Babygirl review

BABYGIRL (2024)
Written and directed by Halina Reijn

The much-hyped “Babygirl” is a pig in a poke; an extended act of bad faith. Is it a sexist exploitation film? A parable about feminist power? A cautionary tale about manipulative men? It wants to be all these and in the end is none. The tone of the filmvis subdued, minimalist, yet for all that histrionic. Beautifully shot and sharply paced, it comes in at a brisk 114 minutes – which still feels too long, thanks to a rambling and static Act II. The director, Halina Reijn, has come up with a provocative premise but has failed to flesh it out in any but the most superficial terms.

“Babygirl” draws a distinct line between a woman being able to get what she wants in bed and her ability to be a leader in business but the connection is not only tenuous in dramatic terms, it’s contrived. The film seems intended as a feminist parable about power exchanges and sex and is presented in what seems at first a naturalistic style but it’s true genre is fantasy as made clear by the exacting color schemes, meticulous production design, and shot choices, which often verge on portentous art cinema trying to produce an out of place and unearned suspense.

As Romy, the gladiatorial Nicole Kidman looks like a carven wax imago of herself, an AI double. Except for her neck and the backs of her hands, her face and naked body are eerily devoid of signs of aging. Her eyes have a permanently startled look, wide open indeed, from Botox or some other treatment. The film contains a striking scene where she undergoes an elaborate beauty regimen that looks like a fountain of youth treatment undergone as self-mortification. There’s a ghoulish aspect to this scene with its short, sharp cuts (the film is expertly edited and paced). Verging on horror, it conveys with visual wit the depressing rituals a woman in power must go through to present a perfectly manicured presence in the corporate boardroom.

Because movie stars are in an unforgiving business predicated on artificiality it’s churlish to harp on an aging female actor’s appearance, however plastic it may strike one. The face is an actor’s chief means of expression and the more beautiful the actor is the higher the stakes in preserving that face. In a way, Kidman’s very appearance, its highly artificial gloss, lends itself perfectly of the film’s theme of female insecurity and empowerment. Her face, framed in close up after close up registering pleasure, anxiety, puzzlement, etc., is the running subtext of “Babygirl.”

All the same, Kidman just looks weird.

Her orgasms, both faked and real, are the crux of the film, its key f/x, as it were, as well as the whole reason for the film’s being (you can imagine the pitch meeting). They are real tour de forces, shot in ferocious unwavering close up – a hymn to the male gaze? Or a celebration of women’s liberatory sexual expression? Somehow they fail to add up to more than the sum of their parts. I found myself drifting off, even texting a friend that she needed to see it even though it was garbage. There’s a carelessness to the film’s dramatic logic, which is a mash up of thrillers, mawkish family drama, and bogus journey of self-discovery. It has nothing of substance to say about any of these themes beyond cliché and platitude, serving them up like adverts for posh lifestyles.

But what to say of Kidman herself? Since “To Die For” and “Moulin Rouge” she has turned in some truly powerful risk-taking performances. In her later years she’s turned into an impressive, if restless, acting mill, as if afraid to pause. Many of the choices she’s made have struck me as mediocre though they’ve proven very popular. But she’s always been for me an actor more to be admired than loved, unlike say her compatriot Cate Blanchett. Her commitment to the material, her intensity, and her tremendous grace and sheer presence has stature and substance. Nonetheless, there’s always something slightly too calculated about a Kidman performance, including this one. Naomi Fry, in The New Yorker, nails it: in a movie about a hot mess Kidman is just not messy enough.

Antonio Banderas is marooned in a thankless role, an emasculated, impotent figure completely immersed in his work as a theater director, while the young hunk, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who fulfills Kidman’s fantasies of submission, is a complete blank. He reminds me of swaggering dumb fucks I knew in LA, all hair gel and wary preening, totally clueless. More a projection of Romy’s fantasies than a real person, he has no apparent interior life, but comes off as improbably wise and confident beyond his years, running his lines with an air of someone who can hardly be bothered. It’s a labored performance. A mere intern, he’s lent an air of dangerous and disruptive charisma. His habit of challenging Kidman’s perfectly sensible objections and rebuttals with a dull-witted question is meant to both underscore his privilege and unsettle hers. Romy seems baffled by this resistance. Are we meant to think she finds this behavior attractive? Or does the director imagine she’s critiquing male arrogance? This kind of ambiguity is supposed to play ironically but it only reveals an impoverished failure to imagine three-dimensional characters. Except this is not a naturalistic drama. More a warped passion play where characters play Large Emotions or Ideas.

