Piece of Cake

Gone Girl is a zeitgeist-fueled masterpiece of exurban, media-drenched, cynical, creepy, hilarious, 21st Century, true-crime-porn, all of that fermenting and fomenting inside a McMansion straight out of a Sominex commercial, with a backyard shed filled with man-cave accoutrements as if Santa Claus has had a bipolar episode.  It is maximally vicious and empty-headedly blissful at the same time.  You watch with a sense of dread and also a strange giddy anticipation.  David Fincher has directed it as a grotesque yet hyper-elegant gloss on film-noir, as well as a shiny-switchblade parody of Lifetime TV movies.  It moves effortlessly toward a bunch of conspicuously unbelievable yet completely realized revelations that shed light on nothing but what movies can be when they are ridiculously well-constructed.

Ben Affleck's Nick is in a shitty marriage to Rosamund Pike's Amy, and the movie begins with her supposed abduction.  I think the conceit the movie is based on (from a bestselling novel by Gillian Flynn who also did the screenplay) is that you don't know who is telling the truth.  But that conceit within a minute or two of the movie is completely vanquished:  the conceit in fact is deliriously deceitful.  It's obvious from the get-go Nick is victim and Amy is victimizer, and that Gone Girl is a charged-up reboot of the old-school femme-fatale plots of  potboiler books and movies like James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and/or Double Indemnity.  While Nick is not really innocent (he has an affair with his young creative-writing student for Pete's sake), he is framed in the movie as a goofy but sweet, five-o'clock-shadowed loser, playing board-games with his twin sister while downing late-morning bourbon in a bar his wife purchased for him.  In the first five minutes of Gone Girl his put-upon stature is cemented:  he arrives home to make sure his pet cat is okay only to find evidence of a break-in and the disappearance of his beautiful blonde wife, an effete, over-schooled knock-out who had to move back to Missouri with him because Nick's mom was dying.

From that initial scene of surprise to a rush to judgment to Nick having to find a defense attorney, the movie's elegant race between back-story (Nick and Amy's first kiss in a "sugar storm" outside a bakery at night, Nick and Amy getting married, Nick and Amy's first fight over money, and so on) and the churn of present-day abduction-story to-dos (Nick and Amy's uptight parents holding a press conference and vigil, suspicious police detectives pursuing the truth and so on) culminate halfway through the movie to a point-of-view switch.  We find out -- guess what? -- Amy has not been abducted or killed or anything like that.  She's just plain pissed and by pissed I mean she's created and executed a whole abduction narrative so detailed and fierce it's obvious this bitch is crazy.  She makes up diary entries to incriminate Nick, draws her own blood to splatter in the kitchen, befriends an idiotic pregnant lady next door so she can steal her pee for a fake pregnancy test.  And on and on and on.  Amy obviously is a femme-fatale Fincher and Pike have assembled as a collage of Madonna in all the videos Fincher made with her, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and a plethora of other blonde-haired, steel-eyed super-sexy ladies who do really terrible things and look fantastic doing it.  Pike's performance is gorgeous and stony and joyous to watch.  She's a robot Medusa, and her voice-over sections as she lets us in on  all her secrets are venom and music combined.

Fincher is the superstar here though.  This is one of those movies you watch knowing how meanspirited and pissy it is and yet the style overcomes the substance, and you are in the presence of true movieness.  And by "movieness," I mean this is a movie that is not about real life in any way shape or form:  this is a work of art referencing (i.e. stealing from) other movies (including Fincher's own back catalog classics like Zodiac, Panic Room and Seven) and spectacularly using those references in pursuit of pure, stupid, cinematic ecstasy.  Fincher, like Hitchcock, understands that movies are not pieces of real life.  They are pieces of cake, and this movie is a morally rotten yet deliciously decorated wedding-cake.  You enjoy every slice not as a reflection of reality, but as an orgasmic joke on it.  Movies like this make going to the movies an experience beyond verisimilitude or an exercise in getting blown away by computer-generated images of oceans toppling over skyscrapers.  Style is Fincher's goddess here; he worships it with every shot, and you follow him wanting to be awestruck by his audacity and dedication to doing what he needs to do.  By the end of Gone Girl, you understand nothing about male-female relationships or 21st Century America or any of that.  You're just grateful Fincher made a movie that makes you feel somehow enchanted, even overcome by, what movies can be and do, no matter what they are about.

Slow Burn

I dreaded seeing Todd Haynes' rendition of James M. Cain's masterpiece of working-class melodrama Mildred Pierce.  It debuted as an HBO miniseries back in 2011, and I just watched it this week.  The dread has a lot to do with my love for the 1945 movie version of Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford.  That movie is one of those classic, campy go-tos, comfortable, fast-paced, and brilliantly arranged so that Joan Crawford can fashion a supercharged, fully-lipsticked star-turn as a trying-too-hard victim who eventually realizes everything she's done for her little bitch of a daughter is in vain.

The novel is a lot more intricate, and also more of a slow burn.  I read it a few years back in a James M. Cain fever-sweep, everyone of his almost-mid-century noirs in a row, including The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.  Mildred Pierce, the novel, has a sleepy-sick pace to it, a flatness that bursts into intense passion at the drop of a hat, so that by the end of the book you feel deeply connected to Mildred and also somehow still in awe of her her alien-ness, her status as a sort of icon that doesn't really represent anything specific outside of her own status as, well, Mildred Pierce.  She's a hard-worker.  She's independent.  She takes the bull by the horns.  But at the end of the day she's ruined by her hugest and saddest flaw:  her deep-seated love and jealousy and resentment and worship of her snotty sinister older daughter, Vida.  And Vida, in turn, is just as mysteriously iconic, lurid and horrible and yet somehow innocent in ways Mildred can't be, in that sad-sack way of all unrequited relationships.  Mildred's intense and self-diminishing love for Vida is the monster in the room, out-monstering even Vida, the true little monster of the piece. 

