On Race, Class and the Hollywood ‘Whiteout’

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February 16, 2011 | 7 books mentioned 19 5 min read

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covercoverIn Sunday’s New York Times, inspired, I suspect, by Black History Month, movie critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis had a long piece on the glaring absence of black writers, directors, and actors in this year’s Oscar nominated movies. They refer to this phenomenon as a “whiteout.”  Some might say that Scott answered his own question—why there are no major movies this year by or about black characters (never mind the rest of America’s non-white racial panoply; Scott never mentions them)—with his rather insightful piece of a few weeks back, “Hollywood’s Class Warfare,” which argued that in the wake of the financial crisis, in the midst of mass unemployment, mortgage defaults, and forecloses, many American filmmakers became preoccupied by class, and that some of the best of this year’s movies (The Fighter, Winter’s Bone, The Town) were about working-class and underclass lives, the kinds of lives that the dominant American class mentality—we’re-all-middle-class-here—doesn’t acknowledge or examine all that often.

Yes, I know: there are still a great many statistics that demonstrate that race and poverty’s fault-lines still mirror each other, still have a causal rather than accidental relationship, and thus that class is not the new race: that race is the new race and the old race. But, it’s Hollywood we’re talking about, and we can’t ask them to attend to too many weighty aspects of American life at once.  So, at least for this year in American movies, the answer to the rhetorical question in “Hollywood and the Year of the Whiteout,” “Is class the new race?,” is yes: For Hollywood this year class was the new race.

That doesn’t mean that this year’s “whiteout” isn’t a problem. But neither the problem nor the answer to the problem are quite what the authors here take them to be, though they touch on the real answer fleetingly.

The problems with the argument? First, and most obviously, when there’s a whiteout year in Hollywood, black isn’t the only color that’s missing.  And, second, the solution to the whiteout is not, as is suggested, a new black indie cinema movement—a few new Spike Lee/Lee Daniels-style black moviemakers. Or, at least, that’s not the full answer.

coverMy sense is that the way out of the whiteout requires something more subtle, something unprecedented. The answer isn’t just a new coterie of black directors making movies in the line of Do The Right Thing or Precious. More serious films about black American life in our yearly cinematic output would be great, don’t get me wrong. But there’s something else American cinema needs more now—something we’ve only had accidental and fleeting glimpses of thus far.

What we need are more serious movies with multiracial characters/casts that aren’t SCARE QUOTES MOVIES ABOUT RACE END SCARE QUOTES. We need more movies that simultaneously are and aren’t about race: movies that are dramas and comedies, about love, death, the usual human plots—and also happen to be about race. We don’t need only highly self-conscious, politicized movies about race, but movies that look at race the way Ben Affleck’s The Town look at class: askance—Affleck uses a popular genre, a crime-thriller, to smuggle a story that’s really about class onto the big screen. This is also how Lisa Cholodenko asks us to think about sexual orientation in The Kids Are Alright: The movie’s lesbianism is sort of incidental. The movie is about a marriage undergoing a crisis brought about by a daughter’s departure for college–oh, and the couple happens to be gay.  Cholodenko does not tell us that gay love, marriage, or family exist in a special category of experience unfelt and un-feel-able by heterosexuals: She tells us that the struggles marriage and children involve are a basic human experience, whatever the sexes of those involved.

I’m not saying that we as a nation have arrived at an idyllic, post-racial (or post-sexual orientation, or post-class) age in which we do not need MOVIES ABOUT RACE, but we could also use a less melodramatic, less strident cinema of race in the vein of The Kids Are Alright that’s just about sort of normal human plots inflected by the post-racial-ish reality that has come to define more and more of our lives.  Because in some American communities, in some American homes and workplaces—more and more, I think—a version of the post-racial age has arrived and it’s not because we have a biracial president. We’re married to and related by marriage to and work with and hang out with people of other races and nationalities, and at the end of the day our relationships with these people aren’t really all that different from our relationships with those of our own races. It’s sort of mundane, actually. Bi-racial marriages and friendships are actually pretty much like any other marriages and friendships most of the time.

Are there moments of fracture sometimes—a sense that your partner of another race is experiencing or feeling something you can’t? Yes, certainly. And are there strange moments in bi-racial relationships in which you suddenly feel as if your marriage/friendship is some sort of radical political choice—that you’re poster-children for something (usually caused by other people’s delighting in/awkwardness about your biracial-ness)?  Again, yes. And I hope that this new cinema I imagine would capture and explain such moments with the subtlety they deserve. But most of the time in interracial relationships, it’s all the same laundry-on-the-floor, bills, celebrations, in-laws, dishes, fights, compromises that the same-race couple next door are dealing with.  And I hope my new cinema would capture this too—how normal and humdrum inter-racial relationships can be.

This American experience has yet to make its way onto the screen, but we catch glimpses of it: A.O. Scott sort of touches on this idea of naturalizing race when he talks about 2009’s The Hurt Locker and its focus on “the volatile friendship between two soldiers, a hot-headed white bomb-disposal specialist played by Jeremy Renner and his cautious black sergeant played by Anthony Mackie.  Race in that movie was not a theme or a problem to be solved, but rather a subtle, complex fact of life.” This is what I’m talking about.  In an ever-increasing number of American lives it’s probably this kind of representation—race as “subtle, complex fact of life”—that feels most resonant. This understated mode (friends and coworkers first; incidentally, black and white) is a norm for more and more Americans and it should become a stronger presence in our movies.  Race, for some of us now, isn’t a be-all-and-end-all melodramatically determinative fact of life, but a fact nonetheless—one that inflects our lives in increasingly subtle, nuanced ways—ways that have only just begun to be reflected in our movies.

What we need now are not white movies with Benetton tokenism (think Harry Potter: Cho Chang and the Patel twins), nor movies that ghettoize racial experience. What we need now, if our movies are to reflect American life as it is lived by more and more of us, is not white or black, but multiracial, biracial—movies whose plots and characters show how people of all races, not just white and black, combine and intersect in more mundane ways (marriage, friendship, work) and how these intersections have their particular, subtle racially-inflected nuances but are also just that—friendships, work, marriages.

is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.

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The Girl Who Played Bestselling Literary Heroines

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January 13, 2010 | 7 books mentioned 2

The Swedish-language film adaption of Stieg Larsson‘s worldwide bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo should be out on this side of the pond in the next few months, but Sony has also recently optioned rights for an American version. 

