m going down to Nashville this Friday to live with Cody for a week. I want to feel a shared life w/ him, not a roving sort of vacation-living. I want to know if I can share a life w/ someone else, too, maybe a better life, with greater fullness. On the obverse side, maybe I just want a simpler life, with less horizon, less travel, less telephone negotiating and upkeep. I can’t tell how selfish I’m being. I know that selfishness is coming through, but “that misrepresents my motives.” (cf. Mating.)

Love,

Your brother,

Evan

—

In June, I said this about Super 8:

The third time I saw Super 8 was with my father. We went to the latest showing because he works nights as a sheriff’s deputy, and is most alert long after sunset.

I convinced him to see the film (and also to buy my ticket) by ruminating on the movie’s deference for local law enforcers. In its schizophrenic Spielbergian mode, Super 8 savages military conduct and personnel, but lovingly dotes on its lower authorities. My father has a cop mustache. Our county’s sheriff does contentious things—like living in another county. A recent scandal involved a woman bringing in the department to hunt for her missing dog, the location of which she had pinpointed with the assistance of a pet psychic out of North Carolina, I shit you not. I told Dad he would appreciate the subtleties of J.J. Abrams’ deputies. A deputy produces a map in Super 8 by marking the locations of recovered dogs in a circumference around Lillian; the dogs ran off to the outlying communities in Montgomery, Preble, even Butler counties. Lucy, Joe Lamb’s dog, made it as far as Brookville, Ohio. I wanted to pay special attention to the map because it is my territory, in a sense, or my commercial purview—only I’m Indiana stateside. I went to Dayton earlier today to put together an outfit for a wedding this weekend. This precipitated (naturally) a crushing financial blow, but with my new digs, none of Cody’s family could possibly comprehend my absolute poorness, and whom have people in Nebraska to compare my charms? Yesterday I got my haircut in Oxford. I look astonishingly angry however thin and well-heeled. I am not on the map but these places are. Abrams’ evocation of Ohio’s summer verdure is more or less accurate. Aliens can’t hide in the cornrows yet (they are knee-high) but the trees are lush and full. In Camden in the fall its citizens hold an annual Walnut Festival. Now they are setting up a street fair with carnival rides and holding a community-wide yard sale. Boys and girls ride down the wide pavements of Germantown and Miamisburg on their bicycles; they seem like awkward kids, middle schoolers, unabashedly bored. These are old brick towns, with two-hundred-year-old houses trimmed in gingerbread topped with turrets and cupolas. The Great Miami River has bare brown banks from all the water in May. Incidentally, Lillian seems modeled off Aurora, Indiana, where a Seagrams distillery makes the town smell like eggs. The Ohio River should flow as clean as gin there—but it doesn’t.

I watched Super 8 another three times with Cody and family over Thanksgiving break. There is an emotional scene at the 2/3 mark of the film wherein the young boy and young girl are divided by a beam of light. They are sitting on the floor and a film projector’s light divides them. On the sixth viewing of Super 8 I fairly disintegrated thinking about the profundity of this scene, the way really only light ever divides us—the medium that carries the image of us to our beloved. And how we make love in the dark so that nothing divides us.

And how monsters get us in the dark.

—

5 December 2011

Evan,

[…] You seem to be having a major crisis in the confidence of your relationship. I know remember when Tayler and I told each other we loved one another for the first time but I don’t exactly remember when I fell in love with her, was like, I love that girl. It was very soon, probably after a first kiss or something. Awestruck was I. I didn’t realize how much I loved her until I didn’t have her anymore. It might be odd to calibrate how strong my feelings for her were by how painful her absence was, how painful being dumped by her was but everytime we have an argument I cannot help but think about what it was like not having her around and that’s how I calibrate the HOW MUCH issues.

I know this is not Evan-Cody centric speaking which might seem like I’m not talking about you but obfuscating, and I’m really trying not to. I’m watching the London Chess Classic streaming right now. It’s fascinating.

Also; falling in love is a lot of fun. It feels nice. I fell in love with my bank teller the other day and with the Senora check-out girl at El Caballo Blanco. She spoke almost no English! But being in love is different and I want you to consider these things. Tayler’s aunt H is currently in the swoons of falling in love and she is full of those signs of excitedness and bubbling happiness that comes with the rush of making perfect connections and saying exactly the right thing, succeeding at a relationship.

Well. I don’t really know anything. I think these experiences are different for everyone. Go spend some time with Cody and tell him what you’re feeling and see if things are worked out or changed.

Also, yes, Comcast does have a monopoly because there is no competition and this lack of competition is actually a violation of trusts/monopoly laws. But it cannot be proven! This has stalled almost all litigation in that regard.

You need time and space to think. Runs and what not. I have been entirely unhelpful and for that I apologize.

bye, love,

aj

—

Lars von Trier made a very measured and reasonable film about lives in crises. I watched Melancholia with Cody in December and have this to say about it:

I don’t think I would marry someone who bought me an apple orchard, either.

&

If the world we’re ending tomorrow afternoon, I too would make a stick fort on a golf course and weep hysterically inside.

Evan Bryson is a writer living in Indiana.

The Year in Review

2011 MOVIE CHARACTER FANTASY FOOTBALL DRAFT

by Chris & Elizabeth Cantwell

(with Special Guest Judge Brendan Joyce, Fantasy Football Expert)

We’ve watched a lot of movies this year. And as the NFL playoffs approach, what better way to take stock of those films than with a fantasy football matchup? We listed out all the major films to hit U.S. theaters in 2011, then went about a quick draft: two teams made up of the year’s best and most able movie characters, ripped from the screen and placed on the line of scrimmage.

