Growing Up is Hard to Do: Boyhood, The Giver, fragments of memory, and notes on the "death of adulthood"

The following is a double review of two recent coming-of-age films followed by images, videos, and observations gleaned from a much longer essay for which these reviews were originally intended.

Jonas did not want to go back. He didn't want the memories, didn't want the honor, didn't want the wisdom, didn't want the pain. He wanted his childhood again, his scraped knees and ball games. He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden. 

But the choice was not his.

The Giver (1993), by Lois Lowry

When the first whispers of Richard Linklater's Boyhood reached my ears - or rather my eyes, since I "heard" about it on Twitter - I knew I would like it. Shot sporadically over an entire decade, the film anchors its universal coming-of-age tale in a very specific place (rural and suburban Texas) and time (the post-9/11 era). Onscreen we simultaneously watch Mason, the character, and Eller Coltrane, the actor, grow from 7 to 18. While widely acclaimed, this novel approach has also been called a gimmick, implying that novelty masks an uninteresting story. But the approach is the story.

Gone Fishin': A collection of commentary on Twin Peaks

This is my second entry in David Lynch Month. It is a collection of quotes from news and magazine articles, scholarly essays, blog posts, and other literature (as well as audiovisual media) on "Twin Peaks", stretching from 1989 to the present.

This week's "Question in a World of Blue" is: Why did viewers and critics abandon "Twin Peaks" in 1990 and reject the 1992 film? You can respond in the comments below or on your own blog (please tag this entry in your response).

There are no spoilers until after a very prominent warning, and I would actually suggest reading up to that point if you're unfamiliar with the series. This could really build your interest.

INTRODUCTION
WHAT KILLED TWIN PEAKS?

It all started so promisingly. A wildly inventive mash-up of police procedural, soap opera, horror story, and wacky comedy, Twin Peaks (1990-91) followed FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as he investigated the murder of beloved teenager Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose body washed up on shore in the two-hour premiere. Just as much as the ensemble cast, the town of Twin Peaks was a character, with its eccentric denizens, numerous intrigues and affairs, and spooky presence in the woods. It was a place viewers eagerly returned to each week - at least initially. The ABC series won rave reviews, a cult audience, and hundreds of imitators (everything from Lost to The Sopranos bears its imprint). For five or six months in 1990, it was a genuine phenomenon, sweeping magazine covers, TV shows, and the New York Times bestseller list. At the center of the media blitz was David Lynch (Mark Frost, the series co-creator, seldom gets equal credit despite having a greater hand in the show's practical development). Lynch, a cinematic surrealist, had hit the small screen at exactly the right moment in pop culture - or so it seemed. Yet within a year Twin Peaks was dead last in ratings; when it was finally cancelled, it was practically jeered off the air (at least by those still paying attention). How on earth did this happen?

What I feel needs to be said

Very rarely do I post on political issues or news stories, or non-movie related topics in general, mostly because I feel it's generally outside of this blog's purview. Only when I feel pushed or compelled beyond my usual vaguely depressive disengagement with contemporary U.S. politics or the daily news cycle do I step outside of this avoidance and post something from my gut about what's going on out there in the non-movie/arts world. The last time I did so was in April, when a bomb exploded at the Boston Marathon and I was drawn back to my connection to that city; what resulted was probably one of the more autobiographical posts I've shared on this site.

Tonight, a day after the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmermann verdict, it's hard to say why I feel so personally invested that I want to write a blog post on the subject. And yet I do. I've tweeted more on this topic than any other, and almost entirely since the verdict. I did not follow the trial very closely, and I didn't even know the details of the case until a few months ago (when it happened, I was in the midst of a move to L.A. and not following the news closely at all - I only knew the names and none of the specifics, so that until a few months ago when I delved into a Wikipedia article, and the relevant sources, on the subject I didn't even know that George Zimmermann had killed Trayvon Martin during an altercation in a neighborhood both belonged in). And yet here we are. I'll attempt to make sense of my jumbled reactions below; take it as you will. Maybe I shouldn't have posted this at all, yet - as a co-worker of mine is fond of saying - "let me tell you where my heart is."

Who's Killing Cinema - and Who Cares?

I've just finished one of the best essays on film I've ever read. It's called "Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?" and it's by David Denby in The New Republic. Denby's essay is about the effect that over-digitalization and informal formalism have on movies: how the narrative art has been pruned to the point of poisoning the tree, how a concern with fleeting impression over deep-seated effect has destroyed the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle. In six pages, Denby effectively conveys things I've been feeling and saying for years. I don't necessarily agree with all of Denby's examples (some of the films he sees as exceptional I think are endemic, and vice-versa) but his overall point seems irrefutable. Movies are no longer made, marketed, or (especially) received the way they used to be, not in an evolutionary sense (these goalposts are always shifting) but fundamentally. This passage in particular had me shouting "Yes!" aloud as if I was watching the Patriots score a touchdown:

"The glory of modernism was that it yoked together candor and spiritual yearning with radical experiments in form. But in making such changes, filmmakers were hardly abandoning the audience. Reassurance may have ended, but emotion did not. The many alterations in the old stable syntax still honored the contract with us. The ignorant, suffering, morally vacant Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull was as great a protagonist as Julie Marsden. The morose Nashville was as trenchant a group portrait and national snapshot as the hopeful Stagecoach. However elliptical or harsh or astringent, emotion in modernist movies was a strong presence, not an absence." (emphasis added)

Is Indie Dead?