MTV’s blog speculates on American actresses who might get a casting call to try for the role of Larsson’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander. They don’t mention the inevitable Kristen Stewart, but the Telegraph does. Oh, the cognitive dissonance of having Bella Swan play Salander. I’m with MTV: Shannyn Sossamon‘s the girl for the job.
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From the Newsstand

Changes at the Book Review

From the Newsstand
January 29, 2004 | 7 books mentioned 2 min read

A quote from Steven Erlanger, the cultural editor of the New York Times on the changes afoot at the Book Review: “To be honest, there’s so much s—. Most of the things we praise aren’t very good.” This, I suppose, is a rather blunt way of saying that things are changing at one of the most influential and widely used repositories of book reviews in the world. (Imagine that: people using book reviews. More on that later.) The charge leveled against the Book Review by its new keeper is that it has become formulaic in its style and perhaps a bit arcane in choosing which books to review. First to go will be the lengthy reviews of literary fiction, which will be replaced by an increased focus on non-fiction and popular, or mass-market, fiction. Furthermore, a concerted effort will be made to publish reviews that are more controversial with hopes, ultimately, of injecting enough hurly-burly into the Book Review that people will flock to see the literary wars waged on its pages. This practice of intentionally soliciting vicious, opinionated reviews in order to draw publicity and readership to a publication is probably almost as old as the book review itself, but recently, as the reviews have become more outrageous, the backlash has become louder. Early in 2003 the people behind McSweeney’s rolled out The Believer, a magazine more or less dedicated, as outlined in Heidi Julavits opening piece in the first issue, to combating the pointlessly mean review. The results have been mixed, but they continue to fight the good fight, even maintaining a “Snarkwatch” on their website. Yet the “snarkiness” has continued unabated. Last spring all of literary Britain was up in arms over Tibor Fischer’s unceremonious dressing down of Yellow Dog, a new novel by one of Britain’s favorite sons, Martin Amis. The review, which appeared in the Telegraph, was entitled “Someone needs to have a word with Amis” and included the line “I won’t tell you anything about the contents of Yellow Dog, but what I will tell you is that it’s terrible.” (LINK) Then, last summer a truly offensive review of Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was penned by a gentleman named Mark Ames for a publication called NYPress. This review included the line, “I cannot ever recall reading a book as toxic, disingenuous and stupid as Klosterman’s new collection of essays.” (LINK) Ultimately, the review served its purpose, and, as it made the rounds via email and blogs, Ames and the NYPress put their names on the map. And now the New York Times Book Review is joining the fray, straddling that blurry line between entertainment and information; strange bedfellows indeed. There is certainly nothing wrong with trying to engage your readers nor is there anything wrong with entertaining them or titillating them so long as it is done within the framework of advising the reader on the merits or deficiencies of a particular book while at the same time taking on the responsibility of being the first word on a book whose ultimate importance has yet to be determined. The New York Times Book Review is a household name, but, until I worked in the bookstore, I had no idea how many people use the Book Review, really use it. They walk into the store clutching clipped reviews like life preservers in a sea of books, trusting that those reviews will not let them drown. If book reviews don’t serve that purpose first, what purpose could they possibly serve. For more on the topic, check out this column at Poynter Online.

From the Newsstand
| 7 books mentioned 2 min read
From the Newsstand

Borders and the Froot Loop Gambit

From the Newsstand
March 13, 2008 | 7 books mentioned 14 3 min read

A recent Wall Street Journal story (I’ll summarize here if you can’t access it), is reporting that Borders intends to “sharply [increase] the number of titles it displays on shelves with the covers face-out.” It is hoped that this move will increase sales, but “the new approach will require a typical Borders superstore to shrink its number of titles by 5% to 10%.”The article goes on to note that “Reducing inventory goes against the grain of booksellers’ efforts over the past 25 years or so. Chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble Inc., the nation’s largest book retailer, became household names with superstores that stocked as many as 150,000 titles or more. The rise of Amazon.com Inc., which offers a vast selection online, made it even more important for stores to offer deep inventories.” A little later, the reporter concludes, “With the book market facing unmitigated gloom, Borders has little choice but to experiment.”I’ve talked about chain stores and how they do and don’t satisfy the avid reader: In “What Makes a Bookstore?“, a golden oldie from about four years ago, I granted that “when it comes to hanging out, it’s hard to beat the chains.” But I relish and much prefer the relevance of a good independent bookstore, which should allow one to “walk into the bookstore and be able to grasp, based upon which books are on display and based upon conversations with staff and fellow customers, what matters at that moment both in the wider world and in the neighborhood.”In this framework, putting ever more books face-out and thinning inventory is exactly the opposite of what I want a bookstore to do. The failure of chain bookstores is that they try to make the bookstore experience like any other retail experience, placing the merchandise just so in the hopes that it will entice the shopper. Indeed, according to the WSJ, “The new display strategy is the brainchild of CEO George Jones, who says he learned when he was a buyer at Dillard’s Inc. early in his career that dresses sell better when the entire garment is shown rather than hung sleeve-out.” John Deighton, editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, has a similar point of view. “‘Breakfast cereals are not stocked end-of-box out,’ he says. ‘You want to your product to be as enticing as possible. It’s a little bizarre that it’s taken booksellers this long to realize that the point of self-service is to make the product as tempting as possible.'”And who knows, tests have shown that “sales of individual titles were 9% higher than at similar Borders stores.” Still, further down this path lies the ultimate in bookselling vapidity, the airport bookstore, where all the books are face-out, and the desperate traveler is forced to choose between bad or worse.As I thought about turning books into so many boxes of Froot Loops, the article left me with a final question. Many bookstore regulars may not be aware that bookstores, from chains to indies, accept what’s called “co-op” from publishers. Ostensibly, this is money that is meant to help market certain titles. In practice, co-op money dictates display areas, what ends up on prominent front-of-store tables, and, yes, face out placement on shelves. The article doesn’t mention co-op explicitly, but I wonder if this is another motivation for Borders. If so, putting books face-out may lead to incrementally more sales, but it may also bring in more marketing cash from publishers, and the end result is an ever more pre-packaged, market-tested, one size fits all experience for readers.Edit: Thanks to F.S. for the correct spelling of “Froot.”

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| 7 books mentioned 14 3 min read
Screening Room

Literary Hollywood

Screening Room
February 21, 2004 | 7 books mentioned 2 min read

When I lived in Washington, DC, I remember there being a slew of excitement in the local newspapers and in local bookstores when a book like Primary Colors came out. Local interest is a big seller in books, especially when there’s scandal involved. Here in Los Angeles this means that books about Hollywood get top billing, and there are lots of them on the local bestseller lists at any given time. They come in a few different flavors. There’s the now-we-can-finally-make-all-those-juicy-stories-public, recent-history-of-Hollywood books. These books come out a generation or so after the action depicted in the book takes place. The main players have either died or they no longer wield any power so their stories are fair game for the reading public. Connie Bruck’s biography of Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman, When Hollywood Had a King and A. Scott Berg’s biography of Katherine Hepburn, Kate Remembered are two recent examples. Then there’s the down-in-the-trenches, you-have-to-be-there-to-really-get-it, borderline-inside-joke, behind-the-scenes-entertainment-industry-workplace-dramas. Take David Rensin’s book The Mailroom, which, as far as I can tell, you would only want to read for one of two reasons. You once worked in Hollywood mailroom and you want to reminisce about those high-energy, low-pay days back before you became a high-powered agent, or you desperately want to become a high-powered agent and you want to read up about what it’s like in the mailroom, your first step on the road to glitz and glamour. Finally there is the true story thinly disguised as fiction like producer Robert Cort’s recent novel, Action!. I got to thinking about all of this Hollywood literature because of a recent review by Caryn James in the New York Times that assesses the latest crop of Hollywood lit. (LINK). Wading through big-selling tell-alls like Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures and Joe Eszterhas’ Hollywood Animal and all the rest, she finds a novel that transcends the Hollywood genre in The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters and also mentions that when it comes to books about Hollywood, The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West is “unsurpassed.”

