Ignore the Hype: The Novel Euphoria Isn't

EUPHORIA (2015)

Lily King

Grove Press, 261 pages, 9780802123701

* *

As an undergraduate, I read Margaret Mead’s seminal ethnographic work Coming of Age in Samoa. Even though it was already an “old” book (published in 1928), one of my takeaway points was that academic writing doesn’t have to be stultifying. I mention this because Lily King’s latest novel—based loosely, as in very loosely, on Mead—is a boring book. I suppose it’s something of an accomplishment to make one of the 20^th century’s most fascinating people seem dull, but I doubt that was King’s intent.

Euphoria has been highly hyped and well reviewed, with Salon having pronounced it as an early favorite for the year’s best novel. Methinks the praise has come from reviewers too young (or too lazy) to learn much about Mead and are too eager to settle for a (semi) Cliff Notes look into her character. Although novelists are not biographers and are free to imagine what they wish, King’s decision to model her character Nell Stone upon Mead (1901-78) suggests she’s writing historical fiction. So too does her decision to make Stone famous and set the book among primitive New Guinea tribes. Don’t believe any of it, even though every major character in this book is tangentially based upon a real anthropologist—Schyler Fenwick is a stand-in for Mead’s second husband, Reo Fortune; Andrew Bankson is a paste-up of her third, Gregory Bateson; and Helen Benjamin is modeled after Mead’s mentor, Ruth Benedict. But this book isn't about anthropology; it's mostly a love triangle between Stone, Fen, and Bankson. To that end, King mostly mines biography for details that lend themselves to cheap psychological analyses or advancement of dodgy plot devices. For instance, “Fen” comes across as so intimidated by Nell’s scholarly fame that he has become insecure, lazy, vain, and cruel. He’s one part slacker, one part tyrant, and one part cuckold—hardly the sort of man who later evolved an important mathematical theory (Fortunate numbers). Bankson, by contrast, is so psychologically damaged from the deaths of his younger brothers that we wonder how he was capable of conducting research among fierce Kiona tribesmen, let alone woo the headstrong Stone.

In the novel, by the way, Nell’s lesbian relationship with Helen is presented as an acknowledged fact. This allows King to engage in some heavy-handed prefiguring of Stone’s work among Tam women—the name given to the gynocentric tribe she and Fen are studying—and to set up a homoerotic ritual later on. In life, a Mead/Benedict relationship remains speculative and, suffice it to say, the ritual King cribs is quite different in Mead’s ethnography. (Mead did have a lesbian relationship with anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, but this was after her marriage to Bateson dissolved.) But these contrivances are positively convincing compared to hints of Fen’s bisexuality and a subplot involving his desire to plunder a totemic flute from the Mumbanyo people. (Apply whatever Freudian reading you wish here.)

My objections to Euphoria are not based upon making Nell out to be sanctimonious or difficult—both adjectives were rightly applied to Ms. Mead—rather King’s larger sin of making Stone/Mead dishrag vulnerable and uninteresting. Although King touches upon bigger issues—Stone’s struggle to be an unconventional woman in a male-dominated society, the cultural arrogance of Western anthropology, the lingering question of what field researchers understood versus what they misconstrued—these, and New Guineans in general, are dealt with as exotic backdrops for Western jealousy, love, and lust. Do we really care about a triad involving an obsessed female researcher, an arrogant ne’er do well, and a lovesick sad sack? Let me put it this way: Would you volunteer to live among them? Euphoria left me with ennui. –Rob Weir           

Jabob Lawrence Migration Series at MOMA Not to Be Missed

One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Works

Museum of Modern Art (New York City)

Through September 7, 2015

The theory of relativity works for history as well as physics; that is, the nature of reality depends upon the position of the observer. For white Americans, World War One conjures stories of the Argonne Forest, Belleau Wood, and the Marne; World War II inspires narratives of Monte Cassino, Normandy, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Not so for African Americans—the U.S. military was segregated until 1948. Although nearly a half million black men served during the two world wars, those numbers are small potatoes when compared to the real mobilization during wartime: the Great Migration––the movement of 6.6 million African Americans from the South to the North. Among those observing the Great Migration was black artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), whose 1941 Migration Series remains one of the most vivid depictions of America's greatest voluntary internal population shift. (By way of contrast, just 500,000 Americans took part in Westward-bound wagon train sojourns between 1843-69.)

