A House of Dynamite

I went to a matinee screening at Amherst Cinema, where the screens are small but the vibe is good. Maybe 5 other people attending. I left the theater wrung out, emotionally exhausted, in a state of cognitive dissonance.

It seems clear to me that this was Bigelow’s intent (hereafter KB, an affectionate shorthand some of us who worked for her like to use). The tripartite story structure, which is not to be confused with the classic Hollywood 3-act nor, despite its shifts in POVs, with Rashomon, though it gestures toward the latter, is working toward something else altogether. The point is not to show how ambiguity besets differing perspectives or subjectivities, calling into doubt “the truth,” but how the most harrowing event imaginable plays out across a spectrum of experience and within the tight confines of a rigorous professionalism which is tested to the breaking point. It is also an ingenious method for ratcheting up suspense. A more vulgar person than myself might call it tease and denial.

The repetitions build up tension to an unbearable level, then – fade to black. Each break occurs just as the missile is about to hit Chicago. Their effect is, as a friend put it, “devastating.” They give you no solace, no room to hide, absolutely no comfort or closure. It put me in mind of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, which was meant to confound the audience’s expectations, to break them out of their complacency. The whole film seems like an extended exercise in that old rhetorical trope aposiopesis — when a narrative is suddenly broken off/disrupted, given no end.

Because it’s Bigelow it is of course expertly crafted. The pacing is superb. The close up work unnerving. The way she holds on the silences in various command centers as the realization sinks in that the missile cannot be stopped.

“This is insanity.” The President says (he’s not wrong) “No, Mr. President, this is reality.” A general replies (neither is he).

Always lauded for her dazzling action sequences, KB does not get enough attention or acclaim for the performances she draws from her cast. The first section places Rebecca Ferguson front and center. It’s a beautiful, restrained performance. There’s an anguished moment where she can barely hold back her tears as she thinks about her young son (whom we saw early on in a typical box-checking domestic scene).

And the little human moments — ballgame chat, lovers in a hurry, a mom on an outing with her son and yes, the hapless SecDef who can't accept the crushing weight of the catastrophe (including, it's suggested, his own personal failures) — all these splinters of humanity were powerfully affecting. Managing such a large number of actors in a coherent and compelling way, in such brief snippets, without slipping into disaster movie cliche, is an incredible accomplishment.

The always excellent Tracy Lett’s general lays out a concise range of scenarios as to the identity of the missile launcher, including one that involves a foreign power blinding one of our spy satellites before launching a missile – a more than plausible and frightening scenario.

Gabriel Basso dominates the second section, where he plays the Deputy NSA Jake Bearington. He’s an earnest Boy Scout type, pretty much the same character he played in “The Night Agent.” He’s a handsome hunk of beefcake but he is also quite good. His is the voice of moderation and de-escalation amid the chorus of brass hats who clamor for more bellicose responses to the maddeningly unidentified enemy. He plays noble frustration beautifully. Indeed, the film excels in its depiction of professionals performing difficult tasks under the most extreme pressure. The film is nothing if not Hawksian in that sense.

The final section brings us at last to Idris Elba’s POTUS—thus far only a voice. He is exhausted, a bit disheveled. Overwhelmed by the awfulness of the moment and the momentousness of the crucial decision he must make, he seems to crumble from within. It’s a wrenching, deeply human performance – he’s caught in an impossible moral crux. This section closes like the others. We don’t see the missile’s impact. POTUS is shuttled off to a bunker. We’re left to imagine the disaster, which is a brilliant move after so much build up. It puts the moral responsibility for imagining such an unthinkable event on the viewer. To have shown the missile strike would have robbed the film of its power, reducing it to just another inane spectacle of mass destruction, no better than an MCU film.

Above all, the film shows just how helpless we are in the face of our own awesome technologies. It’s not just the missiles that evoke horror, but the uselessness of the counter-measures.