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19 comments:

  1. I couldn’t agree more (and would add that the “whiteout” extends into the indie scene–seen any Sundance movies lately? No better than Hollywood on this issue). I have some personal knowledge of this issue. I am an African-American writer who has had had two novels optioned for film (by white producers) for many years, both of which fall into the category you describe. Race is part of the story but not the focus of the story. My hard-working producers hang in there–but why is it so hard? I can’t help but think that part of the problem is what you describe above. I hope that renewed attention to the issue will begin, slowly to shift things. Doesn’t have to be my stuff that gets made (though I’d love that!) but there are many, many stories to be told.

  2. There’s also the stellar model of “The Wire”: it’s a show very much about race and poverty and power; but it utterly complicates these things, i.e. the characters of the darker hue play roles all over the power map, as do the white characters. At the same time it never bows to a sloppy notion that race “doesn’t matter anymore.”

  3. Dear Martha,

    A while back, I met a filmmaker on a flight to New Orleans who was working on a movie featuring a biracial relationship (white woman; Asian man) but not explicitly and heavily about biracial relationships. I’ve been on the lookout for it since, but no luck. Which is to say that you’re not alone in having Hollywood and Indieland neglect your work about/not about race. I just don’t think they know how to sell it and don’t realize that there’s an appetite for it.

    And Sonya’s right that The Wire is a prime example of a successful and highly lauded TV series that’s story first, character first, but is also attending to the nuances of multiracial relationships/communities. There was a bit of this in Deadwood too with the character of Mr. Woo and his relationship with Al Swerengen. And the all-white Friday Night Lights has also, in the past season, become a multiracial show. So there are little inklings of progress–no major feature films along this line yet, but I think they’re coming. Take heart! And thanks for reading, Emily

  4. Before comments, some examples:
    1. Devil in a Blue Dress–Denzel Washington gets caught up in late 40s racial scandal and LA politics but who is he? A WW2 vet, come to California in the Great Migration from the south, owns his own modest home in a black neighborhood of other modest well-maintained homes, which he will do anything to keep (hence, he gets into big noirish trouble when he loses his job). Race is integral to the backstory and it’s a thriller but it’s so much more than a thriller. A man newly middle-class wants to keep his home–an amazing achievement for a black man in this era. Who of whatever race cannot relate to this?
    2. Before The Wire which I agree is the best best best , there was NYPD Blue (first 4 seasons are on DVD and seasons 2 and 3 are to die for)–Sipowicz, white, racist, alcoholic cop with a conscience that drives him crazy and ultimately for his own salvation he gets a lot of help from those around him including his patience-running-thin black lieutenant boss, and a half-hispanic partner. The help comes unwelcomed most of the time.
    3. I suppose Eastwood’s Gran Torino has to be mentioned altho I didn’t like it.
    4. Mother and Child with Benning, Smits and Samuel Jackson.
    5. Immigrant stories can bridge some gaps–The Visitor, Goodbye Solo, Sorry, Haters with an extraordinary performance by Robin Wright Penn (be prepared for a surprising harrowing ending).
    6. Movies I never want to see: movies about the hood aimed at 20 year olds; feel-good inspirational with a mix of characters. Double yuck.
    7. I love the movies of Rodrigo Garcia. He gets it right. I want complex, I want subtle, I want less-is-more. Hollywood mostly: if more works, then give ’em more, and more or top of more.
    8. Fatih Akin is a director who makes German films about Germans and Turks. Fassbinder RIP made movies in the 70s about racism in Germany. There are a whole slew of North African-French directors who open up the wounds and expose the real life of multi-racial characters straddling worlds–race and class. There are many Israeli and Arab-Palestinian movies that expose what needs to be exposed.
    (Now I will look through my movie list and see a lot which I wish I had included, but this is long enough.)

  5. To the extent that there are fewer prominent black characters, this isn’t something that’s happening in a vacuum. There’s been an ugly change in the economics of film. Multiplex theaters are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and the vagaries of distribution deals encourage expansive marketing campaigns that drive audiences into movies on their opening weekends. Movie attendance is so front-loaded that the second weekend gross is often only half of the opening weekend. DVD releases now follow theatrical release by as little as four months.

    Huge opening-weekend grosses on 4000 screens are driven by enormous marketing campaigns. It’s inefficient to run enormous marketing campaigns for movies that aren’t enormous, so there are fewer non-enormous movies. These enormous movies with their enormous budgets are the tent-pole products that prop up the earnings of major corporate conglomerates, so they’re engineered to be very broad, and to appeal to the tastes of the largest portion of movie viewers. This audience is primarily white and largely under 25 years of age.

    A few very powerful auteurs, like James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, can make art in this space. But before “Avatar” and “Inception” were box office successes, they were viewed as unreasonable risks and potential follies by executives who could have played safer by investing in franchises and sequels. The Hollywood norm tends to look more like the output of Michael Bay. There are roles for non-white actors in these movies, but not the kinds of roles that get people nominated for awards.

    In the last couple of years, this new calculus caused the studios to shutter the specialty divisions that blossomed in the earlier part of the decade. With a few exceptions, studios are avoiding smaller and medium-sized comedies and dramas. When Scott and Dargis bring up “The Hurt Locker,” they seem to forget how that film struggled to find distribution and did not get a wide release until after it started getting awards nominations. If there are fewer good roles for black actors, it’s probably a symptom of the fact that there are fewer good movies being made.

  6. I couldn’t agree more: Hip-hop has done little more than turn black men and women under the age of 30 into little more than cliches. The lack of employment opportunities for Hispanics as made Hollywood see them only as part-time workers and immigrants. Movies and TV, more than any other media, can change this: there ARE educated, responsible, gainfully employed non-white citizens out there. If the movies don’t want to recognize this, then non-white citizens will get a raw deal.