All of those complications are paved over in the 1945 Mildred for the most part, which makes the thing zoom on through with murder-mystery ferocity.  But Haynes puts up roadblocks in his version, and un-paves those complications, pulling up asphalt layers in order to show us the hows and whats and whys, but also lingering within the mystery of Mildred's messed-up but somehow work-a-day obsessions.  His remake/revision is a stylized, lush but dour "novel for television" that takes itself very seriously, and yet has a strangely insouciant edge that's almost indefinable, kind of like a parody without comedy attached, but the parody is so deeply rooted in the meticulous lighting and set-design and cinematography you experience the overarching distance of Haynes' approach the same way you experience versions of your own dreams:  there's a logic to his determination, a passion to his need to stare at his own made-up Depression-era America.  And while it all makes sense, you don't understand the sense being made outside of the image and the moment and the need that it make sense.

Kate Winslet is Haynes' Mildred Pierce, and Winslet is very comfortable in his universe.  She gives the neo-Mildred a stone-cold docility and sharpness in certain areas, a fatigued loveliness in others, and a bold, tight-lipped lustiness when needed.  The lust and the love combine most intensely and unnervingly in the last segments of the miniseries, when Vida (played like a hellish android with total and abysmal relish by Evan Rachel Wood) is ascending toward a stellar career as a classical singer.  Winslet delivers emotions that usually don't get rarified treatment like this in movies and TV:  total, almost psychotic martyrdom mingling with jealousy and envy and also a fear that she does not deserve the very emotions she's feeling.  Winslet gives these cross-currents of feeling a bedrock in her expressions, in her gaze.  It's the kind of acting a full-speed-ahead movie can't allow to get in.  Hayne's slow-boat-to-China pacing is about capturing those kinds of emotions and allowing them to be absorbed and echoed somehow, become a part of the tightly controlled scenery and symmetry he's created. 

By the end of Haynes' Mildred Pierce, you are in the presence of true need.  Mildred's desire to please Vida manifests in not only total self-destruction but in a sort of self-realization that becomes torment in a scene in which Mildred discovers Vida naked in bed with Monte, Mildred's new playboy husband played by Guy Pearce in a performance that somehow channels emotions without feeling, a tour-de-force depiction of smarm, seduction and ennui.  When Mildred discovers Vida, Vida lights up a triumphant cigarette in her new lover's bed and slowly pulls herself from under the covers, revealing a nudity that is somehow dislocated from sex and love, and even power.  It represents a supernatural vindictiveness, a horrible style that Vida "wears" all the way to the other side of the room, where she slowly sits down at a vanity to brush her hair.  At that point, Mildred loses it, and strangles her. 

You definitely want to strangle Vida as well, and yet as in all of Haynes' strange and stellar oeuvre  (including Far from Heaven and Safe) you also understand the power of movies in that moment, how art can collapse life into a sensuousness and fury unmatchable to the real.

Beautiful Souls




"Holding Hands for Safety" is in my collection of stories The Smallest People Alive, available on Amazon...

 
L. A. Fields, a sweet and kind MFA student from Chicago,  messaged me about answering a few questions she had about what I do fiction-wise for a class she's in.  Here goes...

I looked up the anthology where I first found “Holding Hands For Safety” (in Men on Men 7) and found a review calling your story “fierce and funny,” which is not at all the impression I got (it seems very quiet and serious to me). How would you characterize this story? Or at least what is the impression you hoped to give with it?

It’s both funny and sad to me, and I don’t think you can have either in a story like that without both humor and tragedy working at the same time together to get you through. That said, I also think the class aspect of everything I write can sometimes be misinterpreted as insouciance and “black comedy,” when really it’s just the way people live, point-blank. Poor people, like rich people, have beautiful idiosyncrasies – it’s just that rich people often have more elaborate and intricate ways of hiding those idiosyncrasies, or to transform them into sweet little eccentricities. When Flannery O’Connor talked about why many of her stories featured “white-trash” people, she said something about how many of her characters are stripped of manners and decorum, and that allows the reader to look into their souls. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist. And I think in “Holding Hands for Safety,” all the characters are stripped down to their essences to the point you have access to their souls, and while those souls might be a little ugly and a little worn out, they are beautiful souls none-the-less, especially the souls of the three main characters: the teenaged gay narrator, his punk step-cousin, and the six-year-old girl the step-cousin kills.

You said in an interview with Donald Ray Pollock that you’ve written another novel since The Life I Lead—would you mind telling me what it’s about, and if it’s any closer to finding a home?

Actually it’s Holding Hands for Safety turned into a novel, funny enough. I opened up the story to include many other points of view (including Courtney and Troy), and what happens after the murder. It’s going around now to different places. No good news, yet. Or maybe ever. But I keep trying. That’s the essence of all this stuff: you can’t get deterred. I have a draft of another novel I’m working on now called Johnson City Divas. It’s a homage to James M. Cain and other noir writers. It’s kind of like Mildred Pierce spliced with Jean Genet. A middle-aged drag-queen who lives in Johnson City, Tennessee is one of the central characters. I liked the idea of going with a plot-driven gig for a change. In The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Cain’s plots have both an artificial dexterity and a weird existential necessity. It’s the nexus between reality and phoniness where murderers live. A lovely place for a story.

Having written both novels and short stories, which do you enjoy writing best? Are there differences in how you approach long and short pieces of fiction?

I like writing short stories, but then I get sick of them because I want the terrain of a planet instead of the intimacy of a condo. But they go well together, and most of the novels I write come from the short stories. They intermingle. And some of my favorite novels, actually, read like collections of interrelated short stories. The best I’ve read recently: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.