Kidman’s longing for humiliation is depicted as both shameful and vaguely spiritual, and finally, as a way for her to own her own power (which never seemed in doubt from the first act). There’s a tedious subplot about her self-aggrandizing aide Esme’s scheme to undermine Kidman by blackmailing her into putting her money where he mouth is by acting as a real leader and supporter of women. This is all red herring dumb show, played for an irony so mild it’s totally ineffectual.

The scene with Esme is shot in tight CU, facing the camera (and reading a speech to a camera); a repetition of a similar scene of Romy’s in Act 1. Not once does the film show us the real dynamics of office politics, the boardroom struggles, meetings and decisions, etc. We never see Kidman doing something that looks like actual work other than tapping her phone and making bland statements for streaming to the company or its clients about her “vision.”

“Babygirl” closes with two scenes: Romy triumphantly telling a fellow (male) exec to fuck off. Romy, prone on her bed, her husband diligently fingering her to orgasm, just the way she likes it. So maybe this is a film afterall about how a career woman can really have it all?

MAKE IT BROKEN

My book of essays, Make It Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism, is shipping from the printers today. It can be ordered directly from the publisher, Black Square Editions.

This book was a long time in the making. I'm deeply grateful to John Yau, Peter Gizzi, Kit Schluter, Margaret Galey, and Shanna Compton for their brilliant and dedicated labor as well as to the many folks along the way whose conversations, input, and notes enriched these essays. Special thanks go to Ingrid Nelson whose faith in my work has been unflagging.

After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with moral acuity and formal audacity. By writing from inside the ruins, poets like Michael Palmer, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Fanny Howe use the very brokenness of language to redeem the poem in the wake of catastrophe.

"Patrick Pritchett’s Make It Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism is a treasure book of lively reading, research, and erudition, bringing salutary attention to the work of eight recent American poets deserving wider and deeper engagement. It is a book of elegant collation and crucial reckoning, lifted high out of the ordinary by brilliant, resonant insights and Pritchett’s fluid, cadence-rich writing—ever exact, ever adroitly qualified, ever with a rightness of touch—a juggling of weight and attunement he even makes look easy. The book offers an essential, exemplary study of important areas of concern in experimental poetry and poetics that are not often enough examined. Pitch perfect and scary smart, it had me smiling, tearing up, and crawling under my bed to hide."

Nathaniel Mackey

"I have long known Patrick Pritchett to be one of our most able critics of modern poetry, but the cumulative intelligence and imaginative understanding of these essays is something else again. Taken together, they present an argument for poetry—gnostic, messianic, and against the grain of language and history—that is as highly refined and as beautiful as any I have encountered. Pritchett’s erudition is profound but always handled with grace; it enables him to bring in other voices to support his reading at all the right moments. His clarity is a gift. Pound, Oppen, Niedecker, Olson, Ronald Johnson, Palmer, DuPlessis, Taggart, Sobin, Fanny Howe: Pritchett illuminates them all with skill, attention, and abiding love."

Norman Finkelstein

"In this brilliant and astonishingly clear study of late modernist poets—Oppen, Niedecker, Palmer, Sobin, Fanny Howe, and others—Patrick Pritchett demonstrates what truly engaged critical scholarship can become: not a form of light, but a mode of transformation, for as the practice of midrash teaches, the living text begins with commentary. With Pritchett we learn that war, in its endless horrors and outrages, whether in the 20th-century or now, can never adequately be written “about,” it can only be written through and with. As it breaks us again, we must respond in kind, with a broken and sorrowful poetics. The poem, in other words, is a burnt offering. The apophatic poets Pritchett reads with such loving attention and outstanding care un-say what cannot be said. Out of the ruins and the ash, an un-whole holiness emerges."

Julie Carr

"Poetry survives, even flourishes, not simply because it is read, but because of what poets themselves have had to say about it in all its variety and particularity. The poet Patrick Pritchett’s Make It Broken is an illuminating group of essays on modern and contemporary poetry whose chief distinction is the breakdown of form—fragmentation, parataxis, montage, or what Pritchett calls "radical formal disjunction." His lucid readings of sometimes difficult poems will make the reading of these poems a new adventure."

