Reading H P Lovecraft a couple of months back and thinking about why exactly we feel such a thing, and why everyone understands what you mean when you talk of this feeling, has taken my thinking into various knots whose existence have fairly changed the way I look at the human intellect and led me to explore deeper the connection between intellect and the body. That’s what I should be writing about rather than this, which a weird fiction aficionado characterises as angst rather than true “cosmic horror,” but I’m too lazy and the subject gets me too confused. Hopefully I can come up with a post about it sometime in the next year or so, but there’s a good chance I won’t be able to.)

The greatest horror is not in the existence of ghosts or murderous trans-human species with tentacles (both of which I feel fill the same role for horror as God does for existential comfort, the idea that something predicated on the same vicissitudes as day-to-day life is worthy of greater emotion than it simply because it is not our everyday life) but in the passing of time itself — the inexorable, half-noticed way in which time jumps scales — coupled with the need to be productive, the constant asking of oneself, “where have I got?”

There are over thirty days in a month, yet a month consists of but four weeks and a week, but of seven days. It is in this ripple-like effect of wasting even one hour of your life wherein lies the horror.

Click to look inside

Undoubtedly the best Salinger I’ve read to date, Franny and Zooey reads like a more sophisticated rewrite of The Catcher in the Rye. The sour-mannered Holden is here replaced by the mild and diminutive Franny Glass and — in another shape — the somewhat peremptory Zooey Glass, the youngest two members of the family which Salinger came to in all his books except Catcher. The vituperative first-person narrative is replaced by a gentle and keenly observant quintessentially American sort of third person voice straining to break free of the chains created by the limitations of language. The rant about phoneys is replaced by a violent and touching discussion of the value of what one may call mystical philosophy*, a discussion whose majority I’m not in any significant manner qualified to understand except in a skimmy way wherein I surmise the concepts from what is said in the book but the rest of which provided a useful supplement to what I’ve read in S Radhakrishnan’s Indian Philosophy.

The first part, Franny, deals with an encounter between Franny and her boyfriend Lane. Lane definitely qualifies as a pompous arse as per last paragraph, and despite her almost frenetic attempts not to, she every so often goes at him fangs bared, and feels sorry about it every time. She’s surrounded by lessers constantly acting like her greaters, and she has resolved to not set the record straight, to be meek in front of these her nemeses. It’s little wonder then that she has a nervous breakdown.

This isn’t just an incoherent scream; there’s a definite catalyst involved, in the form of a pair of books about a farmer who wants to understand what it is to pray unceasingly. He learns that that’s exactly what it is: unceasingly saying to yourself, “Lord Jesus Christ, have Mercy on me.” till the rhythm becomes a part of your heartbeat and you don’t need to do it consciously any more and then you achieve much greater oneness (there’s probably an Alan Moore video or interview somewhere in which he compares this idea, which is actually a pretty common one — long tracts of the Vedas are just repetitions of God names, for example –, with the effect of art). The first part ends with Franny ruining Lane’s mood, then collapsing, coming to and starting the Jesus prayer.

The second part is called Zooey, and illuminates Zooey’s stand on these concerns as opposed to Franny’s. But first, a bit of history. It turns out that Seymour and Buddy, the eldest Glass siblings, already in their twenties during the infancy of these two, supplemented their reading with mystical philosophies. Because these two, on their philosophical odysseys, had bent more and more towards the mystical philosophers; they felt the need to unlearn the differences between things (Radhakrishnan names this as the goal of philosophy as opposed to science, and this is what I use to characterise “mystical philosophy”) and hope that if these ideas are fed into these two from early enough they won’t have as much trouble.

Zooey is a young actor, slightly bitter at Seymour and Buddy for turning him and Franny into freaks. And he says he’s been through what Franny’s going through. And he proceeds to convince Franny that her breakdown is wrong.

In my review of Catcher, I wrote about Holden, “it is in this rejection of what he believes to be half-human that he expresses his true love for humanity.” Here, at first glance, there is no love for humanity. There is relief at the existence of people not covered with the jaded secretions of American society, but that’s about it. And yet… a little bit more thought shows that the purpose of the Fat Lady is to illustrate that there, in fact, is; the hate is reserved for social interactions. (This in fact curiously mirrors and extends what I said in my Catcher review: “The real fact about these phonies is that we all prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet. Some people just prepare more elaborate ones than others, and they can’t always keep it up.” While I say that it’s vile when sometimes some people’s facades slip, Salinger says that facades are by their nature vile.)

Oh, and it’s magnificently important that both of these are actors by calling, and the final resolution is Seymour’s point that the Fat Lady is watching.

