American Salvage

If the characters of Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage introduced themselves to you, such a meeting would likely begin with a closed fist rather than a handshake, a headbutt instead of a nod. Curses, grievances, and cheap beer would spray the air, not to mention your Carhartt. Forgive the analogy, but Campbell's second collection of short fiction is making a name for itself, and for its author. A finalist for the National Book Award in the fall, American Salvage was also recently named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

And how else to describe Campbell's characters? Hard luck doesn't cut it; the rural Michiganders of Campbell's universe have, for better or worse (mostly worse), authored their own sometimes miserable fates. Gritty or tenacious won't work either; those terms welcome affinity, embrace, the part of us that roots for the underdog. And in fourteen short stories, Campbell catalogues violence, addiction, abuse, cruelty, tragedy, and cold hard fact (though dedication, too, with sparse, underscored moments of grace), and her characters aren't easy to root for. In "Family Reunion," a teenage girl abused by her uncle refuses to speak. Instead she directs her quiet rage at her surroundings, obsessively hunting (and killing) deer after deer, much to her father's dismay, until she pursues justice less circumspectly. No need to tell you who lives just across the river within sight of Marylou's scope. In "King Cole's American Salvage," a junk yard owner's troubled nephew unwittingly contributes to his uncle's violent demise. It's a fate neither can embrace nor recover from entirely. Each must embody a new self, and do so on the fly. One bears a burden externally, the other internally. And while both men's circumstances have resulted in different scars, as Campbell writes, "...each of their bodies [still] contained a core of platinum."

Needless to say, with Campbell, the hits just keep on coming. Her prose is terse, her sense of place unmistakable. Starkness abounds. If there's a flaw to her work, she sometimes crafts too dense a canvas, in particular in her shorter stories. But such instances are few and far between. And, as readers, we keep hoping for redemption, a true and righteous reversal of her characters' fortunes. But Campbell is nothing if not relentless. Perhaps the book's final story, "Boar Taint," offers our best chance. Jill, a young woman married to an older divorcee, has abandoned suburban life in Ann Arbor, choosing instead to live on a farm. The choice has given her a life whose hardships she was, in part, unprepared for even after preparing for them. On the surface, "Boar Taint" is the story of an errand, as Jill leaves the farm one day to purchase a boar from a bleak and cruelly reticent family who offer Jill an outward representation of her most internalized fears. The ultimate goal of her errand is breeding pigs, though, as a way to both supplement her income and suggest to herself (and her husband) that she's made the right choice with her life, and so she's forced to go through with it. The pig is, to all parties, a metaphor, and, what's worse, Jill knows it. But just when the story looks bleakest, when her errand looks like a lesson in failure, the story (literally) rises from its own grave. If the miracle is a metaphor for Jill's life, it's also a metaphor for American Salvage. And precisely why you should read this book. After all, sometimes the things we think will turn out the worst, and leave us smarting, end up feeling very sweet instead.

The Hurt Locker

To date, the American films depicting the War in Iraq have been a mixed bag at best. Their collective efforts reflect nothing about the military conflict overseas. If anything, they show us the defining characteristic of our culture in the early twenty-first century: the desire to actively contextualize what’s occurring as it occurs, with analysis whose depth remains largely unquestioned by those who gravely depend on it. Perhaps the films have taught us valuable lessons, but it’s hard to recall what those lessons are when the moral to the story depends on the narrative’s conclusion. To put it another way: Hindsight may be 20/20, but do they even make a Blackberry App for that?

Some of the problems of these films, however, have also stemmed from their unwitting dependence on the war movie cliches of our century in a time when we no longer trust such devices as a whole, and for good reason. The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, succeeds by largely avoiding these traps. In the space of its 130 minutes, the lines between good and evil blur, but the great fog encasing the War and its origins is not overemphasized, let alone discussed. No larger narrative to the soldier’s purposes issues forth either, no discussion of the mission of the War. In fact, the characters merely exist in the moment, and their only hope is to keep on doing so. In the opening scene, Staff Sergeant Thompson (played by Guy Pearce), the team leader of a United States Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit, is killed. (The film avoids big name performers, who, if they appear, are almost immediately ushered offstage, which is its own statement about the nature of armed conflict.) The opening scene, then, calls the rest of the movie into question: Anyone can go at anytime. Without warning. Thus, the pace is unrelenting, the adrenaline palpable. Parts of the movie take your breath away. Literally.

