We at the Kugelmass Episodes are proud to present our first-ever edition of Don’t Believe The Hype, an annual list of the top five deep disappointments. We estimate your savings at, bare minimum, nearly 8 unretrievable hours, which you can use for writing poems on the sidewalk or learning to scuba dive, around $68, plus uncountable benefits to your mental and emotional health.
Note that we are not going to mention Snakes on a Plane in the top five, because I figure if you went to that movie, good for you. You knew what you were paying for and probably got it. It wasn’t a disappointment; hell, it was maybe the second-best movie trailer of the year after Spider-Man 3.
This may be a prelude to a post called “Fighting Dirty.” You just can’t tell about such things.
1. Cat Power, The Greatest
I admit that slowcore has been an uphill battle for me. Artists like Low and Cat Power were not an easy transition from the pop harmonies and sparkling guitars of the Beatles, who have always been my blueprint for pop. There was something about the intense Beatles fetish that Elliott Smith had that kept his music from spelunking the deep and dreary darks that gave birth to What Would The Community Think?
Still, I came around. Eventually I realized how piercing Chan Marshall’s covers of other songs were, and it was only a matter of time until I worked my way around to a love of her own songs. Meanwhile, she was going through (and then cleaning up) a messy problem with alcohol, as well as trying to outgrow her reputation for fucking up her live shows.
The results are obvious: Cat Power suddenly became twenty times more photogenic, plus she had a great story of personal change to tell. Her new album was the clincher. She’d abandoned the dark, almost swallowed sound of the other albums for Memphis soul. The album was about wanting to be the best, and being the best, and it had a helpful title that you could use in your record reviews (“This is her Greatest achievement ever”).
The problem, as a sad poet with a droopy beard confided to me this year, while we stood next to the mailboxes, is that her voice doesn’t mean the same thing if the backing is fuller and richer. I can tell you what Memphis soul sounds like: it sounds like Aretha, or perhaps Dusty Springfield. It has a little fire in its belly. Cat Power’s inability to catch that fire is a huge problem. She has no emotion in her voice, and frankly, “Lived In Bars” is leaning a little too hard on the impossible conjunction of alcoholic stories and a sober lead actress.
2. Pan’s Labyrinth
This is the part of the post that’s likely to recur if I write a post on fighting dirty for the sake of art, because the phenomenon of Pan’s Labyrinth is closely tied to the phenomenon of Harry Potter. I think Jane Awake put it well in a recent comment over at Truly Outrageous about Harry: “I think you specifically would enjoy the books if you did deign to read them, because of (if nothing else) the lost heir plot that we talented, misunderstood people love so well. The idea that: This can’t possibly be my real family.”
The problem is that we already know this plot (see my LRB personal ad, also at Truly Outrageous). In fact, Pan’s Labyrinth is full to bursting with things we already know: that fascism is based on unquestioning obedience, that books are good for you, that ancient mysteries are worth exploring despite the danger, and so on. It’s just a series of nicely illustrated clichés combined with a resistance-to-Fascism plot that is so horrific that you would never take a young child to see it. That said, it’s not even a very warm movie for an adult to see. The visuals are consistently dark and menacing, and the already-ambiguous “happy ending” is made worse by the fact that a) the “princess” returns to the kingdom she tried to escape in a past life, to linger there forever, and b) Nobody seems to live there except her “real” parents and a pretty creepy satyr who is not fun and would never shoot pool with you.
So what you have is a movie designed for adults who want to hear one more time how precious they are, and want that wrapped up with some homilies about the perils of the Franco period. We’re way beyond familiar delights here; this is the “lost heir” plot taken to the point of the morning’s affirmation, with lots of horror thrown in to create the impression of depth. Let me hear all my people say “In death, there can’t be life!”
3. The Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am Not
Well, I can’t say they didn’t warn me, because people said they were great. Here’s the thing about the Arctic Monkeys: they are just blokes. They really dug those two Franz Ferdinand records (so did I, by the way), and they thought, hey, what about us? We have some melodic ideas! So they recorded this album that sounds reasonably fantastic but, over time, reveals itself as exactly the kind of shallow woolgathering that gives male human beings a bad name.