  7. I take your point, Daniel, about this being part of larger forces at work in Hollywood and Independent film-making. And I remember reading an excellent piece–think it was in the LA Times–about The Hurt Locker’s slow, uncertain journey toward major distribution–that it was picked up after getting knock-out reviews, Oscar buzz, steady audience numbers in the few theaters that had it initially. So I’d agree that it was a one-off example. Can only hope it’s done a little trail blazing. Though we’re still a long way away from the 90’s indie/Miramax era, when it seemed like anyone could make a movie and everyone was and that those movies quite often made their way to decent distribution (High Art, The Last Days of Disco, The Brothers McMullin, Chasing Amy, Clerks, Swingers, Kids). Of course, all these titles are very white movies. But if another golden age of independent filmmaking were to come about in this decade–and how I hope one does–I think it would be different.

    But you’re right. For right now we’re stuck with a movie making and distribution system that’s profit-driven and very cautious and that this is perhaps the main barrier for the kind of films I imagine.

    And Thomas–thank you for writing. I absolutely agree that the more our culture’s books, movies, media show us non-stereotypical images of ourselves, the weaker those stereotypes become. I had a professor once who said that the tv show 24 had helped make a real black president possible by depicting a fictional one. I don’t know if there’s a way to quantify that kind of effect, but it’s definitely a provocative and inspiring idea.

    And I agree with you absolutely that very few directors can do anything approaching art

  8. Emily,

    The issue you describe is a glaring problem, not only in Hollywood, but in other environments as well. The post-racial age ideal you described does happen, but all too often non-whites are hired, befriended, etc. as if to make some kind of point. “Look, we hired/invited this black/asian/latino person! We’re a company/family/city that values multi-ethnicity! Look at us! Look at us!”.

    Does anyone have any suggestions on how we can make diversity less of an “issue” and more of an accepted reality? It’s 2011, folks. Surely we can come up with something…

  9. What we need now are not white movies with Benetton tokenism (think Harry Potter: Cho Chang and the Patel twins), nor movies that ghettoize racial experience. What we need now, if our movies are to reflect American life as it is lived by more and more of us, is not white or black, but multiracial, biracial—movies whose plots and characters show how people of all races, not just white and black, combine and intersect in more mundane ways (marriage, friendship, work) and how these intersections have their particular, subtle racially-inflected nuances but are also just that—friendships, work, marriages.

    This is exactly how I feel. I have no interest in either Benetton tokenism or ghettoized racial experiences, and that is the huge bulk of films (and books, and television shows) that feature people of color. As a woman of color, this is especially disheartening for me, because this means I have a hard time enjoying most things marketed as “black” works of art or “Asian” works of art or “Hispanic” works of art. Most of them end up being either tokenism or ghettoizing or “privilege porn,” i.e. lurid depictions of how “horrible” life is for the (usually black) people in said film/book/TV show.

    I agree with Sonya re: The Wire. That was one of the finest TV series ever made. It was consistently subtle and complex. It should have had more seasons!

  10. Quick note on a side point: Harry Potter is a British film, I have no idea why you are criticising it for not representing American life.

  11. Another quick side note re. Harry Potter and racial diversity: the books are full of non-white characters who really couldn’t be left out of the movies: e.g. Cho Chang, the Patel twins, Dean Thomas, Angelina Johnson, etc.

  12. Also, it seems odd to take the Harry Potter movies to task, as it is based on a book. It’s like complaining there weren’t enough Asians in Beowulf, or enough Latinos in Gunga Din.

  13. Hey Harry Potter fans–Yes, HP was written by a Brit and all of the film’s actors are British but it was made by a Hollywood studio (Warner Brothers).

    Thanks for reading, Emily

  14. Emily,
    Maybe one reason for the glaring absence of black directors, writers and actors at this year’s Oscars is because the Academy, in its rush to embrace the so-called “underclass,” overlooked a gem called “Night Catches Us.” It was written and directed by a talented black woman (Tanya Hamilton), stars two mesmerizing black actors (Anthony Mackie from “The Hurt Locker” and Kerry Washington), and deals with the racially charged hangover from the Black Panther movement in 1970s Washington, D.C. It may not be the thing that you, and I, are hoping for – namely, plausible dramas and comedies about love and death and family that also happen to be about race – but it is nonetheless and nuanced and unflinching film that deserved a larger audience and more awards attention. Given what we’ve got, I’ll be pulling for “Winter’s Bone” on Oscar night – partly because it’s a great gritty movie, but mainly because it grew out of a novel by the gifted Daniel Woodrell. Thanks for this thoughtful, thought-provoking essay.
    Bill Morris

  15. I didn’t even hear about Night Catches Us, Bill–but will certainly seek it out now that I have.

    And I’m pulling for Winter’s Bone too–am delighted that it didn’t fall under the radar–and surprised since Deborah Granik isn’t, or wasn’t, a member of the directors guild.

    Another thing this year’s critical mass of movies about the underclass and the whiteout have obscured: This year was a pretty good one for female directors with Granik and Lisa Cholodenko’s films both in the running for top prizes. I’m a big fan of Cholodenko, but think her less gritty/more bougie film is less likely to win big–though I think the writing is as good and the performances. Plus, Andrea Arnold with Fish Tank and Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways.

    And thank you for reading, Emily

  18. The cover of Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue once again reflects the film biz: zero Asian-American, zero Latinos. One (token ?) black actor (Anthony Mackie), one black/white actress (Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones). White men and white women dominate the very glam 1930 era shot. (Note: To the far right is a Swede (her father is a Spaniard): Noomi Rapace of “Girl with the Dragon Tatooo”, etc. fame.)

    I’m white myself and I went: Ouch!!

    One of my favorite black actresses Angela Bassett: whatever happened to her? Halle Berry (white mother/black father) is talented but gets far too much attention in the media.

  19. Dear Jennifer,

    Just back from inspecting the cover and think I’d agree that Anthony Mackie’s their token non-white. And about that: if you’re putting Mackie in the mix, presumably for Night Catches Us, why would you not put his co-star–the ravishing and uber-talented Kerry Washington–in there too? I mean, if Rashida Jones made the cut with her short career of low comedy and that trustfund babe who used to play a lesbian on the OC–who was in some godawful robot/video game movie this year (Tron?)–why not Kerry Washington?

    But I don’t expect much of Vanity Fair–the shamelessness/thoughtlessness/idiocy quotient is so reliably high! Though they do still manage to out-do themselves, as you’ve noted. Personally, I still haven’t fully recovered from the shamelessness/hookerishness of their World Cup cover with Didier Drogba and Christiano Ronaldo. I guess the disappointment is that they could use their considerable artistic powers for good–and so often they squander them on inanity.

    Thanks for reading, Jennifer.