One leaves the theater shaken, haunted. The Doomsday Clock is currently set at 89 seconds to midnight. And my students seem never to have heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

in memoriam ALICE NOTLEY, 1946-2025

We've lost one of our greatest poets and I, like many others, am devastated. I can't say I knew Alice well. Met her at Naropa late 90s/Boulder. Mt first public talk, at Boulder Bookstore, was on her masterpiece "Descent of Alette." I was in over my head. But Alice told me she liked it, which meant alot to me. Years later I was asked by Christina Davis to introduce her at Harvard along with Eleni Sieklianos. In the event Christina read my remaks since I had a job interview at Cleveland State.

Alice Notley—Notes for Harvard Introduction, 4/17/2013 Patrick Pritchett

“I invented the arts to stay alive.” So says Marie, the derelict ur-matriarch of Alice Notley’s rhapsodic and defiant Culture of One. Her motto might be Notley’s own.

Because for years now, Alice Notley’s poetry has operated in a strange no-woman’s land, neglected or ignored by both the pious adherents of canonical correctness and the bully boys of the avant-garde. Part of this is due to her own unwillingness to embrace any camp but her own, and her sharply stated aversion to poetry that is about, “writing, literary criticism, linguistics, or French philosophy.” The whole point of her rejection of such parochialism is that each poet always already forms a school of One, herself.

She lays out the necessity for this position in her essay, “The Poetics of Disobedience,” where she writes that poetry obliges one “to disobey the past and the practices of literary males,” that disobedience in its larger sense means “staying alert to all the ways one is coerced into denying experience.” It means, “No Doctrines” about poetry, but allowing the poem to name its own shape in the making of it. Disobedience to the tyranny of literary conventions suggests an interior obedience – to the poet’s own unexplainable urges and instincts. It means treating her whims as though they were laws and not asking why. It means just following the poem where it leads you. Disobedience also signifies a deeper permission: the inalienable right of the poet to break boundaries, to transgress, to militate against theory, against Poetry with a capital P, against anything that is not the poem itself.

Notley’s poems are infused with an extraordinary tenderness and care for the fragility of our predicament and they undertake this with all the resources of Dr. Williams’ plain American speech, its breaks, stutters, sudden stops and restarts, flush with repetition, always a little ahead or behind: everyday talk, with all its gaps and fissures and aphasic goofs.

At the same time, since 1992’s “White Phosphorous,” Notley has been inventing a radical new measure, a kind of gnostic, hypnagogic speech that is startling in its immediacy. It’s not so much a form of ghostly dictation, not even Jack Spicer’s Martians speaking through the imperfect medium of Alice, but the poet herself listening intently, acutely, to the dream voices of the poem, murmuring in all their disturbing tongues. Yet, as she writes in “Epic & Women Poets,” “dreams are not language … they are fleshly & vivid, they are ‘real’ … the bed of new beginnings, the place to turn to.”

This effort to produce a new measure, which marks such major works as The Descent of Alette, Close to me & Closer … (The Language of Heaven), Alma, or The Dead Women, and most recently Culture of One, amounts to a description of a tremendous struggle – of the poet to speak the poem, of a woman to claim a voice outside the proscriptions of men – and it’s a jarring, gorgeous, intoxicating, and horrific struggle, written in a rhythm of breathless urgency, the swell and pulse of dismemberment and re-unification, of fracture and writing out of the fracture, of brokeness and wholeness whirling, colliding, recombining: a primal religious drama of the violence of the body and the world against the violence of language. “Who will gather up my pieces?” she asks. “How many pieces am I? How many can I be?” To be a culture of one – an impossible, yet utterly necessary, task. And it’s undertaken with such ferocity it leaves the reader gasping for oxygen, looking for a place to duck.

In “Vertical Axis,” (from Mysteries of Small Houses), Notley writes (Alette speaks it): >P> “I am proceeding deeper into the cave ... don’t discount this spirit because it sounds like/what you’ve named it before … I won't be buried in the earth you abuse and slight as/a discarded symbol ... nor is I a discarded symbol/I am Alette who, from deeper than the story, can change it.”

I don’t think there’s anyone anywhere right now writing at a more charged and visceral pitch, with greater bravery and candor, with more fantastic elasticity and risk, charting the unmapped regions between the sublime and the even more sublime ridiculous. How lucky we are to have Alice Notley.

Brief Mercy of This Life

My seventh book of poems will be published later this summer by Eliot Cardinaux's The Bodily Press. i could not be happier with its design.