On the surface, the film explores the lives of three soldiers as they finish the last months of their tour in an EOD unit in 2004. And, while the film avoids cliches, its characters are familiar archetypes we already know from past war movies. Sergeant JT Sanborn, played by Anthony Mackie, is the dutiful soldier who operates by the book and leads by example, even if he doesn't agree wholeheartedly with what's being done. Blond-haired Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) embodies each men’s fears and anxieties; in fact, he's a ball of nervous energy you know won't escape the movie without scars, physically and psychologically. And the third character, the centerpiece of the movie, Staff Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner, is a familiar character who remains difficult to classify. He's somewhere between Apocalypse Now's Captain Willard and the man he pursues, Colonel Kurtz. James’ job is to disarm bombs while Sanborn and Eldridge provide both cover and communication. James has disarmed nearly 800 or so bombs in a row with obvious success. Instead of shrinking from conflict, he pursues it, craves it, and, as the film suggests, develops an addiction to facing his own mortality, sometimes to the detriment of the those around him. His character illustrates the notion that the very thing which affords us survival is often that which brings our survival into question in the first place, a fitting metaphor for the War on Terror. Is James crazy, or heroic? Probably both. Probably neither. Some have labeled The Hurt Locker as the defining movie of the War in Iraq. That remains to be seen. Suffice it to say it's a movie we should all watch, at least once, if only to understand what's happening, on a human level, on the other side of the world.

Destruction Myth

For a handful of years, Mathias Svalina has been an important voice in the collective and disjointed chorus of 21th century American poetry--through individually published (and sometimes anthologized) poems with a surrealist bent, and through the publication of chapbooks either individually or collectively written. Now comes his first full-length collection, a handsomely-designed book worthy of celebration, merit, and envy.

On the surface, Destruction Myth feels simple. Consider its title page: forty-four poems called “Creation Myth” followed by one concluding, longer work, “Destruction Myth.” (The vast majority of poems here are prose constructions). In addition, Svalina’s language is monosyllabic, his vocabulary accessible. Yet, simplicity exists on the surface alone. In fact, simplicity ends once you flip past the title page. The book’s opening lines illustrate this, and more:

In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird
but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird
& this was confusing. Everyone had a headache.

The response to Svalina’s work, especially lines like these, is laughter, and certainly comedy defines his voice on occasion. (How else do you read lines like, “After the beginning of everything the suicide rate increased dramatically,” or “In the beginning there was a void. A tuba”?) However, somewhere behind the closed doors of these poems a smoke alarm blares, and not because everyone has forgotten to change the batteries. No, in a dark corner of the apartment, maybe a closet we didn’t know existed, a small conflagration burns, fueled by objects and artifacts not usually flammable, and ones we didn’t even know we owned.

To achieve its end, surrealism requires a bevy of rhetorical special effects. Reversal, for example (though, not in the sense of peripeteia), is one of the tricks Svalina uses. In many of this volume’s sometimes comic, sometimes tragic post-post-modern myths, the creation of mankind is a kind of afterthought, as though humanity was born into a world already created, its streets paved, its traffic lights flashing from red to yellow to green. Only, perhaps, its bureaucratic impulses aren’t preemptively churning:

In the beginning there were only streets.
There were streets that led to cliff,
Streets that led to patches of dandelions....

There was, however, no Department of Transportation
& over the millennia the streets dissolved into cracks & weeds.
Eventually the living things arrived....

In other places, nonsense governs, and Svalina’s poems echo, therefore, the world we live in now by strange compliment rather than contrast: “In the beginning there was nothing. But the nothing smelled like bacon. No one could figure out how nothing could: a) have smell & b) smell like bacon.”

