A Monster Always

So this is the blog post about Philip Seymour Hoffman .  I was just telling Bill this is my John Lennon moment, that desperate feeling of losing someone you never knew but somehow knew through a cultural pipedream.  Scotty got me first.  I was just finishing up a novel about a pedophile when I saw Boogie Nights, and that movie made me feel brave and as if I knew what I was doing because Scotty was in it.  He was stupid, creepy, glorious, and he occupied a space in cinema that was never before occupied and hasn't been since:  he was an inarticulate loser with a beautiful interior life that could only seep out in emotional tirades performed alone.  That scene with Scotty sitting behind the wheel of his souped-up make-believe sports car as he calls himself a fucking idiot over and over into infinity after confessing his love for Dirk is one of those things, right?  It's epic and it's embarrassing, gigantic and very, very small, and yet it also is what makes life worth living.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is no longer among the living.

What the fuck do you do with that?

You watch Capote.  He won the goddamn Oscar for it.

I'm watching it right now as Truman spoons baby food into the mouth of the murderer.  It's one of those dour gorgeous movies, a gothic sweetness leaking through the black Kansas trees.  And Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman is the pale, red-headed sun the whole situation obits.  That lispy, musical, high-pitched voice, that shiny innocent yet somehow despotic face.  He got into that world by seeing its exterior, by examining what things look like from the outside, and he got in.  He got in.  That's probably what made him feel the most alive and yet it also probably damned him to that sad little death.  You know.  The needle in the arm.

You know what?  I don't fucking care how he died.

I only care about him right now.  With his horn-rimmed glasses and his melodic frilly voice and the silhouette he inhabits with the dignity of a queen.  He made the world safer for freaks.  The sad thing is he also was building his own spiral staircase to heaven.

What Else Can I Say? Everyone Is Gay

Behind the Candelabra is a kitschy/kinky title for a movie that doesn't really tolerate kitschiness (it exonerates it), and while the Steven-Soderbergh-directed opus does dance lovingly around kink it is more a homage to the mundane pleasures nestled within an opulent cluster of feelings and possessions than a salacious bio-pic.  It's a Faberge-egg tribute, with a plot driven by a tried and true Lifetime movie arc:  rich old man takes on a young lover and then gets tired of that lover and moves on and then on his deathbed confesses his love.  Michael Douglas portrays Lee with an offhand sweetness and assurance that does not mock the great showman's mannerisms but somehow ennobles them, giving us a Liberace that lives and breathes and can say shit like "I just love to shop," without assigning him to a one-note stereotype.  It is very clear in this movie that Liberace assigned himself to whatever type he felt comfortable being, and this type comes off as a piss-elegant meditation on luxury and perseverance:  he was the hardest working queen in show business.  That "hardest-working" part seems to have fueled his appetites for a lot of things, including sex and palaces and hot-tubs and diamond rings.  Matt Damon plays Scott Thorson, Lee's conquest at the beginning of the flick, with a sort of understated angst and joy that seems to have been borrowed from Mark Wahlberg's performance in Boogie Nights; in fact his Thorson is a tribute to that movie's deadpan kindness and innocent depravity.  Damon ages from 18 to late 20s in the movie, and that process is so believable it's kind of magical, transporting you past the transgression inherent in Liberace's seduction of Thorson and more into the realm of how relationships work.  All the way through Candelabra you're hypnotized by a sort of longing to go back to those days when Liberace could seduce both old ladies in Las Vegas auditoriums and young men with long blonde hair and sweey glassy eyes, without anybody wanting to notice or care.  Sonderbergh has built a visual villanelle of a movie, overly mannered and lyrical, and also completely free of cynicism.  By the end, when Thorson envisions Lee's funeral as his final and gorgeous curtain call, you realize how much judgment people apply to pop-culture and how hard it truly is to actually see things as they really are.  

 



Beam Me Down Scotty

Boogie Nights is one of those seminal (no pun intended) movies that make you understand what movies should and can do when created by someone with a point of view that exists on a level beyond people-pleasing and beyond spectacle.  Paul Thomas Anderson has never been able to accomplish that eerie altered state of both steely-eyed contemplation and movie-movie ecstasy since.  He's tried but usually he stumbles on the "steely-eyed contemplation" part, creating epic yet somehow small-minded, serious-minded pictures that try so hard to be original they lose their minds.  (The Master is probably his worst attempt yet.)  Boogie Nights takes on the 70s and 80s porn industry with a Robert-Altman-frenetic kind of flourish and bombast, but then somehow slows itself down long enough to harden into a real-life dream.  There are textures and perpheries in Boogie Nights that seem both manufactured and incidental, accidental and somehow right on the money.  The early party scene, when Dirk Diggler is taken into the Jack Horner fold, is mesmerizingly messy yet completely controlled.  

It's that sequence in which Scotty first appears.  As performed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Scotty is both buffoon and moral center, a holy fool who haunts Boogie Nights in a way that always brings it back to itself.  I think that's probably what is missing from The Master and all the other movies Anderson has directed since Boogie Nights, that off-kilter, jaggedy nobody who somehow reinvigorates the atmosphere with a sense of  innocence and need.  You feel Scotty's predicament in a deep way because he is not being focused on.  He's always in the background, yearning to be included in the spotlight, but in end he just winds up holding the spotlight on the porn performers he both envies and idolizes.  

If Scotty were to be a central figure, his power as a character would be lost.  His dramatic vigor comes from his intense desire and his banishment to the edges of each scene.  When he does come into focus, he's either chided or bossed back into place, and yet as you follow the overall structure of the movie you also begin to understand that the movie truly is about him.  Hoffman understands this intrinsically, giving Scotty just enough "zaniness" to be comic relief, and just enough tragic splendor to choke you up.  The scene after he lets Dirk know that he loves him is one of the most powerful moments I think I've ever witnessed in movies.  It simply consists of Scotty crying behind the wheel of his car, calling himself names.  It's kind of like a Will-Ferrell lark but also a Tennessee-Williams crescendo, as if Blanche Dubois and Ricky Bobby had a big fat sweet baby.  

I don't ever want Scotty to have his own TV show, or even be featured in Boogie Nights 2.  But I do want to relish the memory of him.  He's more than the sum of his part.