Now, while I’ve stressed on the philosophical aspects of the novel, there is another, equally important one, which Buddy desperately wants us to remember:

I know the difference between a mystical story and a love story. I say that my current offering isn’t a mystical story, or a religiously mystifying story, at all. I say it’s a compund, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated.

As I hope my piece has shed some light on, for Salinger, these two types of story are not all that different.He seems to be a man who felt intensely out of place with people, and always remembered that that was the reason he was compelled to pursue wisdom like a madman. If I had to bet either way, I would bet that he hated his endless thirst, that he envied the people around him who could live without this insane drive; that, in other words, he wished he were the Fat Lady, such is his discomfort with this wisdom.

*Though I refer to it as mystical philosophy, it is in no sense of the pulling rabbits out of hats by the grace of God sort. It is in fact a result of very deep consideration of the states of being. I’ll come to why exactly I call it mystical soon.

So, before I go further, let me just get this one sticky issue dealt with: yes, this book is not well-written at all, but it’s not bad writing born out of laziness – wherein the writer substitutes tropes for actual thought – but that born out of just plain idiocy; deLint knows what he wants to say, knows how he wants to say it, but is not very good in the execution, falling back repeatedly on stylistic tropes like the way a thriller goes around jumping viewpoints for a page here and a page there, giving us ‘depth’ by making the in-view character think about the event most significant to the story right after introducing us to the fact that this character exists. It basically sounds like this: “Abed was coming home that day, and as he stared at the clickety-clack of the window-panes, he got to reminiscing about his failed relationship with Janey. They had been in love for years before calamity struck. And so this had happened, and so that had happened” and whatnot. This, in my opinon, is the worst stylistic trope there is. Yes, even worse than the art novel’s angsty voice (well-parodied in Prashant Bhawalkar’s Unruly Times and J M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year); at least there are people like Coetzee, Chandler and Eliot use the angsty voice to beautiful effect. The thriller introduction is so obviously the laziest way of doing things and so nakedly trying to hold a pretence of thought-realism that I honestly doubt it can be used well, except for the purposes of parody (even the estimable farce artist Terry Pratchett falls for this). Of course, this isn’t confined just to introductions. Any and all knowledge that one of the characters has which the writer wants to convey to us is conveyed in a similar fashion. And it makes me gag.

But, there’s a beautiful book behind this excrescence. It’s a book about art and how we relate with our art. And it’s told as a parable about the art that I find it hardest to relate to – music – and the art that I find easiest to relate to – writing. What’s not to love?

De Lint seems to be saying that our art needs to be ascribed a life of its own if we are to ascribe it with any power whatsoever. This power, the power to connect to our surroundings and channel it through ourselves and thereby make others connect to us, is magic (an alarmingly common notion actually).

She knew this music–knew it down to the very core of her being–but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.

And there’s no power in the supposed magic unless there’s life in it.

Simple as that, really. That’s what the book is about. There’s a book within the book that’s different for every person who reads it; because it’s magical, because it channels another real world and lets you read about someone who corresponds to you in that world. And music is what’s common to both worlds.

But, of course, you’ll notice, what I’ve said the book is about is just a setup, a description of how things are. There’s epiphany too, as is necessary for a book to be good. Don’t worry. This is a lovely book; it won’t let you down thematically.

It should come as no surprise then that I also hate Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s generally well-reviewed Joker. In which, incidentally, the Joker looks almost exactly as he does in the movie.

The idea is to write a book about the Joker set in an ultra-noirish world, where everyone is evil and “only cops call people ‘scumbag’. People refer to people by other words.” And, Harley Quinn turns up naked in a strip club (stark realism that refuses to mollycoddle the reader!), and everyone’s face is pitted beyond belief. Sometimes even at the cost of making the character look laughable. Yes, in this case, the size of the nose is as much at fault, but it’s the lines on it that really make me cringe. And, forget faces, there are far too many lines on everything. Of course, we could always blame the inker, Mick Gray, as the parts inked by Bermejo himself don’t look nearly as bad (if you ignore the bizarre pose good old Harley is in over at the back).

But I’m not going to let Bermejo off so easily. There’s, for starters, the fact that faces don’t look the same from one page to the next. Yes, it is a testament to the shifting and uncertain nature of Joker’s reality. Yes, it is exactly as hackneyed, unsubtle and one-dimensional as it sounds.

And then, there’s the minor problem of the fact that nowhere in this book did the Joker truly send ripples of goosebumps up my back, despite the fact that he actually has some very good lines. The Joker’s face may well be locked in a perpetual smile, but the smile never reaches his eyes. Look at the way he walks out of Arkham Asylum:

Why so serious, man?