    Emily

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The Unwritten Profile: On The End Of The Tour

Screening Room
July 31, 2015 | 7 books mentioned 13 6 min read

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give to The End of the Tour, the new film about a five-day interview between the writer David Foster Wallace and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky, is that I finally started reading Wallace again. I hadn’t read him since his death in 2008, which hit harder than I expected, considering I had never read his greatest work, Infinite Jest. I feel the need to confess this up front, because The End of the Tour revolves around Infinite Jest; it’s the book that Wallace is promoting on his tour, it’s the book that Lipsky reveres with a mixtures of envy and gratitude, and it’s the book that Jason Segal, the actor who plays David Foster Wallace, read in solitude in a cabin in “the California boonies” in order to prepare for the role.

My excuse for never having read Infinite Jest is that I was in college when it was first published, too busy making my way through classic mammoth novels to have time for contemporary ones. And then, by the time I graduated from college, Wallace’s books, especially Infinite Jest, had been so thoroughly colonized by ardent fans and critics that it no longer seemed like much fun to read Wallace. In other words, he got canonized.

But before he was famous—or maybe, it’s better to say, before I knew he was famous—there was a two-year period when Wallace seemed to speak only to me via my parent’s magazine subscriptions and the public library. No one I knew read Wallace, my older sister didn’t read him, and my parents, astonishingly, didn’t even like him—they thought his prose was too self-conscious. So, he was mine. My secret portal to a new way of thinking and writing about the world, a way of thinking and writing that was infected by cable television, by email, and by the then-nascent internet, “the Web”. Wallace was the future. It made sense that my baby boomer parents couldn’t receive the message and that no one in my boondock town had heard of him.

In retrospect, my proprietary feelings toward Wallace make me laugh because it doesn’t take a great critical mind to notice that, hey, this guy can really write! It’s also funny because Wallace is one of those writers that everyone feels connected to in a secret, special way. That’s one definition of literary genius, that ability to get into people’s head, to make them believe that they aren’t even reading, that they’re somehow thinking the sentences. Lipsky describes Wallace’s literary gift as “casual and gigantic; he’d captured everybody’s brain voice.”

The End of the Tour is based on Lipsky’s 2010 Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a book that is basically a transcript of Lipsky’s interviews with Wallace at the end of his 1996 Infinite Jest book tour. I read it after watching The End of the Tour, curious to see how closely the film followed it, and was pleasantly surprised to find that almost all the dialogue was taken from the book.

That said, the book is subtler than the movie (as books generally are), shaggier, funnier, less plot-driven, and less manipulative. Still, I loved the movie. It brought me straight back to my late teens, and to the beginning of certain literary dreams. It also brought me back to the late nineties, which is another way of saying that there is no way I can be even remotely objective about a film that begins with strains of R.E.M.’s “Strange Currencies”, a song so deeply stored in my memory banks that it inevitably dislodges the emotion-soaked memories surrounding it.

If End of the Tour is actually a good movie, and not just a nostalgia trip for thirtysomethings like me, it’s good because it’s a road movie, and the cracked-open car windows let air and views of the open road into scenes that might otherwise be too cramped and talky. Because of bad weather, Lipsky and Wallace’s flights are cancelled, and they must drive the last leg of Wallace’s book tour. It’s an inconvenience that ends up being fortuitous for Lipsky, who observes that the interview only worked because of “the Henry Ford road trip equation: two men will become comfortable if they have to drive any distance in excess of 40 miles.” There’s something dreamy about a car trip, with the scenery whooshing by, with music playing, cigarettes burning (it’s the nineties, remember). Lipsky allows himself to get wistful in his introduction to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself:

When I think of this trip, I see David and me in the front seat of the car. It’s nighttime. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda, and smoke. The window is letting in a leak of cold air. R.E.M. is playing. The wheels are making their slightly sleepy sound of tape being stripped cleanly and endlessly of a long wall. On the other hand, we seem not to be moving at all, and the conversation is the best one I’ve ever had.

It seems doubtful that this was one of Wallace’s all-time favorite conversations. Lipsky interviews him at the end of a hugely successful book tour, a moment that Lipsky imagines as joyful and triumphant. But Wallace is fretful and self-conscious. He’s between projects, rarely a comfortable place for a writer, and he’s made even more uncomfortable by his growing awareness of his fame. He knows he needs to protect himself against this new genius-writer persona, otherwise he’ll lose the almost childish sense of privacy it took to write Infinite Jest. At the same time, if there’s a public persona happening, he wants a hand in shaping it.

Wallace’s simplest defense is to deny that he is famous, or that he even cares about fame, one that Lipsky tries to tear down throughout his interview. He wants Wallace to cop to his ambition, both because (presumably) he wants some good quotes for his profile, but also because Lipsky is a novelist, too. He can’t help being curious about, and more than a little jealous of Wallace’s success. But instead of getting satisfying descriptions of the pleasures of literary fame, Lipksy gets quotes like this (excerpted from Lipsky’s book, not the screenplay):

I follow the crap. But I struggle much harder against the temptation to follow the crap. And I follow it from more of a distance—and yeah, I have some sort of idea of it. But have some compassion. I mean, I’ve already told you that, like, I gotta be very careful about how much of this stuff I take inside. Because I go home, and I spend a month getting this manuscript ready [his 1997 essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again]. And then I got to start working on something else. And the realer this shit is to me, and the more I think about it—and, of course, you’re holding the tape recorder so that I will end up reading what I’ve said in this article. That will feed the self-consciousness loop.

The irony is that Lipsky never ended up writing the piece that Wallace was so worried about reading. According to Lipsky, his editor changed his mind. This was a relief: “I tried to write, and kept imagining David reading it, and seeing through it, through me, and spotting some questionable stuff on the X-ray.”

It seems important to me that Lipsky never wrote the profile, although the film doesn’t bother to mention it. If Lipsky had written the profile, he would have been forced to look at that “questionable stuff on the X-ray” and make a diagnosis. He probably would have had to cut all the Lipsky out of the interview, all the projections, all the posturing, all the angst, and figure out what story he wanted to tell about Wallace. But Lipsky couldn’t bring himself to do that, and so the material remains raw and unfiltered. It’s not clear what Lipsky is looking for when he presses Wallace, again and again, for a detailed report of what is feels like to be—what? Famous? Critically beloved? Quasi-canonized? A genius? The writer of Infinite Jest? The film tends to simplify the dynamic between the two men, with points of jealous conflict that don’t appear in Lipsky’s book. Jealousy is certainly an ingredient in Lipsky’s interview questions (and one he acknowledges in his preface) but the even simpler truth is that Lipsky was a young reporter without a lot of experience. Wallace was the first writer he ever interviewed.