Gerald Bruns

Coppola's "Dracula"

ROMEO VOID — BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
URB Magazine, Los Angeles, 1992

"Bram Stoker’s Dracula" is a fever dream; a rapturous, incantatory phantasmagoria; a ravishing Liebestraum in which the im¬ages, not the narrative, form the story’s emotional core. Like Wagner in his operas, and Von Sternberg in his films, Francis Ford Coppola has held back nothing in his attempt to inundate us with a riotous profusion of sensual and decaying splendors. In the process, he has succeeded in making his Dracula a figure who is paradoxically transformed by his grotesqueness into something very nearly noble. This is the film for all those who are fed up with the cloying cuteness of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It is not a great film, in the conventional sense, being flawed by weak narrative links, poor, or off-key performances, and a recurrent sense of detachment and remoteness. But it is also more than merely great: a film that literally mesmerizes us with its gothic symbolism, tapping directly into the dark arteries of the unconscious until we swoon in its narcotic flood, a river of opiate delirium.

As Dracula, the remarkably protean Gary Oldman is Romeo in the void, a quester for a profane Grail, Tristan not just mad, but crucified by a 400-year old love. Stoker’s original novel can be read, in one way, as a Celtic reaction to the Victorian whitewashing of eros Tennyson drowned the medieval romance of King Arthur with (and “Dracula” is nothing, if not a medieval romance), coating over its primal bloodshed and sexuality. The terror of feminine sexuality, specifically, is at the heart of Dracula. As the awakener of women’s dormant libidos, initiating them into a power that men, because they do not understand it, fear and must repress, Dracula is paganism’s revenge on the sterility of Christianity — his blood ritual but a mirror, as Coppola and his writer, Jim Hart, make clear, for the symbolic cannibalism of the Holy Mass. But Dracula worships in the Church of Love, elevating carnal, mortal love to the level of a sacrament. As such, he is the ultimate paramour, the final exemplar of Romanticism’s revolt from a tyrannical, deiocentric universe.

By endowing Dracula with a too sympa¬thetic mystique, though, the filmmakers have set the film’s dramatic center spin¬ning. Anthony Hopkins, wretchedly ham¬ming it up as the redoubtable Van Helsing, carries no moral authority whatsoever. When he proclaims to Jonathan Harker (the wooden Keanu Reeves), as they seek out Dracula’s destruction, that “now we are God’s madmen,” you feel the joke is on him. The true and only divine madman here is Dracula himself. Unable to balance the story’s opposing tensions any other way, the role of redeemer is given over to Winona Ryder’s fey, but strainingly ardent Mina, who, as the reincarnation of the Count’s bride, seals their lover’s pact in the end with an improbably, sentimental flourish. (The film also skirts Stoker’s hysteria about immigration that is the novel’s subtext).

The production design and costumes, by Thomas Sanders and Eiko Ishioka, embody the dreamworld of the Victorian imagination with a Byzantine refulgence, a Pre-Raphaelite sensuousness that is glorious. Drenched with images from the Gothic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Dracula is a crepuscular ode, a vision of the twilight of Empire, aswirl with smoke and hot¬house flowers, the morbidity and fire of a dying civilization. But as deeply as we may be enthralled by the lushness of his world, Coppola never succeeds in drawing us fully into it. We remain at a distance, like the director himself, outside looking in, emotionally unengaged.

This is also a movie about a disease transmitted through the blood. Dracula’s decision, at the culmination of his quest for Mina, to spare her from the purgatory of the un-dead, seems to reflect the filmmaker’s conscious, if subtle, awareness of AIDS. This unexpected reversal causes the storyline to wobble (again), but what the film loses in logic, Dracula himself gains in pathos and hu¬manity. In the end, Dracula, embracing only extremes, simultaneously seduces and repels. Full of erotic images that are exces¬sive, disturbing, grandiose and beguiling, it is dream and nightmare, opera and parody, sublimity and absurdity, love and madness.

Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis"

This film has to be set in the context of other Coppola films about big dreamers whose dreams verged on the quixotic. the pathological, or the downright psychotic: the poisonous protagonists of the Godfather movies and “Apocalypse Now;” the benign and likeable visionary of “Tucker: The Man and His Dream;” the charismatic, seductive and undead Count Dracula of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” whose Big Dream threatens the womanhood of Great Britain with an immigrant contagion of unbridled lust and immortality.