We use a two-person snake draft format—Chris had first draft pick, then Elizabeth had her pick, then Elizabeth again, then Chris, then Chris again, then Elizabeth, and so on. Here are the teams we ended up with:

DENZEL WASHINGTON REDSKINS (Elizabeth’s team)

QB: Luke Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) from Fast Five

RB: Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

RB: Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) from Midnight in Paris

RB/WR Flex: Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) from Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

WR: Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) from Twilight: Breaking Dawn Pt. 1

WR: Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) from In Time

TE: Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) from J. Edgar

D/ST: The cast of War Horse

K: Peppy Miller (Berenic Bejo) in The Artist

Bench:

QB – Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

RB – The dinosaur that almost kills the other dinosaur in Tree of Life

RB – Blanche (Christina Hendricks) in Drive

WR – Sid (Nick Krause) in The Descendants

WR – Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) in Captain America: The First Avenger

D/ST – The cast of Cowboys & Aliens

Team Coach: Frank Campana (Frank Grillo) from Warrior

ROUGHING THE SPIELBERG (Chris’ team)

QB: Steve Rogers / Captain America (Chris Evans) in Captain America: The First Avenger

RB: The Driver (Ryan Gosling) in Drive

RB: Tommy Conlin (Tom Hardy) in Warrior

RB/WR Flex: Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) in Hanna

WR: Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) in Shame

WR: Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) in A Dangerous Method

TE: Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Pt. 2

D/ST: Cast of Coriolanus

K: Sophie (Miranda July) in The Future

Bench:

QB – Matt King (George Clooney) in The Descendants

RB – Miss Piggy (herself) in The Muppets

RB – Caesar (Andy Serkis) in Rise of the Planet of the Apes

WR – Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) in Limitless

WR – Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) in Final Destination 5

D/ST – The cast of Carnage

Team Coach: Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) in Moneyball

Chris’ Analysis and Projections:

I took the Driver as my first round pick because he’s driven, fast, nimble, and will get violent if he needs to. On a big offensive drive, I want my QB handing off to the Driver.

Some may say that Tom Hardy is too big to be a RB, but if there’s no hole in the defensive line, he’s going to punch through it. Plus the character is very successful at running away from his problems in the movie, so he should have some speed on him.

As for my QB, well… Captain America can throw. There’s no disputing that.

And who better to throw to than a couple of Fassbenders, who in their respective roles are very good at—needless to say, obsessed with—hitting a lot of… “endzone targets”?

Voldemort also fills out my receiving line well, because he can Disapparate out of coverage and Apparate inside the Red Zone.

Likewise, I believe Hanna is a sneaky flex play, because she’s fast but also isn’t afraid to go one-on-one.

And who better to have as my defense than the expert military guys from Coriolanus? I’ll take two Ralph Fiennes starters any day of the week.

Lastly, I think that Miranda July’s gangliness is going to serve me well on long FG attempts, and may even lead to some strange offsides kicks that’ll leave me in possession of the ball.

I’ve also got a very solid bench in case of injury or underperformance. Clooney is getting up there, but is still a solid leading man. Piggy and Caesar both have low centers of gravity and can move surprisingly fast. Bradley Cooper is taking that crazy drug that makes him the best at everything, so I foresee moving him up to a starter fairly soon. And as for Sam from Final Destination… he can at least survive 60 minutes of gameplay. There’s a lot of passion in the cast of Carnage and Billy Beane has demonstrated that at least statistically he has what it takes to win games.

Elizabeth’s Analysis and Projections:

I knew immediately that I wanted Luke Hobbs as my QB. Those arms can throw some serious Hail Mary passes, and he has all the qualities you want in a QB: the quick-minded analysis of a federal agent, a self-assured ruthlessness, and a great sense of sportsmanship.

With Hobbs as the center of my team—you might even say “the rock”—my other players can relax and concentrate on the skills that come most naturally to them.

Yes, Ethan Hunt is getting older, but the man can run, and his intensity has only increased over time. Ernest Hemingway is a sportsman to the last, and will hunt down touchdowns like he’s hunting down big game.

Speaking of big game, Jacob Black’s competitive spirit will serve me well, and his shape-shifting abilities will ensure top agility. Also, he’s 7 feet tall, so few defensive players will be able to block his catch. Will Salas will keep an eye on the clock as his drive for revenge fuels his desire to survive all four quarters.

Clyde Tolson is the perfect tight end—physically large enough to block the opposing team, and tall enough and supple enough to receive all sorts of passes, if you know what I mean.

Peppy Miller’s tap-dancing gams are sure to kick us into the playoffs, and the cast of War Horse will use the defensive skills they learned in the WWI trenches to push back against any offense (or at least keep things at a stalemate).

And even if things are looking rough, you can count on Lisbeth Salander’s anger to give the team a second wind. No matter what position you put her at, she’ll hack into the other team’s offense and enjoy every punishing minute.

My bench is nothing to write off, either. Sherlock Holmes can analyze plays like no one else, and the Red Skull is a highly gifted strategist (comfortable wearing a face mask) whose physical body rivals Olympic athletes. That Tree of Life dinosaur may not survive an asteroid, but he sure as shit can run (shoving his opponents out of the way and stepping on their heads if necessary) and Blanche knows how to support an offensive operation, even if she is prone to injury. The loyal Sid will willingly take a hit to the face in order to complete a play, and I’m counting on the cowboy contingent of Cowboys and Aliens, who have a good track record of defending themselves against bigger and stronger opponents.

Finally, Frank Campana’s zen approach to preparing for the sports battle of your life will help all these characters find their individual centers and that necessary inner peace.