A new show at New York's Museum of Modern Art reunites for the first time in decades all 60 of the panels Lawrence painted to document the Great Migration. It is at once an audacious and poignant show—audacious because Lawrence was just 21 when he undertook the project, and poignant because he pulled no punches about why African Americans left the South, the promise of the North, or the disappointments that accompanied the occasional joys. The why was simple: Jim Crow, lynching, exploitation of black labor, and everyday indignities. Lawrence had a gift for vivid understatement. For instance, he represented the poverty of Southern blacks with a sparse scene of a man and woman staring down at their bare table and an empty fry pan hanging from the wall. To show the backbreaking labor to which children were subjected, he borrowed from ancient Egyptian art to show uneducated youngsters as so many hod carriers for an unseen white pharaoh.

When war created employment opportunities, black men and women flocked to rail lines headed north. In one panel, Lawrence drives home the theme of flight by juxtaposing a mass of black bodies headed in the same direction as an overhead pride of crows. Northern cities dazzled and intimidated, as one can see in a blocky riot of colorful tenements worthy of Mondrian.

 
But even at 21, Lawrence knew the downside; he chronicled race riots in Chicago and East St Louis to remind viewers that racism was alive and well north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Nor did he shy away from calling out black snobbery, such as fashionable veterans of the Harlem Renaissance (1918-36) who saw newly arrived southerners more as flotsam than as kindred spirits.

 

In the end, though, think of the contrast between then Egyptian-like hod carriers and Lawrence's touching portrayal of three girls doing math on a school blackboard. Call it the end of ignorance, which is so often the beginning of defiance. It is instructive to consider that Lawrence's Migration Series came the same year A. Philip Randolph threatened to mobilize a black march on Washington, D.C. and forced President Roosevelt to ban discrimination in the defense industry. Many historians (including me) see that as a key moment in launching the modern civil rights movement.  

For his part, Jacob Lawrence went on to become one of the 20^th century's most important black artists, and one who produced other works depicting black history. He is sometimes identified as a Harlem Renaissance painter, though its energy was nearly spent by the time Lawrence's family moved from Atlantic City to Harlem in 1930. But to remind us of other ways in which politics and culture intersect, the MOMA exhibit also includes poetry from Langston Hughes, book jackets from Richard Wright books, Depression Era photographs, and a terrific corridor where one can rest whilst listening to selections from now-iconic black musicians such as Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Lead Belly, and Paul Robeson. Want to know what the Great Migration brought? Watch the 1959 video of Billie Holliday singing "Strange Fruit," and you'll figure it out really fast.

Do not miss this exhibit if you're anywhere near the Big Apple between now and September. Observe Jacob Lawrence's world. –Rob Weir

Arts & Entertainment Novel Makes Warhol Look Like a Prophet

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENTS (2014)

Christopher Beha

Ecco, 288 pages, 978-0062322463

* * * ½

In 1968, Andy Warhol remarked, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” What seemed trite then seems prescient in the age of reality television, media confessionals, game shows, instant news, the Internet, and marketers whose sole purpose is to generate buzz. Audiences for shows such as The Voice and American Idol birth a new star every week and command it to supernova the next. Christopher Beha’s breezy novel Arts and Entertainments is a topical comedy that takes on this world. It’s based on a consideration of what might happen if a person got trapped in an autobiographical reality television (RT) show he could neither control nor exit.

