Richard and I went to see the Royal Opera’s production of Oliver Leith’s and Matt Copson’s LAST DAYS, directed by Copson and Anna Morrissey, with superb set designs by Grace Smart. It’s inspired by Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film and so were inspired to podcast on it. The film is part of what’s been called Van Sant’s ‘Death Trilogy’ (alongside GERRY (2002) and ELEPHANT (2003)).
In the podcast we discuss how, in spite of it being a ‘slow’ film, time flew by; how we were hypnotized by images and entranced by the originality of its story-telling. It made those last days intelligible. The film seems to run entirely on mood — loneliness, frailty, vulnerability, alienation in a cold climate. A fluid dexterity of original story-telling and tone. Blake is the source of money, power, creativity … but no one is looking after him.
We talk about how we don’t see Blake’s full face until close to the end, though re-visiting the film proves this to be inaccurate. It’s nonetheless interesting that this is a dominant impression. It’s a film where interiority is expressed through externals. We also discuss the film in relation to Bella Tarr’s Sátántango and to Grey Gardens (1975).
LAST DAYS is about a young man, outwardly rich and successful but feeling he’s got nothing to live for and with no one – even those physically in the room with him — to help him break through his isolation and alienation. A great film, propulsed by mood.
I wanted to talk to James Cullen on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues because of his untrammelled love for the film, his enthusiasm, and the wide array of references he brings to this very intelligent appreciation of the film: Tim Burton, Bergman, Araki, Godard, Tarantino, Erika Tremblay, New Queer Cinema, A24 films, Brokeback Mountain (2005), Indigenous Cinema, New French Extremity, and more, .
In the podcast below we discuss why James sees the film as part of an unofficial trilogy alongside Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991); how the film may be seen as a thesis on the queer American road movie; What does it mean to do a queer female-focused road movie? A queer Western? What are the problems of finding a visual grammar for beat novels, acknowledging that ‘beat’ itself is a very masculinist concept? James sees the film as laudably unserious, a story about finding freedom that destroys all sense of coherence; comedic, silly, with a touch of magical realism; a film that destroys all sense of heteronormative experience, throws it in Hollywood’s face, and might give you tonal whiplash in the process; a film in which Van Sant tries to reinvent himself and fails, yet in the process creates his new style.
Amongst many other reasons, James loves the film because it is ‘Against all the heteronormative expectations we have from cinema as a medium. None of these A24 Neon filmmakers could make anything like this. There’s an audience for this film, it’s going to come from somewhere, sometime; and I want to be part of that audience’
And I want to be in the audience listening to James speak about it.
Michael J. Glass joins me for a discussion of Gus Van Sant’s GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997), a blockbuster success in its day; a film that won Robin Williams an Oscar, made stars of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and left a big cultural imprint. It’s since been much parodied (in COMMUNITY, THE SIMPSONS, all over youtube) and a dominant critical perspective is slightly sniffy on the film: filmmaking by numbers and committees on a ‘we need a job’ script. We found it an extremely easy watch that holds up and is even more interesting on second viewing. GOOD WILL HUNTING is an effective piece that is surprising in all kinds of ways and still works. We discuss its critique of the US, its focus on class, on abuse, on the fragility of young men. Its rare to see a film that dramatizes how American foreign policy is one of extraction and exploitation and how social mobility in the US is available only to geniuses with sponsorship. We also discuss whether how Van Sant films and what he focuses on might be connected to sexual identity.
A new podcast to accompany a new mini-research project. Richard’s kindly humoured me and consented to help kickstart this podcast, but he’ll only co-host with me for the first three films so I shall be reaching out to some of you to talk to me about the rest – and certainly if you have a particular interest in any of Van Sant’s films and would like to podcast on them with me, do please get in touch. I’m hoping to build a resource here, not only with the podcasts but eventually with clips, images, a bibliography and more. It will be a process.
In this inaugural podcast we talk about Van Sant’s first feature, based on Walt Streeter’s autobiographical novel, self-financed for $20,000 and filmed on 16mm. We discuss what made us uncomfortable on first viewing, in my case when the film first came out: the power differentials between the characters; the racialised dimension to the casting; but we also discuss why it arguably remains a great film – and the troublesome aspects are part of its greatness. We discuss how the film is an announcement of a new voice in American cinema, with roots in a history of queer culture (John Rechy, Genet, Warhol, The Beats). We speculate on the film’s romanticism within a quite fluid representation of sexuality that distinguishes between acts, desire, feelings and identities; queer avant-la-lèttre. We talk about the film’s look, one partly dictated by the film’s budget, few lights available thus the choice of hard one-directional lighting; making for a noir look but with a beat, bohemian sensibility.
MALA NOCHE arrives in the context of new forms of finance, distribution and exhibition permitted by the developing video rental market. One could now produce low-budget films with heretofore challenging subect-matter and/or challenging forms and make money from niche markets. Van Sant appears alongside Jarmusch, Spike Lee and other indie filmmakers in the mid 80s. MALA NOCHE can be thought of as a the first of what may be considered a trilogy (alongside DRUGSTORE COWBOY and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO), at least thematically: it’s North West setting, the marginal cultures, the bohemian romance of outsiderness, it’s avant-garde components, its daring. An exciting film to re-watch and talk about.
We discuss all of this and more in the podcast, which may be listened to here:
The work of Kelly Reichardt was until recently new to me. I’ve now seen Wendy and Lucy three times and it continues to be a revelation: it gets richer each time. In Film Comment, James Naremore called Wendy and Lucy ‘one of the most tense and moving treatments of the thin line between poverty and chaos since The Bicycle Thief ‘(Vittorio Da Sica, Italy, 1948). It’s high praise indeed but the film earns it. Wendy and Lucy is a poetic, heartbreaking movie about a young girl on her way to Alaska to get a job. Wendy (Michelle Williams) leaves her dog tied up outside a rural supermarket whilst she goes in to get some things but gets arrested for leaving the shop without paying for a small amount of dog food.
