The Sunset Limited [2006] by Cormac McCarthy

Released in the same year as The Road, an immediate 21st century masterpiece, it's no wonder that The Sunset Limited slipped by unnoticed. Lazily compared to Beckett on the sleeve (not every dramatic conversation about death has to be "redolent of Beckett") the play concerns a conversation between 'Black' and 'White'; the former an evangelical ex-con and ex-addict, the latter a cynical, suicidal professor. You quickly learn that Black saved White from leaping in front of a train earlier on and has brought him back to his flat in an attempt at persuading him that life is worth living. Failure means that White takes a walk back to the station to face the oncoming rush of The Sunset Limited.

As befits a work described as a "novel in dramatic form" the play doesn't contain much in the shape of actual drama. Instead McCarthy presents an open, often one-sided, conversation that explores the dichotomy inherent in McCarthy's work. White an unflinching, and world weary nihilist, believes he has seen everything that humanity is capable of and is appalled; Black holds an unswerving faith in God and redemption, his belief in God is mystical and focused on perceptions of right and wrong. Black tries to instill his passion in White, realising that without this White will succumb to suicide.

McCarthy manages to keep this doom-laden conceit compelling enough, with Black's humanism and folksy charm just about keeping the narrative from spilling over into a mordant abyss. Yet, as with most of McCarthy's work, the conceptualising of death is often beautiful in its starkness. There are moments of nihilism that are shocking in their logic. White's closing statements, delivered after hearing all the evidence Black can muster, comes as a complete rebuttal of religion and brotherhood:

"I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter."

The Road had a relatively simple narrative, one that allowed McCarthy to focus more on the father-son relationship at the novels heart, which in turn allowed him to discuss themes of death, despair, renewal and hope. The Sunset Limited follows this pattern and in its reductive plot and setting allows many ideas and emotions to come to the fore without distraction. McCarthy's next novel is reported to concern a young man's coming to terms with his sister's suicide, another simple yet rich scenario. It will be interesting to see how much further McCarthy can refine his beautiful and affecting style.

Travels in the Scriptorium [2006] by Paul Auster

Having finally finished War and Peace I've decided to read lots of short books in quick succession to get my yearly quota up. I'm a newcomer to Auster and decided now is as good a time as any to break into his ever growing bibliography with Travels in the Scriptorium, a compact post-modern experiment running to 130 pages.

I'm a sucker for tricksy novels and self reflexive narratives and, as much as it is a cliché, I do enjoy authors writing themselves into their own novels, with Kurt Vonnegut's repeated personal appearances being a particular favourite. However, what I didn't realise when I started the novel is that all of the characters in the book are drawn from previous Auster novels, apart from the protagonist Mr Blank. This put me at somewhat of a unusual position whilst reading the book as I began to ask myself who are these minor fleeting characters with their mysterious vaguely alluded to histories and backstories. In such an allegorical book I started to read in to each character, trying to pin some sort of emotion or association on to them. This proved to be something of a dead end, as after finishing the book I found out that they were old Auster characters, and then everything fell in to place...

Mr Blank, an old man, finds himself in a bare room, apparently locked in, with no idea of how he got there or where he is. In the room there is a bed, desk, some paper and several manuscripts of half written stories. He is visited intermittently by people who obviously know him personally and have been had their lives seriously affected by Mr Blank's actions. Mr Blank guesses that he sends these people on 'missions' much like a spy master, often to unsafe or dangerous locations. He spends the day thinking about his position in the room, promising to himself that he will work at unlocking its secret, but never managing it due to a number of distractions.

A great deal of the novel takes the form of Mr Blank reading through one of the manuscripts which takes the form of an unfinished alternative history novel written by John Trause. Apparently John Trause (and anagram for Auster...) was a character in the New York Trilogy, Auster's breakthrough collection - again something I missed in my ignorance. Mr Blank is tasked to complete the manuscript himself, to come up with a middle and an end to the story, a feat of 'imaginative reasoning' designed to test his 'emotional reflexes'. Auster uses this subplot to toy with the concepts of clichés and literary forms in which the reader is comforted by a familiar plot structure (much in the same way that I'm constantly compelled by Westerns and film noir, even though they all roughly follow the same trajectory). At one point, the labels on all of the items in the room are switched somehow, and Mr blank has to re-order them so that everything makes sense. I'll admit, this section of the novel lost me, as I'm not too sure of the symbolism behind the labels and their sudden randomisation.

The novel then is a (obvious?) metaphor for the process of writing and creation. Do we have a duty of care towards are creations? Are their stories ever finished? Do their fictional lives give the author a legacy, a kind of life on the page that will continue after the author dies, one that endless repeats itself each time it is read anew? And if so, how much thought, how much life, should the author instill in his characters?

Cross Fades: Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) & Mulholland Dr. (2001)

(Cross fades is to be an irregular feature where I critique and compare similar films or books, and hopefully it will become more frequent as I get my act together.)

I happened to order both of these films from sofa cinema within a short period of time and through no conscious choice, but their similarities and shared themes are striking.