I could go on. Beyond the tricks, though, what these poems articulate has more to do with the stories we tell ourselves (how we interpret them, how we let them influence our lives and beliefs) rather than the details of the stories themselves. No reader will read the poems of Destruction Myth literally, or even be tempted to. No reader will confuse the voice of Mathias Svalina for a god. (No reader I know, anyway). Yet, the question this book poses places us before the mirrors of our own existence: If we can’t take these myths literally, how dangerous is it, then, not to treat the mythology of our own life in the same way, especially in terms of our past and how it helps to understand our present while also directing our future? Where, then, do we draw the line? Or, can we? Perhaps, as Svalina himself might suggest, we ought stop drawing the line, because the lines have already been drawn for us. Instead, we ought to start drawing outside of them. As soon as we can. It’s the only way to create a new and lasting mythology

The Duchess of Langeais

Jaques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais (titled more sharply in its original French as Don’t Touch the Axe, a reference to the beheading of Charles I) presents a spellbinding adaptation of Honore de Balzac’s short novel of the same title worthy of both our momentary rubbernecking and long-lasting artistic contemplation. The movie begins in medias res (or nearly at the end of the story actually) in 1823 on a Mediterranean island home to an order of Carmelite nuns where the film’s protagonist, Napoleonic war hero General Armand de Montriveau, has finally tracked down, after five years of fruitless search, the object of his unconsummated and tormented affection. Once known to friends as Antoinette in Paris, the Duchess is now known only as Sister Theresa on the island. Armand, through the help of an associate, uses his social status as a symbol of legendary bravery to gain entry into the convent, a place forbidden to any man not the confessor of the Sisters. The gesture represents entirely his character as a tragic figure in the Athenian sense. It’s his social status and stubborn will, after all, that lead him to Antoinette, and likewise those twin forces that ultimately forbid him from her--both during their affair, and here again, at the end of the story (and the beginning of the film).

What follows this deftly arranged, if ill-fated, meeting between the pair retells their story from the start. Their affair, if you can call it that, presents a fascinating study of inner contradictions and outer contrast. Consider, for instance, an early scene between the two when Armand asks to kiss Antoinette’s scarf. “I regard you enough to give you my hand,” she tells him. “Will you always give it to me?” he responds. “Yes, but we will leave it at that,” she adds, sliding a glove on slowly over her long fingers and wrist. Part Beauty and the Beast, part Fatal Attraction, Antoinette and Armand seem most at home testing the confines of their rigid social restrictions, as if inflating a balloon with as much air as possible without wanting the balloon to burst. As Armand, who meets Antoinette by chance at a ball one evening, tells her of his heroic past over a series of private meetings, his passion grows. But the more he offers her himself, the less outwardly interested she becomes. In fact, his affections toward her only repel, until she draws near again under the threat and intimidation of the General. Armand soon tires of this game. A soldier by trade, he takes matters into his own hands, blindfolding and abducting Antoinette one evening as she leaves yet another ball by carriage. His brute strength and desperation, though, only show Antoinette his elusive wit and seductive capabilities, and not his violent desperation, which attracts her to him once and for all, and eventually turns the tables between the two.

As a director, Rivette not only captures the brilliant performances of Guillaume Depardieu and Jeanne Balibar, but he also stylizes the movie into a perfect blend of colorful art and rash execution. (Balibar, with her round cheekbones, firm jaw line, and cream-colored skin, is nothing short of an otherworldly beauty, and an absolute showstopper.) Parts of the film are minimalistic: no music, save a ballad Antoinette plays on the piano and sings for Armand one evening ("River Tage"), accompanies the film. Instead, it’s the patient sound of background noise that punctuates the pair’s incessant series of flirtation and rebuke: the creak of wooden floors beneath the feet of 19th century aristocratic society, the pop and snap of wood in the fireplace, the incessant ticking of the clock, and, most notably, the pouncing sound of Armand limping to a stumble with every desperate step he takes. Yet, parts of the film are quite over-the-top in a way that’s both delicious and consuming, too. Borrowing perhaps from silent film, Rivette allows intertitles of text to splice the story, sometimes right in the middle of critical dialogue. Instead of contextualizing the action, though, the intertitles create perceptible voids in the narrative, deleting objectivity and rendering the heartbreaking into the wryly comic, and visa versa.

Of course, other noteworthy elements of the story remain at large: Where is the Duke of Langeais, and what has he done to the Duchess to make her even entertain the dangerous notion of an affair in a society so choked by etiquette? The questions are both rhetorical and inappropriate. Delight, in fact, is the only response to Rivette’s breathtaking film. Well, that and revelry.