After all, this was the year when I promised to hurl my computer across the room if I saw the word “dude” used perjoratively one more time. But then these lads come along and prove that some term has to exist for guys who both hate and lust after girls on the dancefloor, who think their girlfriend is really boring when she’s in a bad mood, and who have vague fantasies of running away from the police, or maybe stealing a traffic sign, or maybe hiring a prostitute. It’s as if the existence of Lily Allen created some cosmic imbalance in the British Isles that had to be rectified by these polar mammals.
I like the Lili Taylor quote from Say Anything: “No. The world is full of guys. Be a man. Don’t be a guy.”
4. The Departed
I have a personal grudge against this film because I saw it right when this blog was getting going, and people asked me to write something about it, and I just couldn’t. It was weird that I couldn’t, because I’d loved Gangs of New York with a passion, and I was perfectly comfortable with amoral masterpieces like Casino. But watching this was like watching a version of Taxi Driver written by a hundred monkeys with typewriters and bad hangovers.
Who is at the center of this film? Is it Matt Damon’s evil cop, looking out for his own advantage? Is it Jack Nicholson, thinking he’s invincible because he has a basically teenage mentality? These people had a great many personal and psychological problems, but hey, c’est la vie, and the fact that they all get brutally killed by the time the film is over didn’t teach me anything.
There is only one way to truly understand The Departed. It is a satire of how annoying it is to be reachable at any time, anywhere, via cellphone, and also a satire of how annoying it is to hear somebody else’s cell phone ring. That’s always happening in this movie, and it’s always immediately followed by a death or at least some yelling.
5. A lecture delivered by Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit, at the University of Pennsylvania
Now, in a sense this is cheating, because Frankfurt’s ridiculous little volume was actually published in January of 2005. (Although to the best of my knowledge it’s still in hardcover, because a paperback edition wouldn’t even stand up next to 365 Zen Sayings For Tranquil Mornings.) But things reach me slowly, ever since I started listening to early Cat Power, and when I saw Frankfurt speak, in the spring of this year, I was genuinely excited to hear his ideas.
I’ve got my doubts about the linguistic theories of Jacques Derrida et al., and I had to consider the possibility that Frankfurt was actually the guy capable of saving us from all this postmodernity, with his fierce stare and rumbling voice and integral commitment to the Truth. I was ready to watch him prove that the failure of language rests not so much in the nature of language itself, as in the failure to use language in an ethical fashion.
Instead, what I got was a man who had attained the nirvana of a perpetual lather over the fact that some people had got it into their heads to use language for something other than truth. Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit is that it is the utterance of someone who doesn’t care whether what they are saying is true, or not. Unfortunately, just as I was walking up to one of the audience microphones, Frankfurt was called away to save Beauty in Milan, and I couldn’t question him directly. But here are the two problems with his theory:
a) The nature of “truth” is extremely changeable, and in most cases involves a large element of untruth which is necessary for comprehensibility but which is also an excess. Thus, I can read a novel like Pride and Prejudice, in which I learn about how Elizabeth Bennet overcomes her prejudices, but in which I also learn about her sisters, and her home, and about Lydia’s elopement with Wickham. Or, I can have Harry Frankfurt look at me seriously and tell me to always be unprejudiced.
The issue here isn’t merely one of mixing instruction with pleasure. The issue is that “truth” comes into being through context (as in a novel where the author creates a setting, a plot, and characters, and employs a style), and that that context is not (except in the worst art) created as a mere vehicle for truth. In some sense, it remains permanently beyond any particular statement to be gleaned in a moment of reading, which is to say that is remains beyond the exigencies of truth.
b) I appreciate that Harry Frankfurt thinks “sales” are the ultimate inspiration for bullshit, but the moralistic fantasies with which he undoubtedly inspires himself (the used car salesman who misrepresents the odometer) are besides the point. Language can be mimetic of desire. Although sales are a technology of manipulated desire, there are also vocabularies of love and beauty that don’t reduce to any particular universal or to the profit motive. They are particular to the last. They are declarations of private worth undertaken in freedom. And they will continue to spring from the caprice of desire long after used cars are distributed free by the government.