When six dollars is all one can spare to help
The scene in the supermarket demonstrates the moral complexity this great film is capable of conveying. We know Lucy stole the dog food because we see her very deliberately put a donut in her pocket whilst looking both ways down the aisle. The young man who catches her in the act is self-righteous and pompous and about the same age as her. Nothing much divides them — he’s clearly a working class kid; his mother picks him up after work — except he’s got a job. But in the world of Wendy and Lucy having a job makes for a world of difference, as does being caught stealing a can of dog food. She denies everything. But when they reach into her pocket the find the dog food. The manager is hesitant to call the police on a can of dog food. The young man embodying all the traits of a young Republican, insists on following company policy, under the mantra that the rules apply to everybody. But an application of the rules means that this young, vulnerable woman, goes to jail, gets a criminal record which will inhibit her abilities to get an income in future, the small fine is ten per cent of her worldly wealth, and she’s got a long way to go before she finds herself in a position of gaining any income at all. And when she returns from jail, her dog, which she’d left outside the supermarket, has disappeared. All for a can of dogfood. The gap between following the rules — the law- and any sense of justice is vast in the America of Wendy and Lucy.
When Wendy comes out of jail, her dog is gone. Her car breaks down; it’s not worth fixing. A man robs her in the night whilst she’s sleeping rough; her family can’t help her. All she loves in this world is that dog and now Lucy’s lost. Wendy needs every penny to get to Alaska, seemingly the only place offering work, and now she’s got no car, her savings are leaking away and she has to find her dog. Like in melodramas of the 1930s, at the end of the film Wendy finds the dog but leaves her where she found her because Lucy’s now in a better home than Wendy can offer: Wendy sacrifices her wants for the dog’s good and hops on a freight train to try and get some work. Replace child with dog and you have a modern-day Depression melodrama but without the excesses.
In an interview with Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant writes on the film, ‘Oh, is it going to happen like that? Where you get a parking ticket and that leads to lifetime imprisonment if you make the wrong move. And that comments on our society, how society is able or not to take care of its people. Wendy and Lucy for me was about our materialistic society. If you don’t have a few bucks, you’re going to have to live in the woods, because Wendy sort of is in the woods.’ In response to this observation, Reichardt tells us that, ‘The seeds of Wendy and Lucy happened shortly after Hurricane Katrina, after hearing talk about people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, and hearing the presumption that people’s lives were so precarious due to some laziness on their part. Jon (Raymond, novelist and screenwriter) and I were musing on the idea of having no net—let’s say your bootstraps floated away—how do you get out of your situation totally on your own without help from the government? We were watching a lot of Italian neorealism and thinking the themes of those films seem to ring true for life in America in the Bush years. There’s a certain kind of help that society will give and a certain help it won’t give. So we imagined Wendy as a renter; no insurance, just making ends meet, and a fire occurs due to no fault of her own and she loses her place to live. We don’t know her backstory in the film but we imagined Wendy was in that kind of predicament.’
Michelle Williams, slight body curled up inward, is like a grief-stricken waif — vulnerable to all the elements but with inner composure; and she makes the audience understand every emotion that Wendy feels; the audience is put in the position of offering this lonely, vulnerable but hard-working and determined girl the empathy her world denies here.
Reichardt’s sober, handsome and evocative imagery — which I understand has been influenced by the photographs of Joe Deal and Robert Adams — does not spare the viewer. The film abounds in stark, striking images of rural alienation, poverty and want; there’s now a very thin line between poverty and total destitution in the land of plenty. It’s a world where a little gesture of kindness (here only six dollars) can means so much. The long shots are wide so that you see Wendy traverse the shot, a vulnerable figure amongst broken down houses, tract malls, derelict factories, railway tracks and highways that merely traverse this place people are merely stuck in. The film often places Wendy behind glass so that we see both what’s behind her and what’s reflected in front of her, a corroded unworkable America. The editing often stays on the background a beat after Wendy has passed through it as if to emphasise the emptiness, degradation and isolation. Sheer loneliness lived amongst industrial ruins
At the end, Wendy ends up where she started but minus dog and car. It’s a heartbreaking story, delicately told, and with an acuity and expressiveness that reverberates like a good haiku. ‘After watching Wendy and Lucy’, says Gus Van Sant, the sense of people being of no use to society..of being a blight like stray dogs, ‘was just palpable. It was so omnipresent. I was part of the film, but the film had stopped. I was actually now in my own version of it, just dealing with my life. It had infused me with its own story. I was still living it, which is a great achievement, and really hard to do. It’s a delicate thing to get somebody into a feeling that they can’t actually get rid of right away’. It’s what art does and art is what Wendy and Lucy is.
Focus on the eyes amidst the darkness
It’s also worth mentioning how palpable the gender of its director is in the story-telling. Wendy dresses and undresses in the gas station, she changes panties, and the focus is on Michelle Williams thin legs, accenting her deprivation and vulnerability. When Wendy is forced to sleep on the woods and a threatening male approaches her, the threat of sexual danger is palpable, but the camera focusses on Michelle Williams’ face, half-covered by a blanket, so that the accent is entirely on her eyes. I can’t imagine a heterosexual male director de-sexualising the scenes in this way, putting the accent so firmly on dramatising Wendy’s fears and vulnerability.
That actors like Michelle Williams continue to support the making of art in American cinema (not least with their performances) is a great credit to them; that such films are not finding the audience they deserve is a great shame and a kind of indictment of us all.