Jason Segal is already getting a lot of praise for his convincing portrayal of Wallace, but for me, Jesse Eisenberg’s interpretation of David Lipsky was more revealing. His performance reminded me of the thrill of reading Wallace as a teenager, of the way, when you finished his essays and stories, you felt smarter, more analytical, more curious, more observant. At the very least, you’d learned a new word or two. And you wanted to use those words in a sentence, immediately! In The End of Tour, you see Lipsky imitating Wallace without even meaning to, picking up his pronunciation of certain words, his mannerisms, his jokes, and even trying his chewing tobacco (he spits it out immediately). There’s a great moment when Lipsky and Wallace are smoking cigarettes in the car with two of Wallace’s friends. The windows are cracked to let the smoke out but cold air is whooshing in, causing Lipsky to announce, gleefully, “we’re on a hypothermia smoking tour!” One of Wallace’s friends comments that it “sounds like something Dave would say”. She says it without any particular malice; it’s as if this has happened before, with Dave’s new friends. I recognized myself in that scene, and I recognized the generation of writers who continue to live and wrestle with his legacy.

Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned 13 6 min read
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From the Newsstand

Kakutani on the Andrew Keen Bandwagon

From the Newsstand
June 29, 2007 | 7 books mentioned 2

Most reviews of Andrew Keen’s anti-blogger screed The Cult of the Amateur have been pretty unflattering; take for example James Marcus’ assessment in the LA Times. But apparently Kakutani is a fan, “calling it a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the ‘wisdom of the crowd.'”I haven’t, and likely won’t, read Keen’s book, and I’m skeptical of the position that freely available tools allowing anyone anywhere to express themselves to the world are a bad thing. The intermet’s (alleged) damage to highbrow culture is more than obviated by its contribution to democracy. For every 100 mindless bozos on YouTube, there’s a whistle-blower revealing injustice somewhere or a witness to history offering up a first-hand account. To me, the trade-off is plenty worth it, and even if we are going to make the blanket claim that the internet is nothing but “superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment,” there is value to be found in at least some of those superficial observations.It’s hard to say where Kakutani is coming from here, but I suspect she’d back any philosophy that might staunch the flow of all those “amateurish” books she’s forced to read and then summarily dismiss in the pages of the Times. (This is in keeping with my image of Kakutani as the ultimate harried reviewer, who long ago lost the ability to enjoy books and loathes on sight every tome that crosses her desk.)

From the Newsstand
| 7 books mentioned 2
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Screening Room Sport

The Joys and Compromises of Bennett Miller’s Moneyball

Screening Room Sport
September 30, 2011 | 7 books mentioned 2 8 min read

It would be difficult to overstate the ambivalence I felt toward the looming release of Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, the new movie about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. Take whatever it is that’s important to you – knitting, perhaps, or mountain biking – and then imagine waiting for a feature windows10explained film about it. Would you be excited or nervous? Or a mix of both? Or would you simplymoncler black friday salebe dreading how Hollywood would manage to fuck up your passion? I’d wondered what an adaptation of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball would be like ever since the film went into development…eight years ago. Would they be able to translate the plot, in so far as there is one, to the screen? Or would Moneyball be based on the book in the same way that Syriana was “inspired by” Robert Baer’s See No Evil, an adaptation in name only (So much so that Syriana was nominated for 300-206 Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars)?

By the time of the film’s release, I had overcome enough of my anxiety to be firmly in the excited camp. No matter how bad the movie was, at least I’d get to laugh at idiots like Joe Morgan for two hours, right? Before the screening, when my wife and I were standing 70-494 in the concessions line, she asked me what kind of Windows 10 Professional product Key sale candy I wanted. “Are you kidding?” I said. “We’re about to watch a movie about advanced statistical analysis in baseball. Get whatever you want.”

We weren’t, of course, about to watch a movie about sabrmetrics — the use of advanced statistical analysis to evaluate baseball players and teams — and how the cash-strapped Oakland A’s used it to remain competitive with free-spending teams like the New York Yankees. A part of me knew that going in; such a movie fridaysboutiquewould bore 99.9 percent of the audience and probably infuriate the remaining tenth of a percent. No, the filmmakers ADM-201 had to do something to make a more cinematic story of Lewis’s 2003 book. The question was not would the movie differ from the book, but how.

Moneyball is the story of an idea. The thesis of the book is that major 300-208 league baseball teams had long ignored valuable statistical information about their players, relying instead on eye-witness evaluation by seasoned scouts. These scouts used observation and intuition to identify the best players (For example, one scout in the film claims a player is no good because his girlfriend isn’t attractive enough. “He’s got an ugly girlfriend. An ugly girlfriend means no confidence.”). As one might expect from such an unscientific method, it produced variable results. One of the players traditional scouting misidentified as a future star was none other than Billy Beane, who fizzled out after a mediocre major league career. All of this led to an inefficient Windows 10 Professional product Key Oem sale market in baseball talent. Some players were radically undervalued, while others earned much more money than they deserved. Operating from a position of financial weakness, Billy Beane and his Oakland A’s bucked traditional scouting methods and employed deep statistical analysis to find the undervalued players they could afford.

To build a movie out of a book Windows 10 Professional OEM Key about an idea, the filmmakers made several important compromises. First, they decided to narrow the scope of their film to Billy Beane. Interlacing Beane’s backstory with the primary narrative of building a team from the scrap heap of unwanted players was a brilliant choice, as it provided a psychological motivation for his skepticism of traditional baseball scouting. From the very beginning, we see Beane’s doubt come to the fore. “If he’s such a good hitter, how come he doesn’t hit good?” he asks his scouts. “You keep giving me the same ‘good face’ nonsense like we’re selling jeans here.” He challenges Peter Brand (the stand-in for A’s Assistant GM Paul DePodesta, who refused to allow his name to be used in the film): “Would you have drafted me in the first round?” It’s obvious what answer Beane’s hoping for, and when he gets it, an odd couple is created — the athletic Beane (played by demigod Brad Pitt) and the, well, not-so-athletic Brand (a not-yet-thin Jonah Hill). Beane plays Galileo — the lone voice of rationality in a world that worships superstition– and Hill is, I don’t know…Galileo’s assistant?

The pairing works because it plays to each actor’s strengths — Pitt’s arrogance is tempered by his sense of humor and creates a fairly convincing portrait of a man obsessed with being right. Hill, for his part, stammers and blinks his way through awkward scene after awkward scene, his 300-320 comedic timing stealing many of them. Good casting also helps the film eke every ounce of goodness out of the story of Scott Hatteberg, the one-time catcher whose career CISSP appears to be over after a freak nerve injury. Hatteberg, played by loveable oaf Chris Pratt (of Parks and Recreation), sees his career resurrected by Beane and Brand, who value his innate ability to do the single most important thing in baseball — get on base. Pratt isn’t given much screen-time to work with, but he makes the most of it, giving soul to a character who might have easily been overlooked.