La Ventana (The Window)

In The Window, Argentine filmmaker Carlos Sorin has recast the subtle existential genius of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries as a Patagonian masterpiece of minimalistic and exacting art. (For example, no musical score accompanies the film.) Sorin admits as much in the liner notes to the DVD when he says he tried to recreate the spirit of Bergman's Victor Sjostrom in telling the story of his own Antonio Romero: "Somehow the spirit of Wild Strawberries has remained latent in me for over forty years." The plot presents the archetypal story of the prodigal son, with a slight twist. Antonio's son, a now world famous pianist who lives in Spain, flys home to visit his father, but Antonio, having suffered a recent heart attack or stroke, is hardly the picture of perfect health. Even though it remains unstated, the pending visit between father and son, who have quarreled over the years and suffered through long bouts of silence toward one another, feels final, and an undercurrent of anxiety runs through each character.

The movie begins and ends in a Borgesian reverie. (In fact, Sorin has fun with this. Antonio, an author himself, shows his doctor a book signed by Borges and dedicated to Antonio.) Much of what comes in between is procedural, though not in the way that the Cohen Brothers' adaptation of No Country for Old Men is procedural. Sorin, in the absence of plot, meditates on the quotidian, in particular, how Antonio's caretakers prepare for the day's occasion: A worker has been driven to Antonio's house to tune the piano, an old bottle of champagne dusted off, readied for a toast. Don Antonio's breakfast is prepared, his IV changed. At times, the conversation between Antonio and his caretakers explores, at its greatest depth, what damage an overnight storm has done to his vegetable gardens. Antonio, understandably, is a proud and stubborn man. He wants to dress nicely for his son's arrival. He wants to go outside and see for himself what the storm has done. And Anthony Larreta plays him perfectly, counterbalancing Antonio's vibrant octogenarian will with its own necessary confusion and misunderstanding. It is a deeply human portrait of a man who's near death, and in his eighties. Thus, it's no coincidence that Antonio's large house, San Juan, looks nearly flesh-colored in the long hours of twilight. But it's also a comic portrait, and one with great drama when Antonio walks out of his house, IV in his hand and still connected to him, to examine the landscape of his life one more time.

Much of the film remains unexplained: What are the circumstances of Don Antonio's health? Over what, exactly, and for how long have he and his son disagreed? Why? Sorin refuses, not only to answer these questions, but even to pose them. Some viewers might argue that, in doing so, the script has created an unnecessary void. (At eighty-five minutes in length, Sorin easily could have done things differently.) To criticize the film, though, for such an approach precludes missing the point of the movie to begin with. Neither Don Antonio himself nor his son, or even his caretakers, need or want answers. They simply long for the recognition and reassurance of each other's presence for a final time.

The Bride Minaret

As Wayne Miller writes, Heather Derr-Smith's second full-length collection, The Bride Minaret, "pays close attention to those displaced and/or disconnected from the society around them." A couple of poems center on orphans or refugees. Still others survey the modern Middle Eastern landscape from an outsider's perspective. But more than disconnection, The Bride Minaret is also a book of volatile juxtapositions, where the domestic sphere offers little escape from the surrounding political terrors of our time. "Gift," one of the finest poems in the book, exemplifies Derr-Smith's precise pacing and unparalleled agility. When the speaker's son pushes a cereal bowl onto the floor from his high chair, breaking the dish into pieces, the purposeful yet surprisingly adolescent gesture sends the speaker back to another mystifying moment a decade ago:

It was a gift I bought in Paris
After the Charlie Chaplin festival

And the stranger I kissed by an unnamed canal.
The stranger, too, was unnamed, and we didn't speak.

I didn't know then, nor do I understand now
Why I followed him and why I opened my mouth,
Except

for the pleasure of it.

Later, in "Bit," the speaker reflects of her son, "One day this one I love could kill me, if he wanted." Throughout the book, the voice of Derr-Smith's poetry showcases the capacity to ignite, saying almost anything at anytime, however desperate, satirical, honest, or irreverent. In "Blow," when the political and domestic spheres collide, the speaker reflects that "My son would love war," and "I feel as if I've come home. Genocide always has that effect on me." Or later:

The truth is, poets are liars.
And prayer? Get down on your knees and suck.

