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The Disappointment Artist And Other Essays - Hardcover

Lethem, Jonathan

 
9780385512176: The Disappointment Artist And Other Essays
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385512171 ISBN 13: 9780385512176
Verlag: Doubleday, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Blending elements of reminiscence and cultural commentary, the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn presents a series of imaginative essays that address a wide range of cultural obsessions, in such works as "Defending The Searchers," "Identifying with Your Parents," and "13/1977/21," about the summer he saw Star Wars twenty-one times. 35,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of six novels, including the bestselling The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named novel of the year by Esquire. He is also the author of two short story collections, Men and Cartoons and The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye, and the editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Paris Review, and a variety of other periodicals and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Maine.

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Defending The Searchers


(Scenes in the Life of an Obsession)


1. Bennington


What's weird in retrospect is how I seem to have willed the circumstances into being, how much I seemed to know before I knew anything at all. There shouldn't have been anything at stake for me, seeing The Searchers that first time. Yet there was. Going to a film society screening was ordinarily a social act, but I made sure to go alone that night. I smoked a joint alone too, my usual preparation then for a Significant Moment. And I chose my heavy black-rimmed glasses, the ones I wore when I wanted to appear nerdishly remote and intense, as though to decorate my outer self with a confession of inner reality. The evening of that first viewing of The Searchers I readied myself like a man who suspects his first date might become an elopement.

I wasn't a man. I was nineteen, a freshman at Bennington, a famously expensive college in Vermont. I'd never been to private school, and the distance between my experience and the other students', most of whom had never set foot inside a public school like those I'd attended in Brooklyn, would be hard to overstate. On the surface I probably came off like an exuberant chameleon. I plied my new friends with stories of inner-city danger when I wanted to play the exotic, aped their precocious cynicism when I didn't. Beneath that surface I was weathering a brutally sudden confrontation with the reality of class. My bohemian-artisan upbringing—my parents were hippies—had masked the facts of my own exclusion from real privilege, more adeptly than is possible anymore. It was 1982.

Soon the weight of these confusions crushed my sense of belonging, and I dropped out. But before that, I cloaked my abreaction in a hectic show of confidence: I was the first freshman ever to run the film society. The role freed me to move easily through the complex social layers at Bennington, impressing people with a brightness that hadn't affixed to any real target. Plus I was able to hire myself as a projectionist, one of the least degrading work-study jobs, then pad the hours, since I was my own manager.

So when I walked into Tishman Hall, Bennington's small, free-standing movie theater, I was entering my own little domain on a campus that really wasn't mine at all. Which had everything to do with the episode that night. The rows of wooden seats in Tishman were full—deep in the Vermont woods, any movie was diversion enough for a Tuesday night—but I doubt any of my closest friends were there. I don't remember. I do remember glancing up at the booth to see that this night's projectionist was my least competent. The lights dimmed, the babble hushed, and the movie began.

A cowboy ballad in harmony plays over the titles. You're thrust into a melodrama in blazing Technicolor, which has faded to the color of worrisome salmon. A homestead on the open range--no, hardly the range. This family has settled on the desolate edge of Monument Valley, under the shadow of those baked and broken monoliths rendered trite by Jeep commercials. You think: they might as well try to farm on the moon. The relationships between the characters are uneasy, murky, despite broad performances, corny lines. At the center of the screen is this guy, a sort of baked and broken monolith himself, an actor you might feel you were supposed to know. John Wayne.

I'd seen part of Rooster Cogburn on television. The only feature Western I'd ever watched was Blazing Saddles, but I'd passingly absorbed the conventions from F Troop, from Gunsmoke, from a Mad Magazine parody of 3:10 to Yuma. Similarly, I'd grasped a sense of John Wayne's iconographic gravity from the parodies and rejections that littered seventies culture. I knew him by his opposite: something of Wayne's force is encoded in Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, Alan Alda. And the voice—in high school I'd sung along with a hit song called "Rappin' Duke" which aped his bullying drawl: "So you think you're bad, with your rap / Well I'll tell ya, Pilgrim, I started the crap—"

As for movies, I was a perverse muddle, another result of my parents' milieu. I'd seen dozens by Godard and Truffaut, and never one by Howard Hawks or John Ford. My parents had taken me to The Harder They Come, not The Wizard of Oz. In my scattershot reading I'd sensed something missing in my knowledge, something central, a body of Hollywood texts the European directors revered like a Bible. But I'd never seen an American film older than Dr. Strangelove. Somewhere in my reading I'd also gleaned that The Searchers was terribly important, though not how, or why, or to whom.

Wayne's character, Ethan, is tormented and tormenting. His fury is righteous and ugly—resentment worn as a fetish. It isolates him in every scene. It isolates him from you, watching, even as his charisma wrenches you closer, into an alliance, a response that's almost sexual. You try to fit him to your concept of hero, but though he's riding off now, chasing a band of murderous Indians, it doesn't work. No parody had prepared you for this. Wasn't Wayne supposed to be a joke? Weren't Westerns meant to be simple? The film on the screen is lush, portentous. You're worried for it.

Now Wayne and the other riders falter. The Indians, it seems, have circled back, to raid the farmhouse the riders have left behind. The family, they're the ones in danger. The riders race back in a panic. They've failed. The farmhouse is a smoldering cinder, the family dead. The woman Wayne seemed to care for, raped and murdered. Her daughter, Wayne's niece, kidnapped. The sky darkens. The score is a dirge, no ballad now. Wayne squints, sets his jaw: the girl would be better dead than in the hands of the savages. John Wayne's a fucking monster! So are the Indians!

Now you're worried in a different way.

That's when the audience in Tishman began laughing and catcalling. Some, of course, had been laughing from the start, at the conventions of 1950s Hollywood. Now, as the drama deepened and the stakes became clear, the whole audience joined them. It was the path of least resistance. The pressure of the film, its brazen ambiguity, was too much. It was easier to view it as a racist antique, a naive and turgid artifact dredged out of our parents' bankrupt fifties culture.

Benefit of the doubt: What cue, what whiff of context was there to suggest to this audience why it should risk following where this film was going? These were jaded twenty-year-old sophisticates, whose idea of a film to ponder was something sultry and pretentious—Liquid Sky, The Draughtsman's Contract. If an older film stood a chance it should be in black-and-white, ideally starring Humphrey Bogart, whose cynical urbanity wouldn't appall a young crowd nursing its fragile sense of cool. The open, colorful manner of The Searchers didn't stand a chance. A white actor wearing dark makeup to play the main Indian character didn't stand a chance. John Wayne, above all, didn't stand a chance. The laughter drowned out the movie.

I was confused by the film, further confused by the laughter. The Searchers was overripe, and begged for rejection. But the story was beginning to reach me, speak to me in its hellish voice, though I didn't understand what it was saying. And I clung to shreds of received wisdom—this was the film that meant so much to . . . who was it? Scorsese? Bogdanovich? There must be something there. The laughter, I decided, was fatuous, easy. A retreat. Sitting there trying to watch through the howls, I boiled.

Then the film broke. The crowd groaned knowingly. This wasn't uncommon. The lights in the booth came up, illuminating the auditorium, as my...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385512171
ISBN 13 
9780385512176
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
149
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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