The other major compromise the filmmakers settled on is significantly 700-039 less successful. A major reason for Oakland’s success in the early 2000s was their dominant starting pitching. Blessed with “The Big Three” — Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito — three of the best pitchers in the game, Oakland was able to count on a solid performance from its starting pitching three out of every five games. For instance, during the 2002 season depicted in the film, the A’s got roughly 685 innings of all star-caliber 300-070 pitching from The Big Three alone, including 230 innings from Cy Young-winner and singer-songwriter Barry Zito (The late Cory Lidle was no slouch himself, contributing nearly 200 above-average innings, as well). Without these contributions, no number of walks would’ve mattered. Leaving these players out of the film is a bit like filming the New Testament and never mentioning that Jesus fellow.

And yet, the words “Hudson,” “Mulder,” and “Zito” are never uttered in the film. The only pitchers given any screen-time are relievers Chad Bradford and Ricardo Rincon. Bradford, whose bizarre throwing motion was so off-putting it disguised his extraordinary abilities as a relief pitcher, is a central part of Lewis’s book. In the film, he gets a 10 second mention early in the film, and then a condescending scene that plays his religiosity for laughs. It seems that the filmmakers feared the audience might not be able to handle more stats, and so they chose simply to focus on the offensive side of things, and hammer home the mantra of “get on base.” This might very well have been necessary for storytelling’s sake, but it means providing a skewed version of events. Scott Hatteberg had a fine year, especially when judged against his salary, but his 136 games of 116 OPS+ play was hardly the reason Oakland challenged for the pennant in 2002. Ironically, Moneyball may have succumbed to the casual baseball fan’s long-standing bias in favor of offense and position players.

More troubling, in my opinion, is the lack of depth with which the film explores the various “moneyball” principles that Beane employs. It’s all well and good to talk about getting on base, but why? Why is it important to get on base? Sure, you score more runs, and yes, you burn out the other team’s pitching staff, but the real reason is that you simply aren’t making outs. As Beane says at one point, “Why bother attacking? There’s no clock in this game.” Outs are the clock in baseball, and if you don’t make them, you can live forever. Likewise, if your pitchers get people out, you don’t much care whether they are throwing 100 miles per hour or using a herky-jerky delivery to do so. The reason Chad Bradford, with his funky underhanded pitching motion, got batters out was because he made the batter hit the ball on the ground. It’s very difficult to hit the ball over the fence when you’re hitting it on the ground (In fact, it’s impossible). But you’d never know that from watching the movie. Moneyball gets at the why of Oakland’s success without ever really examining the how.

Of course, from the average moviegoer’s perspective, I don’t think it makes much of a difference. The basic tenets of the sabrmetric philosophy are clearly presented in the film, and while it’s sometimes a bit broad, the movie does a remarkable job of dramatizing the concepts. The sins of the film – such as giving Beane too much credit for his strategy (Other GMs, including Sandy Alderson and even Branch Rickey, the legendary GM of the Brooklyn Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals, studied statistics as part of their evaluation methods) –are often those of the book, as well (and I would argue that Pitt’s performance does more to show Beane’s arrogance than Lewis’s somewhat rose-colored portrait does). The major argument against Moneyball has always been that Beane failed to win the World Series (or any other post-season series, for that matter). This is where the film truly shines, in my opinion, as the drama is not so much whether the A’s will win the World Series, but whether Beane and Brand’s crazy idea will work.

The idea does work, as demonstrated in the chapter of the book called “The Speed of the Idea.” This chapter produced my favorite scene in the film. Beane, after a remarkable season, is summoned to Boston to meet with the new owner of the Red Sox, billionaire hedge fund manager John Henry. Henry is enamored with Beane’s strategies and wants to hire him. Oakland has offered Beane a new contract, though, one Beane would be happy to accept. Henry asks Beane why he even bothered to come to the meeting then. “Because you hired Bill James, for one thing,” he replies. James, the patron saint of statistical baseball study, had never had a job in the game before Henry decided to give him one; he was too hated. This gives Henry an excuse to explain to Beane that whenever a new idea threatens the status quo — whether that’s in government, business, or sports — those in power fight it tooth and nail. What choice do they have? Their livelihoods are at stake. “Anybody not out there right now remaking their team with your principles is done. They’re dinosaurs,” Henry says.

Watching this scene in the theater, I found myself thinking not of baseball, but of another spectacularly inefficient industry that’s close to my heart — the publishing business. For the past two centuries, publishers have relied primarily on that most ephemeral and unscientific of qualities, editors’ taste, to decide which books to spend their money on and which books to decline. Their results are not much better than the scouts Beane summarily dismisses in Moneyball (Though, presumably, with less chewing tobacco). In a recent Vanity Fair article about the publishing industry, Keith Gessen writes: “If it is the writer’s first book, and she has no sales track, you can come up with similar-seeming books (“comp titles”) and see how many copies those sold. But this is precision masquerading as insight. No two books are the same book, and no two authors are the same author. The fact is: no one has any idea how many copies of a book will sell.” With that in mind, how long will it be before the Billy Beane of the publishing world finds a better way? After all, “We’re not selling jeans here.”

Selling jeans or not, if you pay to see a sports movie you expect to see some sweat. It’s telling that the most physical exertion we see is not on the field but in the weight room, as Billy Beane prefers to pump iron in the bowels of the Oakland Coliseum rather than watch his team play. I found myself wondering at one point whether this was much of a sports movie at all. In the end, I decided it must be, since it looked a lot like Friday Night Lights — tortured close-ups, jittery hand-held camerawork, sports talk radio overlays, silenced crowd shots, and Explosions in the Sky-esque soundtrack. If Hoosiers were remade today (Note to Hollywood: Don’t get any funny ideas.), it would look a lot like this.

In the end, Moneyball isn’t Syriana. In fact, it has more in common with another adaptation of recent years — The Social Network. Both are compelling dramas about recent history that are probably better considered fiction than nonfiction. Still, I must admit that I felt something special while watching Moneyball. True, it didn’t cover everything I wanted it to (There wasn’t, for instance, any mention of Beane’s Ahab-like quest to acquire Mexican on-base machine Erubiel Durazo, and there was apparently no time to work in a vignette about the great challenge trade of Billy Koch for Keith Foulke), but it was still a rare thrill to watch a movie about a subject I cared about and to see it rendered with love and humor. We should all be so lucky.

Screening Room Sport
| 7 books mentioned 2 8 min read
Lists Screening Room

The Long, Lonely Walk: Hallways in Horror Films

Lists Screening Room
August 4, 2015 | 7 books mentioned 4 5 min read

“The hallway is my sleep,” writes poet Rafael Campo. Hallways are simultaneously prosaic and oneiric. Hallways are all about perspective.

