SLOW FADE

Written for a feature in the August 2018 Sight and Sound about novels set in and around the world of movies. — J.R.

The fourth novel (1984) of Rudy Wurlizer, a remarkable writer better known for his screenplays (including those for Two-Lane Blacktop and Walker, both recently canonized by Criterion), is the only one about movies, but it views salvation as a distinctly precinematic or postcinematic postulate. Following his psychedelic Nog (1969), minimalist Flats (1971), and apocalyptic Quake (1974), Slow Fade is more of a page-turner — as is The Drop Edge of Yonder (2008), a Western that grew out of an unrealized script. It focuses on a wasted septuagenarian macho filmmaker named Travis Hardin contemplating his own demise. Many assume it’s a portrait of Sam Peckinpah, whom Wurlitzer worked with on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, though he also suggests John Huston and Nicholas Ray. And the surrounding dead-beat hustlers, all hoping to turn some aspect of his legend into coin, include his alienated son and a roadie whom Hardin hires to write a script recounting what happened to his equally alienated daughter when she ran off to India on a spiritual quest. The script’s progress is intercut with the director’s drift back to his modest origins, combining the Beckett-like/Buddhist theme of identity loss from Wurlitzer’s earlier novels with a road-movie ambience. Read more

HOW TO LIVE IN AIR CONDITIONING (Introduction to MOVIES AS POLITICS)

My introduction to my 1997 collection MOVIES AS POLITICS. — J.R.

A feeling of having no choice is becoming more and more widespread                                                                                  in American life, and particularly among successful people, who are                                                                     supposedly free beings. On a concrete plane the lack of choice is often                                                                                a depressing reality. In national election years, you are free to choose                                                                        between Johnson and Goldwater or Johnson and Romney or Reagan,                                                                            which is the same as choosing between a Chevrolet and a Ford —                                                                                   there is a marginal difference in styling. Just as in American hotel                                                                                   rooms you can decide whether or not to turn on the air conditioner                                                                                  (that is your business), but you cannot open the window.

                                                      — Mary McCarthy, Vietnam, 1967

I await the end of Cinema with optimism.                                                                                                                               — Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du cinéma, 1965

Thirty years later, both these general sentiments describe an impasse in American life that is vividly reflected in the movies we see and the ways that we see them. If the range of cultural choices apparently available at any given time merits some correlation with the range of political choices, it is also true that Godard’s optimistic apocalypse heralds a new scale of values, though we don’t yet know enough about these to be able to judge them with any confidence. Read more