Enter Eddie Hartley, a guy so striking in appearance that even street bums call him “Handsome Eddie.” He’s the kind of guy who looks good on stage and screen so, naturally, he became an actor. The problem was that Eddie was a terrible thespian. Even his wife, Susan, says so and Eddie knows it’s true. That’s why he gave up performance to teach acting at the private New York City Catholic school in which he was once a student. At age 33, Eddie is years removed from the spotlight and nearly broke. There’s no way he and Susan can afford the expensive fertility treatments she hopes can bring a child into their marriage. About the only thing Eddie has going for him is that lots of people know he once lived with actress Martha Martin, who is definitely the media buzz girl of the moment. She’s so gorgeous (and ubiquitous) that horn dogs Google her hoping to find naked photos of her glorious body. There aren’t, but there are lots of people who’d pay a lot of money to get their mitts on one. As it so happens, Eddie and Martha made a sex tape early in their relationship. This, as we know, won’t end well!

Eddie’s compromised morals bring him cash, but the rest of his life spirals out of control when Susan is outraged. Or should I say recruited? She throws Eddie out and options her marital discord to a RT company that follows her every movement. Before Eddie knows what hit him, he’s camera fodder as well; he’s the bum in Susan’s RT melodrama. Martha’s as well. Even worse, Eddie is inside a story he doesn’t write, approve, produce, or direct, so the only thing he can think of to do is to join the RT team and hope he can bend the story to his advantage. But once he does this, how can Eddie tell what’s real and what’s TV? Where’s the off ramp?

Beha’s novel is the classic one-trick pony, but it’s the kind of horse you can’t stop watching—just like those trashy RT shows we write off as “guilty pleasures.” There are all sorts of ways one could interpret this book, the most obvious of which is self-reflection on the question of what any one of us would trade for fame. Another would be to drag out your undergrad Philosophy 101 notes and brush up on Parmenides, Kant, Descartes, and all those other folks who wrestled with big ontological questions. Or we could put on a Lit Crit hat and note that Beha’s conversational style isn’t exactly Steinbeck-like in majesty or command of prose. But any attempt to intellectualize this book misses the point: it’s supposed to be shallow. How weighty can one get in a zero gravity culture? Next up: Two miracles are attributed to Andy Warhol and he is proclaimed a saint.  –Rob Weir   

If You Liked Gone Girl, Check Out Dark Places

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DARK PLACES (2009)

Gillian Flynn

Broadway Books, 349 pages, 978-0307341570

* * * * *

Before there was Gone Girl, there was Dark Places, which for my money is a superior effort by Gillian Flynn. Dark Places will appear as a movie latter this year and it might be a good idea to read the novel first as liberties are being taken with the original. Moreover, as many readers know, Ms. Flynn’s Gone Girl was a terrific novel, but Hollywood’s treatment of it was merely so-so.

Gone Girl was about bourgeois society, but Dark Places is, well, darker, with a take on rural farm country poverty that’s Carolyn Chute-like on the bleakness scale. The action shuttles between the indeterminate present and 1985, the year that five-year-old Libby Day was the only survivor of a brutal massacre in which her mother and two sisters were butchered inside their Kansas farmhouse. Her older brother, Ben, has been in prison ever since for what the courts determined—partly on Libby’s testimony—was a drug-addled satanic ritual slaying. And not even Libby avoided harm, as her flight into the winter woods led to several amputated frostbitten toes and fingers.

As we move to the present, Libby has a more pressing problem. When news of her misfortune hit the media in 1985, donors and well-wishers set up a trust fund for young Libby, but twenty plus years later the money’s nearly gone, the public is occupied by newer thrill parades, and Libby is living in hand-to-mouth squalor in a down market trailer park. Out of the blue, a man named Lyle contacts Libby and offers to pay her for a personal appearance before the Kill Club, a consortium of do-gooders, get-a-lifers, and creeps dedicated to getting at the “truth” of various sensational murders across America, including the 1985 slaying of Libby’s family. It seems that numerous Kill Club members have been in contact with Ben and are convinced that he’s innocent, that Libby’s “false” memory was planted by child psychologists, and that she needs to help them expose the “real” killer.