All of this came to mind as I found myself the only occupant of a large theater at the 2:40 showing in Plainville CT. (I was also reminded of how one of Larry Fishburne’s earliest film appearances was in 1979’s “Apocalypse Now” as “Clean. Mr. Clean … from some South Bronx shithole. I think the light and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his head,” in Martin Sheen’s memorable voiceover, written by Michael Herr). Here, Fishburne is in full Morpheus mode – his deeply supple baritone supplying needless narration in solemn, oracular tones. Yawn.

I wish I could report that this wildly ambitious film had any redeeming qualities or that I saw in it even a glimmer of what my friends and colleagues have reported. For me, “Megalopolis” is not only pretentious, but stilted – marred by a straining for effect, torpid pacing, and flat line readings. There’s not a bit of genuine emotional life in any of it. It’s an empty exercise in self-indulgent abstraction.

One scene in particular stands out in this respect. It’s symptomatic of the whole miscarried film. Adam Driver (Cesar Catalina) and Nathalie Emmanuel (Julia Cicero) are standing on a rooftop with a distinctive coign of vantage, surveying Cesar’s vision/empire to be. She asks him about his plan for this cityscape. A stadium, he replies, roofed with a delicate gold fiber. As visions go, not exactly inspiring. The platform they are on is a giant mechanical clock, under glass, whose hands move ever so majestically (Cesar, we are given to understand, without explanation, has the power to stop time -- another lame metaphor for the power of art – and of film in particular. There are several freeze frames etc.). Julia replies by reciting the first lines of Sappho’s famous Anacotria poem, no. 16, which runs as follows:

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-
ever you love best

What’s wrong with this scene? Plenty. Her delivery is hopelessly dull and drab, completely without passion or inflection. She might as well be reading a grocery list. But it’s the decisions that the director made in shooting it that dulls its impact. He shoots the whole thing at an impersonal middle distance. When Emmanuel recites Sappho the shot is over Driver’s shoulder -- that way both faces are in the frame, a classic device. What’s called for to intensify the moment is a cut-in to her face – a close up. Then back to Driver, maybe spinning around to really see her for the first time. A connection is made. Otherwise those lines are wasted. They're arbitrary; they mean nothing. It’s hard to account for Coppola’s bad shot and editing choices here.

The plot is saddled with numerous contrived turns involving betrayals and murder, Roman style, with Cesar's cousin, Clodio, framing Cesar in a bogus sex scandal. Clodio is played by Shia LaBeouf, an actor who for unfathomable reasons, still has a career with major directors despite his over the top, hyperventilating performances. Though I suppose this is precisely what Coppola wanted from him. LeBeouf plays a gender-fluid character, an angle that crudely plays off old Hollywood tropes about villains who are sexually ambiguous. It's shameful.

What about the rest of the cast? Driver is not an actor I’ve ever warmed to. And he seems miscast here. His huge, crooked slab of a hangdog face invites some kind of admiration, as does his drawling delivery; it’s certainly arresting. Either that or he’s watched too many Gary Cooper films. But at times he doesn’t seem quite in control of it. Under Coppola’s direction he looks like he’s trying too hard. It is not a relaxed or lived in performance. It’s hammy and stagey. You can see the wheels spinning. Emmanuel, only known to me from her capable ensemble work in the “Fast and Furious” movies, is a luminous presence whose luster is hard to dim. And yet, she looks lost for much of the film. Her reaction shots are all off. Her timing is just bad. She looks like she’s thinking about her lines instead of, you know, acting them. Dustin Hoffman puts in an oddly likeable cameo, gargling his lines like a tipsy mafioso gargoyle. Giancarlo Esposito is an intensely watchable actor, but he’s largely wasted here.

Jon Voight looks like he’s on life support. Why is he even in this film? He brings nothing of urgency to it. The irrepressibly energetic and wonderfully subtle Aubrey Plaza is ill-used here. Her face can register micro-emotions with startling rapidity – the true sign of a great film actor. But alas her line readings – she’s stuck with maybe the worst in the film – are hopelessly dull and lifeless. I guess this is what comes of a director intent on making his actors into mouthpieces for his Big Obvious Theme. The whole cast is reduced to allegorical stand-ins, so Coppola can drive home his fatuous points about the decay of empire and the painfully thin conceit of America as a latter-day Rome. At one point Cesar's car, driven by Fishburne, slowly glides through a bad part of town where we see giant statues representing Justice and other allegorical figures briefly come to life only to fall and crumble. It’s meant to be dreamlike – but it comes across as painfully awkward and obvious.

