Let it rip!
some thoughts on two films and a book
Scarface
1983, dir. Brian De Palma, 165 min.
For someone who struggles to watch violence in film and television, I loved this movie. De Palma’s brilliance is in piling up the atrocities so forcefully but incrementally, in charting the deleterious effects of Tony Montana’s rise so methodically, that when the big, irreversible violence finally comes, it seems as though you were the one who wished for it. The blood, the gore, the explosions, the gunshots, the interminable automatic-rifle rounds, the men in the bushes finally closing in—appropriate. Let it rip!
On the Calculation of Volume IV
2026, Solvej Balle, trans. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, 176 pp.
I am beginning to lose my taste for and/or patience with this series. What I found so enticing about the first two books, the second in particular—the eternal present, the entrapment in recurrence, the book that resists narrative because nothing happens—has dissolved into something much more standard and familiar. It’s all about what is going to happen. Still, there is some idea to rescue here, about time standing still while we move through it, about that being the case whether or not one is stuck in the ever-recurring eighteenth of November, but I am not sure yet whether that’s enough to keep reading.
Sherman’s March
1986, dir. Ross McElwee, 158 min.
Ross McElwee sets out to recreate General William T. Sherman’s devastating march to the sea but is basically too horny to follow through on the project. The movie becomes about the various women he meets, re-encounters, and is set up with along the course of putatively following the path of Sherman’s march, most of them variations on one physical theme: slight, mousy, brown-haired, sly-smiled. McElwee, in his late thirties at the time of the film’s making and fresh off a breakup from a relationship with a New York City artist who left him to go back to her ex, is unabashedly pathetic, narrating his amorous desolation in front of and behind the camera. It’s a bit of therapeutic exhibitionism, and it would be less palatable if it weren’t so funny. On this front, he is helped along significantly by his former poetry teacher, a woman named Charleen Swansea about whom McElwee had made a film nearly a decade before. She insists on setting him up with someone; she rides him about needing to be more passionate. McElwee humors her until her insistence becomes too much, pisses him off—he tells her that passion is not the point, that he’s been in love before and it didn’t solve anything. Charleen, serious for the first time, dropping her performance of Southern over-the-hill feminine hilarity, responds with the most poignant dialogue of the film: “You can’t solve everything, Ross; you never solve everything. The only thing you’ve got is a chance at a few passionate hits. You see how foolish it all is! You see what the army comes to! The bunkers, the island, the burned-out house. Hell, it’s all a tragedy! It’s just a matter of how you get through it. And the most interesting way to get through it is to say, ‘I can’t help it, I’m full of passion, and I’m gonna die this moment.’ It’s the only way to pretend you’re alive! It’s the only way to not be alone and depressed. You’ve got to kid yourself, and you’ve got to kid her, and then you both believe it.” As Charleen casts her eyes downward and to the side, you wonder if she believes it herself.