One doesn’t presume to write a post about overhyped movies and albums without encountering some defenders of the hype, so let me be the first to oblige: I disagree with you about Pan’s Labyrinth. (Note to those who haven’t seen it: spoilers follow.) I am certainly familiar with (and leery of) the “boo to bad, fun-hating fascists” genre (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin comes to mind), but I didn’t see PL as one of those; at least, if it is one, it transcends the cliches of the genre. I think the darkness of the fantasy world is exactly the point, partly in the correspondences between the dark sides of the fantasy and the dark side of Ofelia’s everyday life, and partly in the ambiguity which runs throughout the film, and of which the ending is the apotheosis. In fact, the ending is intentionally troubling; although Ofelia has protected her brother, her “afterlife” is, as you note, barren, and may not even exist anyway. Similarly, the sacrifices by the other characters in the film (the stutterer, the doctor, the mother) are both dignified (in their motives) and undignified (in their circumstances), much like the Resistance in general. Anyway, whether you like all of this darkness or not, it seems to me that your acknowledgment of it precludes your accusation of cliche. If the movie were meant to be comforting or reassuring, as you say, the obvious way to do that would be to save on all that fake blood and just provide a world where sacrifice is unambiguously successful and clean, not one where men, women, and children are beaten and tortured to death for pursuing an ideal that may not exist. (As for the fascists, while the Captain is often a very good moustache-twirler, he is also characterized and humanized through a number of qualities, chiefly his obsession with his own death. In fact, I am certain Cuarón would agree with you that “in death, there can’t be life,” and would point to the Captain as someone who failed to understand this.)
I also liked The Departed more than you did, I guess, but thinking about your questions about the film, I don’t have any answers, or really any other thoughts about the film. So I suppose I just really enjoyed the performances and the script, and can’t imagine that I’d be able to write anything else about it either. (And I hadn’t seen Gangs of New York yet, that was part of it.)
Er. Guillermo del Toro, not Alfonso Cuarón, directed Pan’s Labyrinth. Mea culpa.
I agree with Tom, and not just because I’m slated to become his chattel in a few months. The setting and plot in Pan’s Labyrinth are familiar, but the dark overtones and ambiguous nature of Ofelia’s quest prevent them from being cliched. Ofelia’s vision at the end of her recovered kingdom may just be a hallucination, as indicated by the fact that we see her die after she sees it, not before; this points to the possibility that she’s not the lost Princess Moanna, as she so fervently believes, but just a child with escapist tendancies who has been driven to psychosis by abuse and trauma. How are books good for you and mysteries worth exploring when you end up blowing your chance at escape with your beloved surrogate mother and dying of a gut wound in the woods?
Even if we accept the fairy tale thread as true (which is equally plausible – and maybe even moreso, considering the effects of the mandrake root) it’s still not presented as a warm, comforting alternative to the fascist world. As you mention, her kingdom is barren and creepy (and also, who the hell would want to rule the Underworld? Not me no sir nuh-uh!). Every entrance to the fairy world involves climbing down into underground caverns – already somewhat gloomy – and there’s not a single shot of it that actually looks welcoming; even that first fairy is a big disgusting bug. The world she escapes to is just as troubling as the real world, and this is what makes it an interesting new interpretation of the classic “escape through books and fairies” plot.
I would also like to defend Cat Power. I figure your critique should probably elicit a more sustained defense on my part. Part of what I love is the tension between the flat affectlesness of her voice and the lushness of the production. It creates this weirdly disjunctive listening experience similar to, say, “Hey Ya” or “Go Your Own Way” which contrast desperately unhappy lyrics with sunny dance/pop arrangements. That’s the kind of stuff I live for with pop songs – it’s like the distortion on J&MC songs that makes the pop hooks underneath that much sweeter.
girldetective, I think that reading of Ofelia’s adventures is fantastic. The idea that her fantasies could be bound up with the traumatic experience of fascism — could in fact be an outgrowth and symptom of trauma — had not occurred to me, and raises the value of the film in my eyes. (The fantasy can, interestingly enough, still be the object of critique even if it is true and the magic is real.) I also like Tomemos’s point about del Toro’s realistic portrayal of sacrifice. One could imagine that realism working as the obverse of Ofelia’s escapist fantasies.