Some critics have cited Ayn Rand’s megalo-architect Howard Roark from “The Fountainhead” as an inspiration for Driver’s character. That’s surely in play. But he seems closer to the real-life Roark, Robert Moses, who ruled New York’s Parks and Recreation’s Dept for decades. (This is actually one of Driver’s job descriptions we learn early on).

I could go on but why beat a dead horse? The whole thing made me want to re-watch “Tucker,” which I recall rather liking. Coppola has never been a filmmaker of ideas like, say, Godard. Films anyway aren’t about ideas, but images, emotions, and relationships. (Which is why Godard, despite his early elan, has always left me a bid cold). Coppola’s great theme has always been family, one form or other; the maddening, bloody, and tender dynamics of it, and here he stages that in a ruthlessly naked key right out of Suetonius. There is a grandly staged political marriage between Plaza's scheming Wow Platinum and Voight's decrepit tycoon, done up in an overdone, baroquely lacquered style. But it's stiff, lifeless, even as lurid spectacle. It made me long for the gaudy excesses of Fellini's "Satryicon."

As an overdetermined allegory about art, about the autonomy of the artist in a crass mercantile world set against the death of an empire, about moviemaking itself, “Megalopolis” is a crude, sophomoric essay. White elephant art, as Manny Faber put it. One can applaud the risk, the imaginative stakes, the film aims for. But to see it fall so far short is dismaying. Some critics have praised Coppola for swinging for the fences in the spirit of unfettered invention and that is indeed laudable in a time when most films have nothing at stake. But the film is also quite regressive.

“Megalopolis” is not so much a futurist film as a throwback, one that invokes the popularity in 1950s and 60s Hollywood for sword snd sandal epics: Anthony Mann’s “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” William Wyler’s “Ben Hur,” Jospeh Mankiewicz’s “Cleopatra,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” to name the most prominent. These films, made in the decade or so after the war, offered mostly triumphalist allegories about the fate of America as it moved into its imperialist phase. They were a mixed bag to be sure: Mann’s film made a stark warning about hubris, while Wyler served up a sentimental ode to Christian piety. Mank’s movie – much maligned like Coppola’s for its cost and extravagance – remains a remarkable achievement in retrospect. Kubrick, working with the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, delivered a sharp-edge liberal critique of empire and an ardent defense of the individual.

Coppola never manages to achieve such a sharp focus. He’s all over the place, really. Is it a film about the endangered fate of art in the modern age? Or a film about the wages of ego and power? The two strands never quite converge. The emotional lines between characters are badly skewed; they feel like sketches for relationships and thus never draw us, never invite us to identify with the hero or anyone else.

Coppola’s daring vision fails to catch fire. It’s less an appeal to what cinema can achieve than a complaint about the many abuses he’s personally suffered during his time as a filmmaker fighting an uphill battle against intractable studio bosses and dull bean counting functionaries. The result is a film that should have reached for the intensity of a tragedy, through the eventual death of its hero, whose self-awareness arrives too late. Instead, it’s a flagrantly self-justifying film in which tragedy is elided by an absurd sleight of hand as it abruptly, preposterously, and unconvincingly pivots to a happy ending. It’s just embarrassing.

It's unfair, I suppose, to hold the film to some rigid standard of naturalism when it so clearly is operating in the grandiose register of opera. Yet the operatic here comes across as merely cartoonish. Oddly enough, it's not grandiose enough. "Dracula" unfolded like a fever dream -- a rapturous, incantatory phantasmagoria; a ravishing Liebestraum. None of that energy is present in "Megalopolis."

And yet: maybe this film is supposed to be a more Brechtian/Noh drama than naturalistic? The actors are archetypes, portraying ritualistic, formulaic archetypal states of being, etc. Conflict is depicted at an elemental, rather than naturalistic, level. The aggressively foregrounded artifice is meant to shock the audience into an awareness of our civilization’s fragile predicament. I can entertain that notion for as long as it takes me to dismiss it.

Coppola, for his all larger-than-life ambitions, has always worked them out in the framework of naturalistic human behavior. “Peggy Sue Got Married” is a good example. It’s a lighthearted fantasy, expertly crafted, with a whimsical supernatural angle, lightly laid on, as in a Hollywood classic. But that film is light on its feet. It never takes itself that seriously even though the emotional stakes are high. In “Megalopolis” it does not work. It’s merely leaden; ponderous and inert.