Libby is certain that Lyle and his cohorts are ghoulish conspiracy theory crackpots, and prison meetings with Ben do nothing to convince her otherwise. Still, she needs money and the Kill Club is willing to pay her to track down suspects on their list: Libby’s tramp father Runner, who abandoned his family years earlier, but showed up whenever he needed booze or drug money; Trey Teepano, an older boy with whom Ben hung out and who was a known Satanist; and Diondra, rumored to have been Ben’s girlfriend. They also want to hear from Krissi Cates, a stripper who was then an eight-year-old who accused Ben of molesting her.  Senseless murder… Satan… copious amounts of blood…. cokeheads… alcoholism… crippling poverty… hobo camps… strip clubs… pedophilia….  Talk about your stroll down Low-Life Lane! I doubt anyone has ever accused Ms. Flynn of being the Queen of Sunshine.

Okay, so this is not an uplifting novel. It is, however, a very taut murder mystery and, if you know anything of Flynn’s work, you know that even revelations come drenched in moral ambiguity. It’s a whale of a story and its look at social class is sharper than in Gone Girl. Another reason to read the book and not wait for the film: Rumor has it that parallels to the Manson cult murders are grafted into the narrative. Why? If you’ll pardon the expression, that seems like overkill.  –Rob Weir

Nashville Female Roundup: Make Me a Star

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Nashville is to singer-songwriters what Pittsburgh used to be to steel. The first question one must ask, though, is whether the Starmaker Machinery (phrase courtesy of Joni Mitchell) is cranking out high quality products or interchangeable widgets. The second question is whether supply has outstripped demand. The marketplace will probably resolve both of these questions better than I, but what I've heard in the past year leaves me torn between optimism and pessimism. Here's my take on a crop of several female Nashville recording artists.

Sometimes the best "new" singer-songwriter is a vet who has been kicking around but hasn't yet made the big leap. Garrison Starr heads that list for me. Her slightly nasal young-sounding voice belies the fact that she just turned 40, has 10 LPs to her name, and has been shuttling between LA and Nashville since 1993. Her latest EP, The Forgotten Street is a damn good reason to discover her if you've not already. Call these five selections 'trials-of-love' songs mostly in a country/pop vein, though her "I Could Be Your Girl" is evocative of Robyn's dance hall tunes. Starr has a supple voice that can be little girl-like, guttural, tender, or heart-wrenchingly gorgeous and what she knows that a lot of youngsters don't is which voice to put with which song. You can hear this on "In the Silence," available on YouTube, though my personal favorite is "Halfway Whole," a healing-in-process exploration that's way more honest than 99% of the processed pop platitudes one hears.

All the Pretty Things, the Nashville debut release of Ashley Riley (her third overall), induced less excitement for me. Riley has a bit of Emmylou Harris husk in her voice, but not nearly her range or depth. The album title (and its second track) sum up all that's promising and still in development about Riley's music. She indeed has a pretty voice, but she needs to add colors to her vocal palette instead of relying on shiny baubles. For example, she has a song titled "Love Shark" that, like many of the selections, simply needs to be tougher. This is particularly the case if she is going to keep working with her current band, one that features heavy bass lines and electric guitar breakouts. Put directly, Riley's material is in the country/folk realm, but the instrumentation leans toward pop/rock. She began her career as an acoustic artist and perhaps that was her best destiny.

Sarah Miles might be the artist most likely to break through, simply because she's the one with the most commercial potential. You'll see some of her releases labeled "folk," but that's utter nonsense and she might want to do all she can to discourage that handle. Think Carrie Underwood or Taylor Swift; that is, she's pop music as filtered through those rock-influenced big arrangements favored by the country music industry. She has released four recordings, of which I sampled One (2013). Miles certainly has her pop hooks in order: catchy melody lines, danceable tempos, and a tight backup band. On a less charitable note, One could also be seen as mostly one-note in tone.  With the exception of "Gray," every song on the album opens small and abruptly shifts to high gear. It's a classic pop diva maneuver but, for me, these songs lack to emotional impact of "Gray," where she manages to stay in the slow lane for the entire song. But then again, the pop industry loves singers like this and it won't hurt that the New Jersey-born, UVM grad, Atlanta-based, Nashville-produced Miles is fresh-faced and leggy. If she does make it, good for her. This music isn't my cup of tea, but it's very good of kind.Here's an official video.