Of course, more than with the art, this is a problem with the writing, which is an unlovely colossus of Holvudine psychology whose sole purpose is to describe an interesting villain. Never mind that the psychological portrait – inasmuch as it makes sense; internal contradictions abound – has little, if any, resemblance to the mythological symbol it tries to explicate. Seriously, is there any Joker worth our time who would be angry during his release from Arkham Asylum? Is there any Joker who would … ahem … “salute” the city as this white-faced guy does? The last I checked, the Joker loved Gotham, and didn’t really care about territory and respect as he does in this book.

And, most importantly, the guy should be allowed to choose to smile, not have his lips pulled tight by a scar.

What do I want from a graphic novel about the Joker? I don’t want a definitive explanation of seventy years of villainy; what I want is an interesting perspective. Because, finally, that’s the only thing any one writer can offer, for any mythological figure. I love other Joker-explanatory novels, like Alan Moore, Brian Bolland and John Higgins’ The Killing Joke, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum and Bob Hall’s I, Joker (the first and third being my two favourite pieces of art featuring Batman), and all of them, if seen as a definitive explanation, look hackneyed and idiotic.

What I don’t want is an uninspired, “starkly realistic!” piece featuring a white-faced man being diagnosed by an emotionless psychiatrist who calls himself a writer; and that, dear reader, is exactly what this Joker is.

Transliteration:
Chhoti-chhoti chitrayi yaadein… bichhi hui hain lamho ki lawn par,
Nange paer unpe chalte-chalte itni door aa gaye hain,
ki ab bhool gaye hai joote kahaan utare the

Edi komal thi jab aaye the,
thodi si nazuk hai abhi bhi.. aur nazuk hi rahegi
In khatti-meethi yaadon ki shararat jab tak inhe gudgudati rahegi..
Sach.. Bhool gaye hain joote kahan utaare the
par lagta hai ab unki zaroorat nahi…

Translation:
All the little shreds of memories that are scattered on this lawn of stolen moments:
My feet have walked on them for so long
That they’ve forgotten where we left our shoes.

My soles were soft when we came,
And they are somewhat vulnerable still;
And indeed they will stay that way
For as long as the pranks and games of these bittersweet memories go on
Tickling them.

It is true,
We’ve forgotten where we left our shoes,
But now it seems that we don’t really need them.

Perfect Balance

I didn’t watch Jab We Met for three years simply in my scepticism about the existence of a good Bollywood romantic movie, these days when most Hindi movies seem to me like ugly mashups of Bollywood and clichéd Hollywood aesthetics (Mr. Ali thankfully stays away from Hollywood style editing and scriptwriting)..

While Jab We Met is not a great or even a good movie, it sure as hell is not a slight movie.

It could have been great, if it had ended around an hour earlier. The guy’s left the girl with her boyfriend and is crafting himself a successful life of his own.He’s entering a boardroom and suddenly the girl’s next to him (“Naa hai yeh paana… na khona bhi hai… Tera naa hona… jaane… kyun hano hi hai“; “This is neither being with you nor is it losing you; your absence, I feel, is as your presence”). He takes her hand as she leads him into the room and they dance in front of the board members, and the ending of the dance fades into their applause: he’s learned something, he used to be stuck-up and sad and about to kill himself (by jumping in front of what Ali shows to be a toy train, as if the stakes were somehow low) and then he met a woman,  uninhibited and irresponsible and ultimately beautiful, and he’s learned from her and now he has achieved perfect balance, that thing that is so rare when two opposing yet neither untrue worldviews come into contact.

After this, how can the fact that he eventually gets the girl be anything but incidental?

Franklyn, directed and written by Gerald McMorrow, starring Eva Green, Ryan Philippe, Bernard Hill, Sam Riley and William Faulkner (not the writer)

The Fall, written by Dan Golroy, Nico Soultanakis and Tarsem, directed by Tarsem, starring Catinca Untaru and Lee Pace

Many spoilers be here, for there is nothing to be said about these movies without discussing their endings, and I don’t see that they spoil the movies.

Milo: I heard this story once when I was a kid, or read it. It was about a storyteller who was so good at telling stories that everything he made up became real. So the storyteller creates a world for himself where he’s the king of the castle, has a beautiful princess on his arm. And then, one day, he wakes up. He looks around. He kisses her on the cheek and… legs it.

Dan: Why?

Milo: I don’t know. Even though his life was perfect, absolutely perfect, he had the feeling he should be somewhere else. With someone else.