Jean-Paul Sartre thought modern existence contained a “labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere.” We believe — structurally, metaphorically — that all hallways end. Hallways were not meant for standing, but we adorn them with images. Li-Young Lee’s lines “The photographs whispered to each other / from their frames in the hallway” capture the sense of this place.

I grew up in a ranch house defined by its long central hallway. My bedroom and the living room were on opposite ends of the hall. The New Jersey of my youth was a land of bottleneck traffic, creatively corrupt politicians, and suburbs lined with video rental stores. Whippany, my hometown, was graced with a Movie Van that delivered VHS tapes to doorsteps. The van was a suburban cinephile’s dream, but it didn’t have every horror movie I wanted.

After I exhausted the late-night timer recordings on my VCR, I began borrowing obscure titles from older friends. I covered my eyes during The Beyond, a particularly gruesome Italian film set in Louisiana. When the movie ended and I turned off the television, I froze. I realized what scared me the most: that long walk down the silent hallway back to my bedroom. My brothers had moved out. My sister was home from college, but was on the phone in her room. My parents had gone to sleep after trying to convince me that I should do the same. I did what any kid with an overactive imagination would: I sprinted down the hallway, shut my door, and dove into bed.

When I built up enough nerve to actually finish all of the horror movies I rented or borrowed, it became obvious that hallway scenes are an essential element of American and international horror films. Hallways are tight, narrow, walled, made for transit — and yet sometimes our most sensitive moments are out in the hall, doors closed behind us. Hallways are places for tense encounters, confusion, and fear.

Here are eight essential hallways from horror films.

1. The Shining (1980)

Young Danny Torrence spends much of the film riding his Big Wheel through the hallways of the Overlook Hotel. His hypnotic travels reinforce the idea of the hotel as maze and labyrinth.

A ball rolls along the carpet to Danny, and he looks up, allowing Stanley Kubrick to use the hallway structure as readymade perspective. During the first quarter of the film, viewers are introduced to the layout and grounds of the Overlook as if they were to be also hired as caretakers. Kubrick’s methodical method establishes expectations and curiosities. In our homes, hallways are spaces shared with those we know well; in hotels, hallways are tight byways, places where we share space with strangers.

Jack is a stranger to his wife and son, and possibly to himself — his Vermont teaching backstory is blurry in Kubrick’s treatment. He appears to have been birthed at this hotel, naughty from the start (he is casually reading an issue of Playgirl while waiting to meet with the hotel’s manager). Early in the film, he spends much time in the hotel lobby — typing gibberish for hours, throwing a tennis ball at the wall, starring into a model of the hedge maze — but as the film progresses, Jack is more confined to tight spaces: the Gold Room bathroom, the storeroom, and the hotel’s many hallways.

Dick Hallorann’s long, slow walk seems to get longer and slower with each viewing of the film. The Shining continues past its final reel: a hallway without end.

2. Black Christmas (1974)

The film’s anonymous killer hides in the attic of a sorority house, so he must descend through the upstairs hallway. Near the end of the film, Jess Bradford is alone in the big house, worried as much about the prank-calling killer as she is about her overbearing boyfriend — who is enraged about her decision to get an abortion.

Director Bob Clark, who would revisit this holiday in a lighter fashion within A Christmas Story, plays with hallways and tunnels throughout the film. The police attempt to trace the obscene calls made to the sorority, and the narrative cuts to a technician at the phone company trying to find the origin as he moves through hallways of sound.

3. The House of the Devil (2009)

Viewers of horror films from the ’80s remember the convoluted music interludes that preface the real horror. Think Silent Night, Deadly Night for the right amount of camp. Ti West’s film is a litany of horror homages, but his two-minute dance interlude is quite effective. College student Samantha Hughes spends the night house-sitting for strange owners. An ill, elderly family member rests upstairs, behind a closed door. Bored, Samantha pops a cassette of The Fixx into her Walkman, puts on her headphones, and rocks her way around the house. The song stops when she knocks over a vase in the upstairs hallway.

In a later scene that nods to Rosemary’s Baby, Samantha walks down the hallway, knife in hand. She is not prepared for what happens next.

4. The Exorcist (1974)

Regan MacNeil is sick, and her mother is desperate. She soon enlists the Catholic Church via nearby Georgetown University, where some Jesuits still dabble in that old-time ritual of exorcism. Father Damien Karras, perhaps the most haunted priest to ever appear on film, battles the demon that inhabits Regan. Beaten by the guilt of not caring for his ill mother, Karras limps his way through early attempts to banish the demon.

William Friedkin holds Karras’s pause for a heavy moment. He stands between the domestic world and the supernatural world; are not bedrooms our most mystical spaces — where we love and sleep?

5. Halloween (1978)

I have always found John Carpenter’s film to be so perfectly suburban — violence and mayhem in one house, silence and peace next door.

Exhausted Laurie Strode has stabbed somnambulant killer Michael Myers in the neck. She tells the children she’s been babysitting to get help, and then do — they run out the front door, their screams piercing the suburban silence. Moments later, as Laurie rests in the hallway’s doorframe, Myers rises. A blank-faced Lazarus, Myers is the perfect villain for horror in the home.

6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

In the climactic scene, the film’s title character finds that a hidden door in her closet leads to a hallway. Rosemary enters, and immediately faces a painting of a burning church.

Rosemary’s subsequent walk is funereal: her body has been drugged, her heart has been wounded, and her child has been taken. As in Halloween, the threshold between hallway and room becomes a place of union, but the effect is somehow opposite. The satanists in the room first appear banal, urban, engaged in a cocktail chatter, while the hallway Rosemary exited was the infernal place.

Parley Ann Boswell sees Roman Polanski’s work in this film as influential for Kubrick in The Shining: the long hallway “provides a sort of birth canal.” Rosemary is, at the least, reborn to a clearer sense of sight when she exits the hallway.

7. Suspiria (1977)

Dario Argento’s film mixes pulsating images, almost impossible colors, and an overwhelming score by Goblin to create a psychotropic Black Mass.

American dancer Suzy Bannion attends a ballet academy in Freiburg. After leaving practice, Suzy walks down a hallway. She encounters a strange woman and a child who put a spell on her.

Hallways are transformative throughout the film. A red glow paints Suzy as she hopes to discover the evil secret within the school’s labyrinthine corridors.

8. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

The only place that might contain more charged memories than our childhood home is our high school.

Nancy Thompson wakes in class to see the animated corpse of her friend Tina sitting next to her. A student in the front of the room drones lines from Hamlet, the class rapt. Nancy follows Tina’s blood trail to the hallway.

It is best to end with a film about nightmares, because that is how we sometimes encounter hallways. We wake from a bad dream and rub our eyes. Unable to sleep, we walk down the hall, and though we know there is nothing to be afraid of, our fingers trail along the wall, hope for comfort in the dark.

Lists Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned 4 5 min read
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