Jessica Campbell is trying to follow the same path as Miles. She's an artist whose work I've known for several years and her latest III (2014) will either be the record that makes her, or brings her back to earth. Campbell has a terrific voice and has some fine moments with the pen as well, but she's struggled to find her niche. III is a very Nashville album in that its very slick and polished. The open question is whether its processed like American cheese. There are several nice moments, including "Brighter Days," a soulful pop song, and the chirpy, happy "Better ThanThis." To my ear, though, four of the eleven tracks feel like filler and several others imply fail to ignite. Campbell has certainly paid her dues, but in my heart of hearts I think she's in the same boat as Ashley Riley, and that Jessica Campbell Unplugged is a better musical space.

Rob Weir

The Battle of the Five Armies: Time to Surrender

THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (2014)

Directed by Peter Jackson

New Line Cinema, 144 minutes, PG-13 (violence and orcicide)

* * ½

One of the better sequences of a padded film

After part two of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug (2013), I purposely dodged part three, The Battle of the Five Armies, when it hit the theaters earlier this year. My ennui with the series was akin to the hysterical 1969 Bored of the Rings parody penned by National Lampoon founders Henry Beard and Doug Kenney. I wasn’t bored at all by Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, but it seemed to me that Jackson had said all he needed to in those three majestic films and that The Hobbit felt like Lord of the Rings Lite.

Lord of the Rings made $3 billion on a $280 million investment, so I understand the allure of making The Hobbit, but my skeptical hackles rose when the project mushroomed from a one-off, to two films, and then a trilogy. A trilogy? J.R.R. Tolkien’s namesake book was just 320-pages-long. One can literally read it in a shorter period than it takes to view the three films (nearly eight hours worth). My skepticism was well placed; if The Hobbit were an undergraduate film, it would have been marked down for “padding.” I felt this keenly after The Desolation of Smaug, so I stayed away from the cinema in hope that more time would allow me to enjoy The Battle of the Five Armies with a fresh set of eyes. It didn’t work.

Martin Freeman is delightful as Bilbo; Richard Armitage is convincing as Thorin, the  dwarf king slowly driven mad by greed and dragon sickness; and Ian McKellen, perhaps to his chagrin, was born to play the wizard Gandalf. Performances are uniformly great throughout, including Benedict Cumberbatch’s voiceovers for both Smaug and Sauron. Still, The Hobbit was a children’s book and only four things of note happen in it: the formation of the dwarf/hobbit alliance, Bilbo’s escape from the Mirkwood spiders, Bard the Bow-man’s takedown of Smaug, and the final man/elf/dwarf/wizard clash with the nasties (orcs, wargs, goblins, trolls). In other words, the story could have been told in one film without resorting to tack-on slapstick sequences, giving big roles to minor book characters (Radagast, Alfrid, Kili), and inventing new characters to introduce an elf/dwarf romance (the elfin Tauriel played by Evangeline Lilly.  Jackson even inserted Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) into part three, though she’s not mentioned in the novel.

The problem with The Battle of the Five Armies is simple: once Smaug is felled about 20 minutes into the film, the next 90 minutes are just filler to get us to the culminating battle. I wish I could say the wait was worth it, but it wasn’t. What was spectacular in the Lord of the Rings series is now old hat. Jackson got us to suspend disbelief within those glorious battle sequences, but when obvious padding occurs in The Hobbit we start to ask questions about how a small intrepid band manages to slaughter thousands of orcs, why an orc chieftain can be killed with a single sword swipe on the street but can endure blow after blow and a near drowning in hand-to-hand combat, how you can “kill” ghosts with a sword, etc. In several scenes we watch orcs being mowed down, tumbling as if they were stalks of grain falling before a mechanical reaper. After one mind-numbing scene after another of this, the forces of evil begin to seem more like forces of ineptitude. I suppose this gives thrills in the ways progressing through a video game can satisfy, but at some point the vicarious sensations wear off and we wonder why we are spectators in this video game.