From The Fall; this is a typical example of the respect that Tarsem has for the laws of optics

Promotional image for Franklyn; from left to right, Sam Riley as bereft lover, Ryan Philippe as masked man, Meanwhile City and Eva Green as disrubed art student

Now, finally, is the time I have to admit that I’ve never been quite comfortable with the classification of art into “great” and “not great.” Yes, I’ve myself indulged in it; but only in cases when I’ve been utterly certain. The reason that it is now that is the time is that I’m going to write about two utterly amazing fantastical movies which I cannot in honesty call great but which I don’t think I’ll ever be forgetting.

Franklyn is about four people: a masked man in Meanwhile City (the other three are in London) – a steampunk city in which it is the law to belong to religion, whether it be deep or based on washing machine instructions and in which the masked man is the only religionless man – trying to kill the head of a murderous religion (called, in a fit of inspiration, The Individual), an art student who enjoys attempting suicide, a bereft lover whose fiancé has just left him, and a father whose son escaped from the mental asylum on the eve of his home visit. Well, technically there’s also the guy who insists that your actions’ consequences are felt by people you haven’t met.

The Fall is about a five-year-old Latina girl Alexandria who’s broken her arm and by accident meets a stuntman with broken legs, Roy, in the hospital. Roy starts telling her a story about five bandits who have sworn to kill the terrible Governor Odious. Roy, however, has a death wish and… what he does about it, he invites my profoundest contempt (till the end, anyway, but I’ll come to that shortly).

The first thing in common between these two (apart from the fact that I watched them both this weekend) is that they are about the power of storytelling. The second thing in common is that I proudly admit that I don’t really understand them, though I have an emotional sympathy for them.

First, Franklyn. How can I describe the formidability of Mr. McMorrow’s vision without going on for a thousand words about the plot? Simple: the fifth guy disappears. Ka-boom, we feel as the camera slowly zooms in on an unmanned mop.

For those (everyone, I expect) for whom the last was too vague, here’s the deal: masked man is the “alter-ego” of the son of fourth guy (Meanwhile City exists only in his head), head of the religion is fourth guy and fifth guy… in Meanwhile City he’s the mayor. In London, he is the pastor at some church, a janitor at the hospital in which the art student is a regular who says that you action affects the people you’ve met and a guy in a mental institution who shares the bereft lover’s hallucination of his childhood sweetheart; he’s nothing either more or less than some sort of overseer of stories. And in the end, he disappears, right after some tricks with character placement subtly suggest that all four protagonists exist within each other’s heads, much like this.

Yes, like much good fantasy, Franklyn is about the power of stories. I just don’t know how. Franklyn is the more formidable in terms of vision, but The Fall is the one which stumps me more deeply.

It’s scary. Roy almost kills Alexandria in his attempt to get enough morphine to kill himself and then concludes his story in a way that scares me will traumatise her for life, and yet I’m with him. This is how the story deserves to end, some sort of balance: the real guy doesn’t die, so the people in the story have to. It makes no sense to me, but I’m emotionally completely taken up.

Click to look inside

Is there anything I can say about Waiting for Godot without sounding either contrived or clichéd? I can think of five:

1.       It’s hilarious. Uproariously funny, even on paper.

2.       It features that rare representation of a gay couple/pair isomorphic to gay couple in which neither could be replaced by a woman without changing the dynamics.

3.       It’s about the stories we tell ourselves. I could write a long essay defending this sentence, but I don’t care enough.

4.       It’s not very existentialist: there’s much hope in the face of the understanding that Godot is a story as much as any of the side characters’ shifting identities are.

5.       It’s not that great: it provided me neither with enough fun nor with enough freshness of insight to justify its reputation.

Movie: Almost Famous (2000), 122 min

Writer/director: Cameron Crowe

Actors: Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Kate Hudson

Story: A high-school boy is given the chance to write a story for Rolling Stone Magazine about an up-and-coming rock band as he accompanies it on their concert tour.

Watching Almost Famous is akin to the experience of living through a whole life.

Okay, it’s not. When all is said and done, it’s only a ninety-minute movie. But that doesn’t change the fact that the one thing I remember about the movie – Keats’ tuneless melody – is a feeling of–– I don’t know how to describe it; suffice it to say that it’s wrong to say that we don’t feel that we’ve lived through a whole life.

There are all these people, and I don’t like or dislike them, I don’t get the slightest inkling of what drives them or what they aspire to, but I’m glad to have met them, and feel as if I know them; much as in real life.

I don’t know whether there’s any more worth saying about this movie, except that I don’t really understand why I like it as much as I do.