The vision of the polis reborn, the ideal city, where art guides the citizens to some lofty utopian form of living, is swallowed up by the "mega" and its hubristic ambitions: unfortunately the damning fate of so many artworks – Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos” comes to mind – conceived on a colossal scale and bent on delivering utopia.

But utopia is not a large scale, Robert Moses-style urban redevelopment plan. It’s a series of micro transactions, founded on hope, purely and always anticipatory, intimate gestures made toward a still emerging future. Much has been made of the books Coppola read preparing for this film. One wishes he’d come across Ernst Bloch’s 1918 “The Spirit of Utopia.”

Because Utopia is not and can never be fixed, as Cesar naively dreams. It’s not an achievement; it’s a process.

George Oppen and Fernand Leger

I was unable to shoehorn this bit on Oppen and Leger into a long essay I've just completed on Oppen -- so here it is.

When Oppen and Pound met in 1969 in the New York offices of their mutual publisher, New Directions, after nearly 30 years, they both “wept openly” (as recounted in Eric hoffman's excellent bio of Oppen, A Narrative). Oppen revisits the moment in his 1972 poem “Of Hours” where he asks: “but why did I weep/Meeting that poet again what was that rage//Before Leger’s art poster/In wartime Paris.” The poem concludes with the single one-word line “Unteachable” – a final indictment of a lost soul.

It's an odd splice in time. Oppen's syntax conjoins the two moments, so far apart in time but not in emotional charge. He was not a man to shirk from reality yet one can't help but feel that his outrage over Leger masks a deeper reaction to the war itself.

But if Pound was unteachable, we might venture to say that Oppen could be somewhat intransigent himself. Case in point: his response to a Fernand Leger poster he saw in Paris. As Mary Oppen recounts in her autobiography, “Meaning a Life,” itdrove George “berserk: there was no way to express my anger at these Parisians who could care about such mediocrity at the time.”

Ironically enough, Leger, who had fought on the Western Front in World War I and spent WWII in America, was, like Oppen, a member of the Communist Party. He was singled out for ire by a congressman from Michigan, George Dondero, who attacked the State Dept’s “Advancing American Art” project of the late 40s, which was designed to convince European elites that modern art could flourish within an anti-Communist left:

“The artists of the “isms” change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations. Léger and Duchamp are now in the United States to aid in the destruction of our standards and traditions. The former has been a contributor to the Communist cause in America; the latter is now fancied by the neurotics as a surrealist.” (qtd. in Menand https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front

In my interview with the Oppen’s daughter, Linda, at Harvard in 2011, (which can be viewed online) she related how, during their extended stay in Mexico in the 50s, her father abruptly ended a friendship with a fellow expat over Fellini’s "La Strada" (1954), which like Leger’s poster, he deemed frivolous. One supposes this was because Oppen as a good card-carrying Communist, viewed it as a betrayal of Neo-Realism. And indeed when Fellini was awarded the best film prize at the Venice Film Festival, a fight broke out between the Marxist supporters of Luchino Visconti, whose "Senso" had been in the running, and those of Fellini.

Those were the days.

In any case, Oppen, a self-declared “man of the 30s,” seems to have suffered from an acute case of brow-anxiety, as Menand might put it: a desire to build a wall between high brow seriousness and what Dwight MacDonald labeled “masscult.” It makes you wonder what Oppen might have made of Ashbery, if in fact he ever read him. “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”?

In the interview, groping after some notion of Oppen as regular chap, I asked Linda if her father had liked baseball or Westerns, which I had fantasized he might have, “Oh, nooo,” she said, shaking her head.

Late Style in Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham’s new poem in the London Review of Books (LRB 46.8, 4.25.2024) would seem to be a poem expressing anguish over the situation in Gaza (or maybe it’s Ukraine. Or Sudan. Or Name The War Zone) though it’s so cloaked in her typically murky arabesques it’s difficult to tell. It’s about loss. It’s about suffering. It’s about relief that her beloved is still alive and that, well, she is, too.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/jorie-graham/no-one-today

(Her partner of many years, the poet and artist Peter Sacks is reported to have hurt himself badly while out for a run on Martha’s Vinyard, where they both live part of the year. His plight as well as Graham’s cancer diagnosis were reported in “The New Yorker” in genuflectional prose by Katy Waldman, who doesn’t seem to know much about poetry but does know how to butter up an interview subject).