Final Spread Projection (judged impartially by Brendan Joyce):

In a matchup that serves as the de facto championship it all boils down to one thing – matchups. For the Spielbergs in this week 14, Captain America will be going up against a Smurfs defense that has absolutely outperformed preseason expectations, likely resulting in a COY for Gargamel in his first season as head coach. Chris would be wise to consider a Matt King start here as the veteran’s late-season experience guarantees a consistent (while likely not overwhelming) statistical performance. For the Denzels, Hemingway should run rampant through the backsliding run D of the penguins from Happy Feet 2, but Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) has been a constant disappointment this year, failing to live up to his breakout 2010 campaign. Furthermore, Elizabeth’s lineup gamble of Ethan Hunt is a feast or famine proposition, as he may not even get the start come gameday, taking a back seat to impressive scat back Brandt (Jeremy Renner). When all the power rankings are crunched, and the +3 Denzel Washington Redskins home field advantage is taken into consideration, it will come down to a game of inches … which means the double Fassbenders will carry the day.

Roughing the Spielberg -3.5 (girth) over Denzel Washington Redskins

_________________

Elizabeth and Chris blog here and here, respectively. Expect cryptic clues in the days ahead as to how this projected outcome has affected their marriage in the form of music videos, grainy cell phone pictures, and telling quotes. Brendan Joyce contributes to this blog. He enjoys creating domestic tension and showing off his knowledge of fantasy football lingo.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

by Andrew Root

Jim Henson was dead, to begin with. A freak bout of pneumonia had taken away the man who was at the centre of countless projects and characters; the very voice of Kermit himself. Richard Hunt—who performed Beaker, Scooter, Sweetums, and Statler, among many others—had also died, and the number of beloved characters that had been shelved out of respect was ever growing. How could The Muppets survive after such a monumental loss? It would be foolish to think that the idea to shut down Muppet Studios wasn’t bandied about across more than one boardroom table. How do you come back from that? How do the children find the strength to go on when the father has died?

One of the truly remarkable aspects of the Muppets was that despite all of their endearing self-deprecation (early Gonzo) and in-fighting (Fozzie vs. Statler & Waldorf), they were not only susceptible to, but also revelled in great moments of pure, unadulterated optimism. During the climactic showdown between Kermit and an obsessive restaurateur in 1979’s The Muppet Movie, the beloved frog (then still performed by Jim Henson) delivers one of the most genuine, heartfelt, and unquestionably true monologues on the nature of friendship. What he says is this:

I’ve got a dream too. But it’s about singing and dancing and making people happy. That’s the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with. And, well, I’ve found a whole bunch of friends who have the same dream. And, well, it kind of makes us like a family.

Over the course of his journey, Kermit’s dream has been scoffed. He has encountered hardship after hardship, not least of which is a psychotic frog-leg enthusiast, and as Kermit struggles to find the words to reconcile his frustration with his pursuers and his generally positive outlook on life, he stumbles on this immutable true revelation on the nature of friendship; that what you are doing with your life is not as important as the people that you are doing it with. This may well be the central ethos to the entire family of Muppet performers. What choice did they have but to pick up and keep going?

Choosing their next project would be an incredibly difficult task. It would need to be a story that embodied their commitment to positivity, featured a wide variety of memorable characters, and had a solid emotional core. By choosing to adapt Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, they got all of those things. At its heart, this story is about redemption, about coming out of the blackness of solitude, denying cynicism, celebrating love, and above all, carrying on tradition. In embracing these themes, the Muppeteers were also committing to a sea change; with Jim gone, the status quo had been swept away, and shaking things up was a necessity.

The Muppet Christmas Carol is a true ensemble work. Michael Caine brilliantly fills the shoes of Ebenezer Scrooge and provides a performance with seemingly boundless range. He is cruel and flinty; broken and remorseful; joyful and loving; all without sacrificing the continuity of his character. Seeing Scrooge experience happiness is like watching a newborn fawn finding its legs. He simply does not know what to do with himself! Caine’s performance is also noteworthy for being one of the only human characters in the film, a stark contrast to 1984’s cameo-packed The Muppets Take Manhattan (Kermit and the gang’s last big screen outing). With fewer humans filling up the scenery, it’s up to the Muppets themselves to fully populate this world. The way that these characters are used is another indicator of the evolution of the Muppets; for one thing, Kermit and Fozzie don’t have any scenes together. The original trinity of Kermit, Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear is downplayed in favour of the interactions between Gonzo and Rizzo. The chemistry between these two characters is unmatchable and completely fresh. Kermit and Miss Piggy form the emotional core of the film, ruminating on the nature of family, love, and togetherness, while Gonzo and Rizzo form more direct connections with the audience, breaking the forth wall with delicious precision and intent (when the narrators don’t want to stick around because the story is getting too scary, it’s a fairly good indicator that something frightening is about to happen). How does one talk about the casting of a film in which most of the characters are puppets? “The manufacturing?” Whatever the vocabulary, the characterization is beautiful. With 20 years of characters to fall back on, it would have been easy to rely on established personalities rather than forge ahead into new territory, but here again we find the Muppeteer’s commitment to change.The three ghosts that Scrooge encounters work so well for their particular idiom that the idea of shoehorning Scooter into the role of the Ghost of Christmas Past seems perverse. Where Muppet cameos are used, the old familiar faces appear in ways that instantly resonate (Robin the Frog as Tiny Tim jumps instantly to mind, as do Statler and Waldorf as Jacob and the ingeniously named Robert Marley). It’s a clear indication that the Muppeteers are not resting.

Much credit must go to Brian Henson - Jim’s son - who picked up the reins and directed this film as his first feature. While it may seem strange to comment on mise en scène in a film that contains talking rats, it is an important aspect of what makes this film so well-crafted. The Muppets are always shot to fill the frame, a trend which would diminish with each subsequent Muppet film until (during the ghastly Muppet Wizard of Oz), the puppets are relegated to the bottom half of the screen.