It’s fun to return to Hobbiton, the elves remain magical, and Smaug setting Lake-town ablaze is better than any fireworks spectacle.  Good stuff, but not enough to justify over two and half hours. The Hobbit trilogy made almost as much money as The Lord of the Rings, but count me among the exhausted viewers who are glad this franchise is finished. You know you’ve lost interest when you find the DVD special feature on filming in New Zealand to be way more interesting than the film itself. Time to move on….  Rob Weir

Clouds of Sils Maria an Epic Fail

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014)

Directed by Olivier Assayas

CG Cinema/IFC Film (USA); 124 minutes, R (language, brief nudity, tedium)

* *

This film should have been about them!

Here’s what good about this German-French-Swiss production (in English): gorgeous views of the Swiss Alps and strong performances from Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. Here’s what’s bad: the script, the ham-handed metaphors, the (lack of) direction, any story line not involving Binoche and Stewart, and everything else about this numbingly obvious and boring film. This is a two-hour film that feels like a climb up the Matterhorn.

The setup is that glamorous actress Maria Enders (Binoche) is on her way to honor her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior. Twenty years earlier Wilhelm hurtled Maria to fame by casting her in Maloja Snake, a play and film in which a teenage girl named Sigrid fell in love with an older woman named Helena (who is eventually driven to suicide). Enders is now world-famous, though she’s a scattershot whose life is, by her choice, micromanaged by her devoted personal assistant Valentine (Stewart). As the two make their way toward Zurich to honor Melchior, word comes that he has died. There is also a rumor that Melchior wrote a sequel to Maloja Snake with Binoche in mind as Sigrid at age 40—the age at which Helena committed suicide. But, as it turns out, that’s not quite the case. Maria is told there were just “notes”—though we suspect that Melchior’s widow, Rosa, actually burned the script—and a hot young director named Klaus (Lars Eidinger) plans to direct a revival of the play with Enders this time playing Helena.

Thank me now, as I’ve just made more sense of the script than the film does. What follows is Maria’s retreat to Sils Maria, Melchior’s home deep in the Alps generously donated by Rosa, who wishes to flee Wilhelm’s memory. There, Maria and Val hole up so she can have an existential crisis over aging and decide whether she wants to do the play. Sils Maria is stunning and, as we learn, the Maloja Snake is a cloud formation that slithers through an Alpine valley and entombs the region in wispy shrouds. It is one of the film’s obvious metaphors, representing the inexorable sweep of time, Maria’s clouded judgment, and Maria’s inability to see the potential for another kind of beauty when the postcard panoramas (her youthful visage) fade. Even more, she cannot see that Val is deeply in love with her. Get it? The play within the play…. Nor can she appreciate Val’s attempts to bring her up to date; Maria finds social media, tabloid sensationalism, and new concepts in how to present plays and movies to be shallow. She’s absolutely oblivious to the charms of Jo Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz), whom Klaus wishes to cast as the new Sigrid. What Val sees as freshness and intensity, Maria sees as a boorish bad girl who confuses F-bombs with complexity. (Ironically, that’s right—Moretz is only minimally competent in the film and has all the appeal of Lindsay Lohan in her train wreck phase.) Needless to say, Maria and Jo Ann will have a parting of the ways. Ooohhh—how profound! A play within a play within a play….  

If this sounds like a one-trick pony, it is. The film’s various subplots—Maria’s disdain for another actor, Jo Ann’s scandalous affair with a married man, Klaus’ attempt to articulate his “vision”—have less weight than the Sils Maria clouds. It’s hard to care about anything in this film except Maria/Val dynamic and, frankly, this film would have been much better as a lesbian love story rather than what it is: a series of rambles across the Alps that always end just short of the hike’s stated destination. I suppose it’s also intended to make us muse upon culture and the gap between sheen and substance, but by attempting to make that point through nothing but gauzy surfaces, Clouds of Sils Maria manages to fail on still another level. –Rob Weir