No one today

of my own died. I
did not die. My
love did not. Is intact. I
checked.

“Is intact. I/checked” are phrases that make one wince. Graham is always pleading for the urgency of her case – her poetry makes “palpable designs” on the reader as Keats famously put it. Is “I/checked” Graham’s attempt at poking fun at her own seriousness? Alice Notley pulls that off effortlessly. Graham, not so much. Readers in search of irony in her work will go a-begging. This is high-wire stuff – Rilkean predicaments for the jet set. But then Rilke was rather jet set, too.

Despite many grace notes and indeed passages of harrowing beauty, the poem is pockmarked with these characteristic asides, designed as annotations of the process of consciousness itself, footnotes, as it were, to emotion or perception, but which in fact come across as pedantic, self-important, clumsy neurotic signposts to her Big Drama. Little effort is expended on creating language that enacts anguish – though she does some nifty stuff with syntax, bending her tight quatrains at acute angles. These broken stanzas carry some real power, though again, she can’t resist editorializing.

No oblivion

was visible

to us, no one
lay waiting to be buried
under the vast
sound then the unending

weight which imitates
eternity
perfectly – where suddenly
we’re down in

the burning
mounds the slippery
pits – how did our room
disappear – & is that a

cry under there, is that a hand

“Is that a hand” – this kind of stuff is embarrassing and yet it’s been Graham’s stock in trade for decades. Her “searing honesty,” if you will. I took issue with this aspect of her work in my review of the otherwise excellent “Overlord, where I wrote of the poem "Posterity": “No one could doubt Graham’s sincerity. But the poem veers dangerously close, as James Wright often did, to a self-valorizing sentimentality in which psychological honesty becomes fetishistic self-flagellation.”

https://www.joriegraham.com/pritchett_2006

These lines come off as someone who' swatched too much CNN. But can we genuinely find fault with a poet for feeling too much? Well, yes, if the feeling results in mawkishness.

The thing about Graham’s work that has always put me off is the way she is always at the center of her poems in such a flagrantly melodramatic way. In this she shares a lot in common with the late Louise Gluck. As Michael Robbins observed in his review of Gluck’s “Collected,” “she’s a major poet with a minor range.”

I much prefer Gustaf Sobin's posture: "There's little room in my poetry for myself," he once told Ed Foster. "I’m there to structure the poem. To get it to fly ... tightening a syllable here, releasing a line there … to get language to lift ... to defy … the weights of the explicit."

Amen.

Still, “No One Today” ends on a poignant note. The pleading has modulated into a dernier cri, a tender, even hauntingly elegiac tone takes hold – last things are being said; next to last things. The short, compressed lines mark a departure from Graham’s recent work, with its bloated long lines threatening to run off the pages in a kind of gaseous all-out Whitmania. These stanzas vibrate with force; the enjambment does the kind of work a long line simply isn't outfitted for:

don’t bend that way

you’ll hurt yourself,

no you can’t
hurt yourself, you are all
gone all
gone
who ran in the

light with me to
the beach last
Saturday … Shall we venture out
I ask – at bedtime

now – tomorrow, &
my sleepy ones say
maybe, if

it is fine,
and I say yes, of

course, if it is fine.

The nod here to Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” is lovely, invoking a mother’s solicitude for her “sleepy ones” – children perhaps, or the beloved – is he truly gone? Or does the poem make some kind of pre-emptive apotropaic gesture against loss? Graham’s earnestness is never less than sincere. But she often seems to swim upstream against it, setting up obstacles where none are needed, undermining the very effect she wants to produce by overloading even her short lines with palpable design. I can’t decide if it’s a feature or a bug. Mannerism afflicts a poet who can no longer write around her own blind spots, who gets too comfortable in her own style. It’s an occupational hazard and it afflicts most of us. Jorie Graham takes tremendous risks, as if daring the reader to cry “hold, enough!” Yet one can’t help but feel that the risk taking would be more impressive if only she stuck the landing a bit more.

But a counter-argument could be advanced that Graham has been writing in what Adorno called “late style” as early as 1987’s “The End of Beauty.”

Late style, according to Adorno, is not ripeness, or completion; not some quintessential distillation of spirit as the purely subjective (idealist) expression of final plenitude. Instead, he says, it is “the sudden flaring up” with which a work of art abandons its own status as art. Late style is the style of ruins, the scorched earth policy of form.