The ending of the film is not so much ambiguous as associative: Ofelia’s death and her immortality in the “Underworld” are largely the same thing. The underworld is a morbid opium dream.
The film’s re-contextualization of the fantasy plot is not cliché, and justifies its “darkness.” Darkness itself is becoming over-used. Episode 3 of Star Wars was supposed to be great because dark. Later Harry Potter books receive the same sorts of praise. It is easy to see how the addition of some shadowy cinematography, emotional scarring, and troubling endings can become another facsimile of merit. At some point, it is nothing but an end-run around a failure of imagination, a failure of the fiction to keep its own promises.
Brandon, I think there is a difference between the disparate sonic elements of “Just Like Honey” and the difference between lyrics and music in a song like “Hey Ya!”. In terms of musical intermixtures of apparently unreconciliable things, I agree that it’s exciting. It’s also hard to pull off. I’ve kept four songs from The Greatest around on my iPod, because I think they do make the disjunctions work (“The Greatest,” “Living Proof,” “Lived in Bars,” and “Hate”).
By the same token, I don’t think the Jesus and Mary Chain have a high batting average. Listening to every song on Psychocandy consecutively is possible, but difficult, and the band’s sound quickly changed after that. They embraced more straightforward stews of bad-ass rock (“Head On”), and then they embraced an early mediocrity and retirement.
So here’s something you should know about my initial reading of Pan’s labyrinth – I read a review that mentioned the ambiguity of the fantasy world, so I went into the theater knowing to look for clues that it wasn’t real. With that said, I just saw it again last night, and picked up a lot more stuff that demonstrates that the fantasy world does objectively exist. Which, unfortunately, lowers my opinion of the film a little (although I still love it).
Also, I think you’re right about the ending. The Underworld and the afterlife are one and the same.
I was going to comment on Pan’s Labrinthy, but this sidetracked me:
“So they recorded this album that sounds reasonably fantastic but, over time, reveals itself as exactly the kind of shallow woolgathering that gives male human beings a bad name.”
Fantastic. I wrote a review of that album – it wasn’t good. (The album I mean. And my review, now I’ve read yours. Yours has the bonus of being much more tightly written.)
You might be interested in The Cribs (both albums) and Kaiser Chiefs (first one – their second just came out but I haven’t listened to it yet).
Toodle-pip!
“Labrinthy”
egads.
And yet, ironically, it wasn’t hardly labyrinthy at all.
I found my post-rock British “B” team (after Franz Ferdinand, who really are immortal) in Bloc Party, though the angry reviews have so far scared me away from their follow-up.
Yay, Cat Power critique! Not mincing words as usual:
Ok i hate Cat Power, I admit. I just saw my first dance concert, at Juilliard, last week. Some beige colored dancers made subtle melodic nuanced movements with Cat Power as the background. Apparently it was brilliant according to my more knowledgeable friend. I couldn’t even understand the adjectives he was using to describe it. But I said “I can’t get over the music.” It was that plaintive and ruinous. Flat, no doubt. Production I don’t think has anything to do with the value of her songwriting, although I like myself a good crunchy industrial feel.
Also – by that sentence I just quoted do you mean that you have to be that person you sing about in order to be a great songwriter, like art=man and such?
No, I don’t think you have to be authentic, otherwise David Bowie could never have made it. I meant that the sentimental picture of living in bars that we get in the (past tense) “Lived in Bars” is nauseatingly reconciled. It’s like those horrible nostalgia-fests that begin “I used to be quite the wild child…”
Production is everything! Production is why Siamese Dream is better than Machina: Or, The Machines of God. Production is half the reason that Can avoided getting sucked down the prog-rock whirlpool. Production is the only reason I haven’t sued Timbaland for babble and pander.
[...] music is not stagnating, and in fact is as interesting as it’s ever been—is summed up in this response by Joseph Kugelmass to Cat Power’s The Greatest: I can tell you what Memphis soul sounds like: it sounds like [...]