Recognize the cover? It is, of course, a riff on the famous "Is God Dead?" TIME Magazine cover of the mid-60s. It perfectly fits its subject in a number of ways: the entrenched, self-conscious irony of "indie"; the essential triviliaty of same (from asking about God to asking about indie in forty years); and perhaps even a nascent self-loathing (ever notice how the most vociferous critics of hipsterdom have themselves a wide streak of hipsterism?). The article itself is compelling; you can read it here. It's timely, at least for me, because I was going to post a similar inquiry on the Examiner a while back, where I myself had been designated "Indie Movie Examiner."

That's the first time I've used that full title myself, and there's a reason for it. I just don't like that word. Jim Jarmusch famously said, paraphrasing Goebbels (by way of Godard, most likely): "When I hear the word 'independent', I reach for my revolver." (correction, two years later: actually he said "I reach for my revolver when I hear the word 'quirky'." Oops.) I don't have too much of a problem with the word "independent" - politically in particular I think it has a strong, potent ring to it. While it's accrued some negative connotations in the film world - smallness, marginalization, unpalatability to wider audiences - it still strikes me as an appropriate term for films made outside the box, whether that box is financial or conceptual. But "indie" is another matter. Its twee, quirky shortening smacks of a marketing moniker, and the very fact that it shrinks the term "independent" only highlights those inherent drawbacks of the term I mentioned above (except perhaps for the unpalatability, as "indie" has proved quite popular in recent years).

You Don't Need a Metro To Know Which Way The Wind Blows (or It's All Over Now, Hollywood)

Some thoughts on new media at the end of the Zeroes, on the cusp of the Teens

When the buzz hits the Metro, that ubiquitous subway news freebie, then it’s probably hit the mainstream. Sometimes this means the ebbing of a tide – as I suggested with July’s (500) Days of Summer free media blitz. With that campaign, it seemed that “indie” quirkiness had reached saturation point and it was time to start looking elsewhere for pop culture trends. Perhaps that “elsewhere” was the Metro itself. If their cover stories can mean the tide’s gone out, sometimes they seem to suggest a tide coming in, and that appears to be the case this weekend. Their picture of the Hollywood hills, partially obscured by the light bulb-crowned head of a young woman, is headlined “How recession is forcing creativity.” The cover image and inside article are just vague and suggestive enough to suggest that a “meme” (that increasingly popular academic word hijacked to mean a pattern of thought sweeping the culture) has begun to form.

The Way We Weren't: Art Under Bush

"A cloying cliché presented as profundity" - so Peter Plagens, Newsweek art critic, describes Jeff Koons' Hanging Heart and, by turn, the Bush era in Newsweek's recent article, "The Way We Were: Art and Culture In the Bush Era." One could add that it's also a particularly apt description of what passes for socio-cultural criticism these days, with the contents of Newsweek's run-down providing the latest example. The article's opening reads, "If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing." The implication is that somehow the Zeros have been a bonanza of cultural expression, angry fist-waving at our social conditions, a constant artistic outcry at the folly of our times. This is, of course, absurd, and to be fair, many of Newsweek's critics take a different tack, highlighting - as Plagens does with Koons' Heart - the ways in which glib, narcissistic, or tacky art has inadvertently reflected the ethos of the epoch. Yet even here their critique is problematic, for if the arts are thrown in the lion's den with our much-maligned president, the castigators largely refrain from applying the same vitriol towards themselves, the cultural (and mostly liberal) establishment, or us, the American people. Reading this article stirred up a variety of thoughts and feelings, criticisms which both reflected the writing and responded to it. The rest of my reaction follows after the jump.

Twin Peaks in context

Atop my first post on "Twin Peaks," I quoted the show: "That gum you like is going to come back in style." Little did I know how right I was. Lately, the show has been materializing all over the blogosphere; both series and movie prequel Fire Walk With Me have popped up on Moon in the Gutter, Cinema Fist, and The Kinetoscope Parlor, among others. A quick google blog search for "Twin Peaks" turns up even more results; not bad for an 18-year-old show that was cancelled after one year, nor for a film which was booed at Cannes, panned by critics and ignored by audiences (I discuss Fire Walk With Me here and here). True, a new Gold Edition Box Set was released last fall, but why the sudden resurgence of interest this summer? Perhaps the Man From Another Place could tell us...

Anyway, my fascination with the series has only grown since I watched the final episodes and the prequel. So I'm going to do something slightly ridiculous - I am revisiting the series just weeks after I first discovered it, at a slower pace, analyzing it episode by episode.

Critical idiocy vis a vis Fire Walk With Me

This will be my final post on "Twin Peaks," I promise (at least for a few days). Last night I reviewed Fire Walk With Me, acknowledging my ambivalence about the way the film mixed its highly disturbing subject matter with the supernatural elements. Since then, the film and especially Laura Palmer, have continued to haunt me. I must concede that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is one of those films whose raw power overwhelms any troublesome elements, ensuring the film, flaws and all, a place in the pantheon of unforgettable classics. Which makes it all the more astonishing how thoroughly critics missed the boat.