Look at this frame from 1999’s Muppets From Space. That is 18 inches of wasted headroom. Perhaps it was the changing trends in aspect ratios that forced the Muppets into wider and wider angles, and that Muppet movies were meant to be seen in the old 4:3 home video format, but whatever the case, that the Muppets are treated with the same (sometimes more) care as the human performers speaks volumes about Brian Henson’s commitment to his father and his friend’s creations.

Just as Scrooge found salvation in his fellow man, so too the Muppeteers must have found solace in each other. When Scrooge is confronted by the regret of how he spent his younger days, and how the manner of his ways cost him the love of his life, he curses the Ghost of Christmas Past. She replies by saying “These are the shadows of the things that have been. That they are what they are, do not blame me.” Above all things, the past is unchanging and unapologetic, but the future (so terrifyingly depicted here) is mutable. Every year that passes is an opportunity. Jim Henson is gone and we cannot change that. What we can do is try our best to live up to his ideals and the ideals of this film; to make a positive connection with the people around us, and to revel in the togetherness of loved ones, whatever form they may take.

Andrew Root is a writer living in Canada. He tumbls here.

A Christmas Carol (1951)

I WEAR THE CHAINS I FORGED IN LIFE

by Letitia Trent

Unlike most kids between eight and twelve, I dreaded Christmas break more than I dreaded school, and I dreaded school almost every day to the level of sickness. Dread made my stomach churn while on the inevitably long bus rides (we always lived at least ten miles from town); dread made me plan exactly by which door I’d enter the school so that the fewest people would see me. But I dreaded Christmas vacation in a different way. It was a slow-burning dread, an eventuality that I couldn’t plan for. It was two weeks of cold, isolation in our tiny trailer, inevitable arguments, and no indoor plumbing or running water (the best things about school, by far, besides the books, were the running faucets of hot and cold water and the flushing toilets). My mother tried to make Christmas day special—we had gifts labeled as from “Santa”, though I had long since heard my parents cursing at each other on Christmas Eve as they put the gifts under the tree, and Santa had my mother’s perfect cursive handwriting. No amount of tinsel and dollar-store-candy-stuffed stockings could make it anything but bleak and cramped, a house full of dirty clothes and the underlying smell of old cat litter.

So I read books until my eyes hurt. And I watched TV, which was the best thing about holiday break. My favorite movie of all of the wonderfully schmaltzy holiday programming was Scrooge: A Christmas Carol. Specifically, the version make in 1951, starring Alastair Sim, the man who ruined all other Scrooges for me. Scrooge is my favorite archetypal holiday character. Not because he figures out how to love his fellow man just in time for Christmas, but because I recognize the fear and insecurity underpinning the desire to hoard money and keep poverty at a distance. Here’s a character who shows how much neglect, poverty, and helplessness can fuck you up and fill you with fear.

Scrooge is the classic formerly-poor/formerly-neglected person who clings to what little status and financial security he can get. He’s caged up by fear, the source of greed and miserliness. If he can coldly recommend that the poor go to jails and workhouses, if he can pass a beggar without stopping, then he can pretend that poverty exists somewhere else, that he has transcended it, and that it no longer has a hold on him. And I know this feeling. Sometimes escaping dependence on others through economic success can do the opposite of what you might think: instead of inspiring you to turn back to the poor communities you came from, you run as far from them as possible. It takes a long time to get far enough from poverty to view it as a social evil and not a real, powerful force that could permanently break you. Poverty is a hole you fall into. Once you’ve been poor, it’s easy to see how quickly it can happen.

This reading of Scrooge comes mostly from Alastair Sim’s incredibly sympathetic and funny Scrooge. Even in the initial scenes, where he plays the heartless miser with glee, you see flashes on his face that indicate a self-disgust, a hatred of his own words and actions even as he says them. He’s locked up tightly in his black coat, his black hat, his gloves, his mouth firmly shut unless he’s delivering a barb to anyone who shakes the tower of isolation he had created. His money is armor. He’s more to be pitied than hated, and many other versions of A Christmas Carol fail in that they ask us to see Scrooge as cold, heartless, empty, and without suffering until he’s taken through the lessons of the past, present, and future. But he’s suffering, all right, from the very beginning of the movie. It’s the suffering of somebody desperately afraid to lose what they ‘ve worked hard to build up to keep poverty away.

When the ghost of Christmas past visits Scrooge at midnight, after he has received a visit from his old business partner Jacob Marley (a great scene, in which Sim asserts that Marley’s just an “undigested bit of beef”), we get a small snippet of Scrooge’s childhood. As a very young child, he was abandoned for most of the year in a shabby boarding school. Later, he was a young, moneyless apprentice, apparently scorned and ignored by his father and left to the good graces of Fezziwig. His sister, the only person to which he had an emotional connection, died young during childbirth. We are all familiar with these scenes—every version of A Christmas Carol includes them, and they’ve been copied and parodied countless times. But they’re still effective.

I’ve wondered how this movie is re-made over and over in a culture that generally seems to reward originality (at least in terms of what is critically acclaimed—I’m not claiming that each new bromance, torture porn, or Judd Apatow-esque jerfest is in any way original). I think that Dickens hit on a particularly effective device by making Scrooge watch his life play out along with the viewer. There’s something powerful about watching the old man watch himself as a young man making mistakes in what seems like real time. Only Alastair Sim has pulled off this double-scene in a way that truly affects me. The way he reacts to himself and the people he once knew seems genuine, not the straining and obvious outbursts you get from other Scrooges. You get the feeling that Sims is watching with us, equally invested in this story that he’s familiar with but can’t quite remember. That’s how memory works, isn’t it? I bet we’d all be shocked by ourselves and our decisions, which we now remember through a haze of revisions and softenings. If we could see ourseves again, objectively, standing outside the scene, we’d break down in disgust at our own stupid choices.