Celine and Julie is my second attempt at Jacque Rivette after Paris nous apartient which was a great surprise when I first watched it. Two women who seemingly meet for the first time strike up a bizaare friendship centred on make-believe. Their lives become increasingly interlinked, leading to some scenes were they live each others life for a brief time without anyone noticing – Celine dons a ginger wig and meets with Julie’s lover; Julie performs Celine’s magic stage show and breaks down in front of a pair of cigar smoking agents. The pair act out their lives as if it’s all a big joke, chasing each other across Paris, inventing wild stories to each other about their day. This sounds wearying, but its all done with a deft light touch and its all very charming for the first hour or so.

Then the pair stumble upon an empty house and events take a strange turn... Listen:

Celine and Julie play the role of a maid in the house, and the house is inhabited by two sisters, one widower and a small child. They play out an over the top melodrama in a constant cycle, Celine or Julie playing the maid and helping the action move on. When they leave the house they are dazed and incoherent and can’t remember any of this. Accept there’s a boiled sweet in their mouths, and when they eat it the memories return and they can recount their adventure.

However, they can only remember small sections of the drama each time, so they have to keep returning to the house to learn more about the story. You see, the child gets murder at the end of the play, but neither Celine of Julie know who committed the murder.

The rest of the film involves the couple solving the murder by piecing together the fragments of the drama into a whole, and then entering the house together and attempting to rescue the child.

This sounds pretty serious, but you won’t think it is when you’re watching the film. There is no atmosphere of foreboding or terror like Mulholland Dr, instead everything is taken in it’s stride. Celine and Julie enjoy the adventure, they concoct in-jokes about the inhabitants of the house and they never question why this is all happening. The house scenes themselves are shot in such brightly lit conditions that it seems almost uncomfortably real, anti-cinematic. The camera is reserved, framing each shot simply and cutting between scenes very quickly. Rivette’s direction throughout is great, not flashy in the slightest but confident enough to keep you from getting bored and moving the action on – quite important for a film were nothing really happens for 3 hours.

The film is a giant metaphor for the experience of watching and engaging in the cinema, and as such forms a nice companion to Mullholland Dr. C & J enjoy the experience, go back to the house to experience it again, get to know the lines, interpret the characters actions, invest their emotions in the drama and eventually manipulate it to their own means. The meta-narrative ‘film-within-a-film’ story is ripe for interpretation and is a favourite of high minded critics and film buffs (David Thompson described it as “the most innovative film since Citizen Kane”). The last 5 minutes after they exit the house are great, the boats gliding over the water being akin to the final shot of geese flying over a lake in Paris nous apartient in its thought-provoking beauty.

However, it is a flawed film and one that is perhaps something of a sacred cow due to its  self-reflexive nature. It is too long. At just over 3 hours long the film had many scene that could easily have been cut at no detriment to the finished product. The breezy silliness of the protagonists started to become irritating towards the second hour, especially the screaming and playground rhyming banter that they converse in exclusively in the last 20 minutes. Brevity seems like such an underrated concept, but its shocking how many at films with seemingly low budgets seem to sprawl out to 3 hours. So much for Hitchcock’s mantra that the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

Mulholland Dr was exactly what I expected from David Lynch, which is a strange kind of praise. It stems from my being greatly disappointed by Blue Velvet which is thought was made by Dennis Hopper and seriously flagged whenever he was off screen. Prior to watching Blue Velvet I was expecting Lynch's films to be murky, labyrinthine and unsettling, but Blue Velvet only met the latter.  

Like Celine and Julie..., Mulholland Dr concerns two women who happen upon each other unexpectedly and increasingly rely on each other to interpret events around them. Betty, an ingenué in hollywood trying to make a break, takes on the cause of Rita, the amnesiac she found in her Aunts shower one day. Rita was involved in an accident and she is trying to find out who she is and why she was involved in the accident.

The film is littered with red herrings and false starts, leading the viewer down roads that never go anywhere. This could be due to Lynch originally writing the film as a TV pilot for aseries he had in mind. Purportedly he was knocked back on the proposal and decided to turn the story into a film, keeping most of the multiple strands in the plot. The feeling of 'forces at work' that this generates throughout the film is great and it has to be said that Mulholland Dr has one of the best atmospheres in a fim that I have experienced in a long time. Everything is messed up and potentially symbolic, much like Celine and Julie... excet this time there is a real sense of dread running through the film, especially when the duo discover a disgustingly putrid corpse decomposing on a motel bed that looks strangely familiar... 

From there on the film breaks down and starts again, gradually revealing itself through flashabcks to show us what has happened, why people are suddenly calling Betty 'Diane', and just how warped an obsessive mind can become. 

I really enjoyed it, felt genuinely spooked on several ocassions and found my opinions on the film changing rapidly as time went by. I thought the early Betty scenes were pathetically sentimentally and corny, but at the end of the film you realise they were supposed to be. An extremely subjective film, the direction changes depending on the character involved and their current state of mind.

Again, much has been made of Mulholland Dr, mostoy due to its focus on the seedy side of Hollywood and perceptions of reality, a subject that is integral to cinema. However, a word of caution - try not to read too much into this film. Enjoy it for what it is, let it flow over you - you'll still get it. Its not hard to understand whats happened at the end of the film (it may be during the film, but thats part of the fun), but I think there is a danger of exposing multi-layered films like this as quite superficial if they are unwound too much.