In "The Bell," a mother watches children spill out of school when the day is over, which somehow leads to this wonderful stanza:

When my mother dies, I'll change into a man
Living in women's clothes. I have a collection of Nanette Lepore dresses.
I'll go breastless.
She always said there such a wide gulf separating this world from that.
She won't see me. I'll run like a man running like a woman.

Themes change, of course, as we encounter settings like Cairo, Paris, and the West Bank. But, at their core, the poems themselves do not. The work of Derr-Smith is fearless and without peer. At times stark, endearing, wry, or sexy, The Bride Minaret is a must read. And once you're done, you've got to read it again. After all, when the speaker of "Anatomy" says, "I'll do / Everything, everything // Just to touch you," you won't know whether to be frightened or flattered. Or both.

The Girlfriend Experience

Artistically speaking, Steven Soderbergh is nothing less than an enigma. Twenty years ago he made his directorial debut with 1989's Sex, Lies, and Videotape. His efforts made him an indie film hero, and, ironically, earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Some of his best work has also gone largely unnoticed since. Take 1999's The Limey, for example, a highly-stylized crime thriller starring Terence Stamp, or, more recently, the two-part biopic Che, in which Benecio del Toro plays the oft-posterized Marxist Revolutionary with a subtle sense of terror and acute pathos.

However, Soderbergh's also not one to shy away from the mindlessly mainstream. He directed Ocean's 11, and later, Ocean's 12 and Ocean's 13. Nearly a decade ago, a year before he put forth the remake of Ocean's 11 and the first of the Ocean's franchise, he was nominated not once, but twice, in the same category for an Oscar as Best Director of both Erin Brockovich and Traffic, winning for the latter. Furthermore, some of Soderbergh's most enigmatic zest feels like misplaced and unnecessary affectation: Reading through the credits of his films, you'd never realize that he often serves as his own cinematographer and film editor under the psuedonyms Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Berand respectively.

Make no mistake, though. When it comes to contemporary film, Soderbergh is often dubbed a so-called "genius." And, twenty years after his debut, he's finally pieced together a follow-up to Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Sort of, if not directly anyway. 2009's The Girlfriend Experience packages itself as the "mainstream debut" of adult film actress Sasha Grey. Forget for a moment that the phrase "mainstream debut" is somewhat of an oxymoron in this case, that a "debut" almost always precludes a parade of future performances, performances Grey might never get a chance at precisely because she's a porn star. Because, in fact, Grey is the true revelation of the film. The plot tells the story of Chelsea, a 2000$ a night escort whose clientele is Manhattan's upper class. Chelsea offers her clients more than sex; she provides them a listening ear and a beautiful shoulder to cry on. In short, she provides The Girlfriend Experience. But, as the economic crisis of 2008 unfolds, Chelsea too begins the feel the downswing of the market. So, too, does her boyfriend, Chris, a personal trainer who seems mostly benign toward her profession, so caught-up is he on whether or not his own clients will be able to afford to have him train them anymore. Survival requires that their collective tension is thus diverted from each other. Soon, personal crisis follows, and it's Chelsea's performance as a girlfriend that's called into question by Chris.

The cinematography, artistically done by Soderbergh himself, feels like high-class surveillance footage. Most of the angles from scene-to-scene are fixed. Often, set pieces, like couches or counter tops or potted plants, block our views of characters' faces as the dialogue unfolds. The film creates a strikingly vague voyeurism. The plot itself is told out of sequence, and it takes some time for the viewer to piece things together in the first half an hour of the movie. But, as the film nears it's denoument, we're left to question how much objectivity and awareness Chelsea still possesses when it comes to the illusions over which she, at first, seemed in complete control, illusions which have only left things shattered, personally and professionally. As an actress, Grey is smartly understated. But she's certainly genuine, and it's her quiet performance (not Soderbergh's)--in particular her willingness to show and suppress emotion at the same time--that steals the show. One is left to wonder, then: How much of the film is an illusion after all? Is Grey really acting, or playing a character she's embodied for years, albeit under altogether different lighting? Is there any way we, as viewers, or Grey even, can begin to answer these questions?