I’ll tell you who I never quite believed, though—the Cratchit family. Not just for Tiny Tim, that very Dickensonian little tearjerker, but the cheerful, loving little family itself. I don’t believe that they exist. They are penniless, and there seem to be a hundred of them, but they are still happy. I suppose that we and Scrooge are supposed to take a lesson from this—that money can’t buy you happiness. And it can’t. The point of the Cratchit family is that they love each other despite their limited place in the Victorian world and their scant hopes for ever being more than what they are. I wonder if such a family is possible. From what I’ve seen, poverty generally drives people into the ground and wrings any last bit of hopefulness from them. But perhaps I’ve just never met any real Cratchits.

I wonder if Dickens was a Scrooge or a Bob Cratchit. I wonder if they were two parts of him—Cratchit, the idealized, loving father-figure (his own father spent years in debtors prison, where his family often joined him) and Scrooge, the successful man who could easily skate above poverty. Did Dickens remember where he came from in more than just his fiction?

It’s difficult to go back to those places where you feel most vulnerable. By the end of the movie, when Scrooge jumps up in his bedclothes proclaiming his joy at Christmas and makes his housekeeper think he’s mad, when he visits the Cratchit’s in their home of poverty and acceptance (one thing he didn’t have and most sorely wanted), and his nephew at a holiday party (the nephew whose birth killed the only person he loved), he’s doing just that—going back to the places that frighten him and letting them in.

Every time I go home for Christmas, to that trailer where I felt so trapped, I think about these scenes from Scrooge. When I go back, do I truly go back? It’s easy to hang outside the scene, acting as though I’m not really there, feeling a removed pity for the people who still live in a place I’ve been lucky enough to leave. Do I bring gifts and remove my black top hat, take off my black coat, and come inside?

Letitia Trent is a writer, poet, and teacher living in Arkansas. She tumbls here.

White Christmas (1954)

WHITE CHRISTMAS, DECONSTRUCTED

by Elizabeth Cantwell

As most of my friends know, I tend to conceptualize movies in terms of brief, disconnected scenes that for whatever reason stuck in my mind. (So: “The Godfather is the movie where there’s a cat on Brando’s lap, and people are making some kind of red sauce, and Al Pacino is in the rain, and they shoot James Caan at a toll booth.”) My detractors may claim this is unsophisticated, and a generally poor way to analyze a movie. I disagree. Following is my personal summary of the timeless classic White Christmas, with an insightful commentary.

White Christmas: The movie where there’s a big wall, and Rosemary Clooney wants to wash herself in snow, and Bing Crosby makes a good sandwich while Danny Kaye makes fun of Martha Graham, and then there’s some cardboard cutouts of fat farm people and Bing Crosby throws a perfectly good gift into a tree.

Commentary:

… there’s a big wall

Okay, so, to be honest: even though I have seen this movie a lot, I always kind of black out on the war part in the beginning. I mean, I feel like the sky is kind of too dark for me to watch it closely, and men in uniforms always confuse me because I’m waiting for something to come out of their mouths that I don’t understand, like “Formation One, Hut Hut” or “Load that gun!”

Anyway, I know that a wall falls on Bing Crosby (who I know isn’t called Bing Crosby in the movie, but we’re going to ignore that for purposes of this essay) and Danny Kaye saves him and hurts his arm, and this puts everything in motion, as we all know that when someone pulls you out from beneath a falling wall you are contractually obligated to perform large and colorful musical numbers with that person.

… and Rosemary Clooney wants to wash herself in snow

She does. She says so in the song. I remember hearing this as a kid and being sort of creeped out by it. First of all, snow isn’t a very good washing agent. Probably most tap water is better for washing purposes than snow. It’s got all that acid rain in it, and it lies on the ground with the winter bug corpses, and people step on it, and there’s no anti-bacterial content to it whatsoever.

Second of all, when I love things, I’m not usually like “Oh yes, I want to wash myself in that.” Like, I love orange marmalade. But do I want to wash my hands, my face, my hair with orange marmalade? No. Furthermore, do I want to “see a great big man entirely made” of orange marmalade? Fuck no. That would be terrifying. So when Rosemary Clooney wants to wash herself in the snow and then see some huge man made out of it, it just gives me a weird feeling in my spine. But you know, I’m going to give her a pass for this because she is George Clooney’s aunt, and that makes her God’s sister or something.

…and Bing Crosby makes a good sandwich

What bothers me about the scene where Rosemary gets all flirty with Bing over a midnight snack is that they don’t actually eat it. I think the Spirit of Christmas demands that you eat all the food people make for you, especially if they made it specifically for you because you were up traipsing about in your robe and claiming you couldn’t sleep. Bing goes to all that trouble, and sings for what seems like a lot of choruses about counting your blessings instead of sheep, and then she just leaves the sandwiches by the fire. I don’t care if he did beat his children; that is no way to treat a Christmas Sandwich.


…while Danny Kaye makes fun of Martha Graham

“Chicks / who did kicks / Aren’t kicking anymore / They’re doing choreography.”

I think this part sticks with me for personally sentimental reasons, because my mom’s a modern dancer (and she LOVES this scene). I remember watching her laughing as the dancers contorted themselves around the stage in these gray stretchy costumes and wondering whether this was the sort of thing I’d find funny when I was a Grown-Up. And then when I actually knew who Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham I laughed too. Plus, Danny Kaye looks ridiculous, and I love him for that. Maybe the best part is that it was back in those magical times where people could REALLY dance, not High-School-Musical dance, but I’ve-Got-A-Killer-Pink-Dress-On-and-I-Can-Work-It-Like-No-One-Else-While-Maintaining-A-Classic-Elegance dance.