As Shierry Weber Nicholsen explains, “the essential feature of late work [is] the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity, so that as work becomes late it becomes increasingly inorganic.” Late work is not about transcendent summations, but radical discontinuity. As Adorno remarks: “The caesuras, the abrupt breaks that characterize the late Beethoven more than anything are those moments of eruption; the work falls silent when it is abandoned and turns its hollow interior to the outside world.” The mystery, he writes, of the relation between compositional fragments is never resolved, only held in a perpetual field of tension. “What is objective,” he concludes of Beethoven “is the crumbling landscape; the subjective side is the light that alone illuminates it.” “In the history of art,” he concludes with a Teutonic rumble, “late works are the catastrophes.”

And yet – Graham’s work finally militates against such a reading. She holds the fragments in a field of tension, to some extent. But unlike poets such as George Oppen, Michael Palmer, or Nate Mackey, she always come down emphatically on the side of the subjective. Of some kind of closure. The tensions must be resolved -- not undergone, not held in suspension.

Alex Garland's "Civil War"

Alex Garland’s much ballyhooed “Civil War” is a classic case of midcult entertainment, as Dwight McDonald would have put it. It overpromises and under delivers. Garland posits a dire crisis for the fate of the republic but cowardly refuses to lay out the stakes. A complete evasion of any coherent moral point of view masquerades as some putative form of old-style objective journalism. But without that moral point of view the film is nothing more than a cynical grab bag of sensationalistic cliches. It’s all fire fights and madcap pursuits. It never really comes alive, despite all the incessant mayhem.

Midway through the first act I muttered, hasn’t Garland read Sontag’s “On Photography”? Sontag's famous argument is that photography tends to aestheticize and romanticize its subjects rather than act as bearers of witness or unimpeachable representations of reality. This is esp. true of war photography which has a complicated relationship to the truth. For Sontag war photos don't heighten our awareness, they merely anesthetize it. If the film had tackled that it would have been far more compelling, trying to grapple with something complex and real.

“Civil War” purports to follow a group of photo-journalists covering the conflict in order to report the horrific events. As if America were Gaza or Sudan or some other generic war torn hellhole. Not doubt in the pitch meetings this seemed like a daring idea. But in the execution it comes across as hollow. Oliver Stone's “Salvador” covers a lot of the same ground but with far more moral urgency, as does Kubrick’s uneven but powerful “Full Metal Jacket.”

There's a cavalcade of shots of the principals snapping , well, shots, but it adds up to less than nothing. A smug exercise in the self-reflexive. Didn't "Rear Window" and "Blow Up" already cover this ground? But Garland’s staging is so utterly empty, so devoid of actual witness and emotion. Witnessing is represented as mere tedious spectacle. So is the film a critique of social media culture? One the contrary the whole enterprise is massively self-serving. Kirsten Dunst, looking very haggard, works hard to emote in fraught close ups. But the film insults the intelligence of the audience at every turn. Its central conceit is that a photograph is an unembellished represetation of "what really happened." That it conveys an unmediated reality. Of course, no such thing is possible. Images are always already mediations, at one remove from the actual. "Civil War" is nothing more than an extendned act of nostalgia and bad faith.

The film reminded me of a scene near the end of Michael Herr’s brilliant book on Nam, “Dispatches,” where Tim Page, the wild British photojournalist, is asked by a reporter if it’s possible to take the glamour out of war. Page’s response is priceless:

“Take the glamour out of war? I mean how the bloody hell can you do that? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan … Can you take the glamour out of a Cobra or getting stoned at China Beach? It’s like taking the glamour out of an M-79 … it’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones.”

And indeed, this madcap paean to a deep if unpleasant Freudian truth about our Dionysian impulses is impossible to refute.

So that the net result of all of Garland’s frenetic staging achieves the exact opposite of what he sought to attain. Objective journalism? If only. As Truffaut once observed, all anti-war films end up glamorizing war.

Not once does the film pause to ask – what *is* a photograph? Esp. a photo of an atrocity? The main character, veteran war photojournalist, Lee, clumsily named after the renowned WWII photojournalist Lee Miller, evades all moral responsibility for her vocation – we’re just here to record the event, she says. It’s up to others to explain it – a massive evacuation of the very moral responsibility photojournalism tasks us with. A description, an image, constitutes a moral judgment. I guess she skipped class that day.