…and then there’s some cardboard cutouts of fat farm people

JESUS CHRIST. Can anyone explain to me who thought that part of the movie was a good idea? I get it, it’s supposed to be a joke. Like, “Hey, we’re not in the army anymore, so we’re getting lazy and fat!” But it’s not really funny to make fun of people based on weight, and I don’t see why it’s funny to make fun of farmers, and whether or not it’s funny those cutouts are TERRIFYING. I know the shot only lasts about 20 seconds. But it is NOT Christmas-y. Plus, none of the actors look very enthused about them, even Danny Kaye, who is also known as The Man Who Looks Very Enthused About Everything, Even Cereal.

How do I know this? Because sometimes when I’m eating cereal I imagine what Danny Kaye would look like eating cereal right across from me. And his expression is always Very Enthused.

…and Bing Crosby throws a perfectly good gift into a tree.

This part of my summary of White Christmas got added on just this year, while watching the movie for the millionth time with Chris. At the very end, as the big show for the General is coming to a close, and it’s started to snow, and everything is wrapping up in that lovely, warm, musical fashion, Rosemary gives Bing a statue of a knight on a white horse as a present. See, there’s a running thing in the movie where Rosemary talks about Bing being her White Knight, and then when she gets all bitchy and Assumes things, therefore making an Ass out of U and Me, she tells him he’s fallen off the horse. Which is pretty mean, when you think about it.

So when she gives him the statue, it’s a thoughtful, symbolic way to apologize without having to actually say “I’m sorry” and to confirm that they will be having hot Christmas sex later in their red velvet costumes. And Bing is so happy that what does he do? He sweeps Rosemary up in his arms for a movie-ending kiss and THROWS THE STATUE INTO THE TREE.

Just throws it. Tosses it like a balled-up kleenex, or a used piece of floss. It looked pretty substantial, too, so I have the feeling that he may have BROKEN it. And I don’t know about you, but if I gave someone that I cared about a meaningful gift, and they proceeded to throw it on the floor, I’d be pretty ticked. But then again, it’s not the material gifts that matter. It’s the love, and the smooth baritones, and the loyalty and brotherhood in the face of hard times, and the stream-of-consciousness memories of experiences that have brought you joy, one way or another.

Elizabeth Cantwell is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here.

It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?

by Chad Perman

It’s easy to lose track of your life. All of us do it, in one way or another, locked up so tightly in our own heads - our own private little worlds - that we lose sight not only of The Big Picture, but of even our own smaller pictures: our families, our friends, the things we set in motion, the lives we impact and influence on a daily basis. Which is precisely why one should watch It’s a Wonderful Life at least one time each year. Not because it’s on TV all the time in December, not because your relatives are forcing you to, not even because it is (in my opinion) one of the best ten films ever made. No, watch it because of the way you feel once it’s over, the way it reminds you that you matter, the way you interact just a bit differently with people (or at least, try to) for a few days after seeing it. Above all, watch it to remember your ripple.

Let me explain.

Dr. Irvin Yalom, a brilliant psychotherapist and writer, as well as one of my own personal heroes, is, sadly nearing the end of his long and distinguished career. As such, he’s turned his professional focus over the past few years towards death - the grappling we all must do over its inevitable finality, and the long shadows it casts over every single aspect of our lives. How are we, the only creatures on this earth aware of our own fragile mortality and the awful realization of an expiration date (no matter how well we live, how wonderfully we behave, or how healthy we are), how are we supposed to carry on with all this awful knowledge? What is the point, ultimately, of anything that we do? How do we, especially those of us not comforted by the tonic of religion or soothed by the promise of a better world awaiting us after this one, confront our own mortality without being utterly crippled or paralyzed by it?

Yalom concludes, finally, that one way we endure is through our ‘ripples’, the “the fact that each of us creates - often without our conscious intent or knowledge - concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even for generations…the effect we have on other people is in turn passed on to others, much as the ripples in a pond go on and on until they’re no longer visible but continuing at a nano level. The idea that we can leave something of ourselves, even beyond our knowing, offers a potent answer to those who claim that meaninglessness inevitably flows from one’s finiteness and transiency”.

Of course, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), the Everyman Hero of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, doesn’t exactly come to this idea of rippling on his own. In fact, it’s basically forced upon him by an angel-in-training after a botched suicide attempt on Christmas Eve. Clarence, the angel attempting to earn his wings, saves George by rescuing him from the waters he’s jumped into, and then offers him an ingenious gift (and narrative device!) that a good many of us might indeed feel changed by - the ability to actually see what what the world would be like if we had never been born. George, in effect, becomes aware of the ripples he’s made by being shown their absence: the war hero brother who never makes it to war (and saves other soldiers lives) because George wasn’t around to save him from drowning in a frozen lake as a boy; the quiet and lonely sadness of his wife Mary’s (Donna Reed) life without him in it; the scores of people who were screwed over by the town’s resident Scrooge, Mr. Potter, because George was never there to stand up to Potter, stand up for the people, and provide a different, better way of life for the citizens of Bedford Falls through his inherited work at the Savings and Loan.

Now, sure, your own life might not contain such large ripples - at least not yet! - but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain any. Think of the lives you’ve touched. Think of all the lives you still have left to touch. Think about your ripples.

There’s another way to read It’s a Wonderful Life, a much more cynical one to be sure, but also one that I suspect goes a long way toward explaining its massive appeal over the years.

Very few among us can relate to someone who is actually living out their dreams, conquering the world in exactly the ways in which they had hoped to as an idealistic young person. But who among us can’t relate to its opposite, to thwarted dreams and lives of quiet desperation? To making small concessions that eventually turned into a life you’d never meant to have, an adventurous Man of the World becoming, instead, a Family Man stuck back in his old hometown?

This is George Bailey’s story for most of the film, the discouraging plot of It’s a Wonderful Life for well over half of its running time. George dreams of a life perpetually out of reach, always right around a corner that never comes. He makes all the responsible choices, the safe ones, the necessary ones, and in exchange gives up nearly all of his youthful ambitions. It’s heartbreaking. And worse, it happens to almost every single one of us.

But It’s a Wonderful Life assures us that it’s all going to be okay. It assuages that nagging voice in the back of our heads that tells us we were meant for something greater, soothes that itching ambition and resulting disappointment at a life not fully lived. Looking at it this way, it’s not hard to see why so many people love and embrace this film. Who doesn’t want to feel better about all the things they never did? Who doesn’t want to think that all the compromises they’ve made along the way will wind up bringing them just as much happiness as the dreams they traded them in for? Thus, we flock to It’s a Wonderful Life because it’s our therapy, our culturally endorsed, holiday-approved balm for all the miseries and disappointments that pile up around us with each passing year.

So I guess the question becomes, then, why am I so personally drawn to the film? Why do I insist on watching it every single year? Is it the theme of rippling (I hope) or merely the band-aid the film applies to my own regrets (I fear)? Can it somehow be both?

Regardless - and make no mistake about it - It’s a Wonderful Life is a tremendously dark film, 15/16ths a tragedy. Sure, there’s a jubilant celebration at film’s end (a happy ending which takes up, literally, less than five minutes of the entire film’s running time), the telegram, Zuzu’s Petals, Auld Lang Syne, and a Happy Ending fade out. But in comparison to all the darkness that’s come before it - compromise, defeat, depression, a nearly successful suicide attempt by the film’s main character (!!) - there’s nowhere near enough love and joy to balance it all out.

It always amazes me the ways in which people misunderstand It’s a Wonderful Life, thinking of it as a something almost wholly other than what it really is; that it’s a holiday staple, revered by nearly everyone (though, interestingly, not very successful when first released in 1946), is even more puzzling. There is no Santa Claus here, no Winter Wonderland, no whimsy, and precious little ‘holiday spirit’ to the film. That it is considered a Christmas film at all has mostly to do with the timing of George Bailey’s suicide attempt: this beaten down and worn out businessman, husband, and father jumps off a bridge on Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas, eh?

That George finally decides life is worth the living - after Clarence’s inspired this-is-your-life-without-you tour - and rushes home to hug his wife and kids and celebrate the holiday with his friends and family is certainly a nice touch, but hardly one that would justify its status as an Official Christmas Movie.

Still, in the end, we gather around our televisions every December, we hold our loved ones close, we think about all the food we just ate, and we let George Bailey’s triumphs and failures become our own. And maybe, just maybe, we realize how lucky we all are. Because to live, for even a single day, is a miracle.

Chad Perman is a writer and the editor-in-chief of A Bright Wall in a Dark Room. He lives in Seattle.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)

AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN MCCALLISTER ON THE 20TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF HIS ABANDONMENT

by Bebe Ballroom

He is forty minutes late. The pigeons in Central Park have taken the seat on the bench next to me. His hot chocolate is cold chocolate now. My phone buzzes and sends the pigeons scattering. He has sent a text message. It reads:

Traffic! ={ 

He shows up twenty minutes later, walking briskly in a gray hooded sweatshirt. He wears a black t-shirt underneath that reads, in tall white numbers: 14:59. His jeans are rolled up past his ankles, exposed as boney and pale. His fingernails feature chipped charcoal nail lacquer. His lips are chapped, his hair still blonde, though not the bright blonde it was when he was younger. Kevin McCallister takes one long drag of his cigarette before putting it out on his tongue. He bites the tip off and spits it out, putting the remains of the cigarette in his pocket for later use.

“The pigeon lady taught me that trick,” he said. “Right in this park.”

It is December of 2010, the twentieth anniversary of “The Home Alone Kid.” That’s how most remember Kevin McCallister, the 2nd grader who was left behind when his parents traveled for the holidays. He was eight years old when it happened, and nine years old when it happened again. That’s right, for two consecutive years, the McCallister family boarded a plane without their youngest, the inventive and sharp-tongued Kevin.

He apologizes for being late.

“The city does these things to you,” he says. 

He lives in New York now, the same city he accidentally flew to when he paused in Chicago O’Hare International Airport to load fresh batteries into his Talkboy. When he looked up from the recording device, he followed a man wearing his father’s calf-length caramel mohair trench coat onto the wrong flight. Soon after, his family was in Florida and he was in New York, thankfully with his father’s wallet (which matched the atrocious coat).

“What else has the city done to you?” I ask him.

“Some things you can read about and some things you can’t,” he says and smiles smugly.

When his family forgot him in 1990, he spent Christmas and the days before in his large Chicago residence, enjoying his new-found freedom in a suddenly guardian-less world. But in an almost unbelievable twist, he wasn’t as alone as he thought. While Kevin ate ice cream sundaes for dinner and jumped on his parent’s bed, his entire neighborhood was being cased by two wanted criminals known only as Marv and Harry. They came to be known by the police as the Wet Bandits and they planned to rob the houses, empty of families visiting relatives for the holidays. Kevin noticed suspicious activity on his street and soon discovered the danger these men presented. The criminals became aware of Kevin and dismissed him, but they should not have underestimated the imaginative 8 year-old. When they came to claim the McCallister household valuables, Kevin was ready for them. In just several hours, he had booby-trapped his entire house, using objects like paint cans and broken ornaments, even matchbox cars, in fresh and painful ways. The Wet Bandits had no idea of the hurt they were in for.

“Some have questioned your incredible ingenuity in creating instruments of torture at such short notice,” I say.

“I see where this is going,” he says.

“Do you love violence, Kevin?”

“I like Tarantino films if that’s what you mean.”

“Did you have any pets growing up?”

“I wasn’t allowed any. My big brother got to have a tarantula though, that dumbass.”

“Did you ever get in fights with your many siblings?”

“Yeah. I mean, what kid doesn’t? I was the youngest, I was a speck to them, an electron. But I never got violent with them if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Never? I believe an entire gymnasium full of students and parents saw you punch your brother Buzz in the face, sending dozens of children from the risers and the piano accompanist backwards off the stage.”

“That whole thing was bullshit. Buzz was using two battery-operated candlesticks to illuminate my ears and also mock-drum on my head. He was begging for it.”

“How long has it been since you and your brother have spoken?” 

Kevin McCallister pulls a balled up straw wrapper out of his jeans pocket and begins to unravel it. 

“Not long enough.” He balls the straw wrapper up again.

“What happened after Christmas of 1990?” I ask.

“After I brought those guys down?”

“Yes, after the Wet Bandits were incarcerated.”

“That spring everything changed. I was on TV a lot. The phrase ‘tiny American hero’ was tossed around.”

“Did fame come too fast?”

“It wasn’t fame just yet. It was novelty. I was a novelty. Fame came after New York.”

“How did you feel when it happened again, when your parents flew to Florida without you?”

“I felt nothing. It felt familiar and I felt nothing.”

“What happened in New York?”

“You know what happened.”

The whole world knew what happened. The headlines read Lost in New York. The Home Alone Kid was back. The McCallister family tried to keep this second occurrence of abandonment out of the papers. And it might have worked, if not for the Wet Bandits, who had escaped from prison and hitch-hicked their way to the Big Apple in the back of a fish truck.

“Were you shocked to see the Wet Bandits in New York?” I ask him.

“Not as shocked as I was that when I saw them on the street, they chased me for five city blocks, two despicable looking criminals chasing a nine year old kid and not one person, not a single person in this whole city would help me.”

“They told you about their plan to rob Duncan’s Toy Chest.”

“Yeah. That didn’t sit well with me. Having purchased some silly slime there earlier, I knew that the day’s earnings were going to a nearby children’s hospital.”

“You once said, ‘You can mess with a lot of things but you can’t mess with kids on Christmas.’ Do you still believe that?”

“Yes.”

“You had an uncle in New York.”

“Yeah, Uncle Rob. He and my aunt were in Paris. Their inner city brownstone was being renovated.”

“You led the Wet Bandits there.”

“They came because they wanted to do harm to me,” he says.

“You did harm to them.”

“I did the only thing I could do.”

“Which was what?”

“I turned my uncle’s house into a deathtrap.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“Not my style.”

“Do you think part of you was grateful at another opportunity to deliver justice?”

Kevin McCallister doesn’t answer.

“Did you know this would put you back in the limelight?” I ask him.

He replies, “Does the truth change what happened?”

Once again the Wet Bandits fell for his traps, and once again they found themselves in prison, where they’ve been since.

The Home Alone Kid was back in the headlines, and stronger than ever. He hosted the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. MTV featured him as a guest VJ. He threw the first pitch at a Cubs game. A video game was created. Kevin’s growing celebrity made it difficult for his classmates to focus and his teachers convinced his parents that it would benefit everyone were he home-schooled.

“Did you miss your friends?”

“Those clowns? Naw, I just made new ones.”

New ones included Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Elijah Wood, Anna Chlumsky, and somewhat controversially, Michael Jackson.

“How were you affected by Michael Jackson’s death?”

“That’s not something I want to talk about.”

“You had controversy of your own. The Division of Family Services put your mother on trial for reckless neglect.”

“That was a very dark time in my life. I was eating a lot of cheese pizzas in limousines.”

“You were on the cover of Esquire that year.”

“It didn’t mean anything to me. My mother liked it. I’m glad it made her happy.”

“What was your relationship with your parents like after Lost in New York?”

“Have you ever made strudel?”

“Strudel? No.”

“You have to stretch the dough out, slowly. Slowly. It is prone to holes and breakage. And then you have to roll it. Talking to my parents was like making strudel. And I was the pastry dough. They pulled me thin too quickly and I started to tear and then they tried to fill me with things. They could never get over the fact that they left me, forgotten and misplaced, and twice even. They tried to fill me up with gifts. Gifts from guilt.”

“You married an unknown actress at 17,” I say.

Kevin McCallister touches his chin.

“You divorced at 19.”

“I did those things, yes.”

“Do you feel like for reasons beyond your control you had to grow up too fast?”

“Yeah, don’t you?”

“Some say that in your teens, you travelled to other states, other countries even, alone and without supervision. Were you trying to become lost again?”

“What can I say, I read Catcher in the Rye and it stoned me. I had been there, I had seen those ducks on that frozen pond. I was also reading a lot of Kerouac at that time. I still feel lost most days.”

“What do you fill your days with?”

“I’m a sculptor,” he says.

“You sculpt tables and chairs, right?”

“I sculpt furniture with right angles.”

“Can you sit on it?”

“Would you sit on the Mona Lisa’s face?”

“Do people commission work from you?”

“Michael C. Hall has one. We met at a house party in the San Fernando valley last year. He said he liked my work, and I’m a huge Dexter fan.”

“Do you identify with the character of Dexter Morgan?”

“Uh, no.”

“Whatever happened to the pigeon lady, the homeless Scottish woman you met in this park nineteen years ago?”

“That was Susan Boyle. Sometimes we have coffee in the park.”

“She was very special to you, wasn’t she?”

Kevin McCallister pulls a small white ceramic ornament from his the pocket of his sweatshirt. He rubs his painted fingers over it as if it were a talisman. One of the bird’s wings is broken.   

Bebe Ballroom believes you, but her tommy gun don’t. She tumbls here.