August 2024 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Conversation on Killers of the Flower Moon w/ Tyler MacDonald

Having already covered four of the big films of 2023 on Patreon, I'm finally catching up with the fifth and final title in that line-up. Barbie and Oppenheimer as well as The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One were discussed in pairs, but Killers of the Flower Moon receives undivided attention in August's reward for the $5/month tier (all patron tiers were also presented with an advance work-in-progress this month). In this quasi-western from Martin Scorsese, returning World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) marries Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) while taking direction from William Hale (Robert DeNiro), an apparently benevolent but in fact deeply sinister Oklahoma rancher with murderous designs on the oil-driven fortunes of the local Osage tribe - including Ernest's own wife. As with the Japanese subjects discussed a couple months ago, I've conducted (and transcribed) a conversation, in this case with my cousin Tyler MacDonald (a first-time guest, though his brother Riley joined me to cover The Lighthouse last year). Together, we dig into the rich story, style, and history of Killers, including its origin as a nonfiction book (adapted for the screen to focus more on the romantic relationship of a murderer and his would-be victim), its place in Scorsese's gangland- and religion-focused filmography, parallels between the film's portrait of a vicious backwater social ecosystem and the political realities of the present, questions about the intricate and often elliptical conspiracy at the center of the plot, and the film's relationship to American mythologies (especially those that Scorsese grew up with, as someone born just a decade and a half after the film's events but making this movie nearly a century later). Having explored Scorsese's work extensively in the past (all Scorsese-labeled posts including this one are gathered here with further links included on Patreon), I looked forward to catching up with the octogenarian auteur's latest output, and Killers of the Flower Moon did not disappoint.

What are the exclusive August rewards?

belated December 2023 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Twin Peaks Conversations podcast w/ Rob King, editor of David Lynch and the American West (including public teaser) + TWIN PEAKS Character Series advance & new introduction to patrons (w/ public status update/32 Days of Movies video revision)

David Lynch's work is often connected to specific locations like sunny suburbs, industrial cities, and the backlots and bungalows of Hollywood, as well as to genres like noir, horror, and melodrama. The broad Western landscape, and the Western genre, are less frequently associated with Lynch (aside from Lynch's short film The Cowboy and the Frenchman and his cameo as none other than John Ford in The Fabelmans). In his recent anthology of commissioned essays, David Lynch and the American West, Rob King gathers a number of perspectives particularly focused on how Lynch's works play with the history and mythology of the actual region. The terrain stretches from the parched deserts of the Southwest to the foggy forests of the Pacific Northwest, the timespan from ancient indigenous civilizations to the modern highways running across this landscape today. I spoke with King a couple months ago; technical difficulties unfortunately cut our discussion short and we were unable to resume, but for a half hour we dug into how he and other scholars approach this material. Because this is a shorter Twin Peaks Conversations episode than usual, most of it has been reserved for $5/month tier patrons. I published a brief teaser on YouTube, rather than the much longer public "first half" I normally share.

I'm also previewing another character entry for the $1/month tier - in this case, very interesting revisions to someone featured in the earlier series. And I've officially updated my tier structure, as explained in the following video:

+ read the public announcement:

Updated tiers, new intro & new directories (+ December update)

For more details and other updates, check out the above public post, shared in mid-December. As mentioned in there, I've recently added some new pages to this site's directories so that now you can navigate patron rewards without having to scroll past public material. The directories are as follows:

All Available rewards (by Topic) // EXCLUSIVE Films in Focus // Twin Peaks // EXCLUSIVE Film Capsules // Political Topics on Podcasts // Random Topics on Podcasts // All Available rewards (by Entry/Episode) // Essays

What are the December rewards?

The Favorites - The Searchers (#27)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Searchers (1956/USA/dir. John Ford) appeared at #27 on my original list.

What it is • Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to his brother's homestead in Texas after a stint in the Confederate Army...three years after the Civil War has ended (Wikipedia picks up on clues that he spent that extra time fighting against the French interventionists and Emperor Maximillian in Mexico). In other words, he is established right away as a rootless wanderer, most notably in the infamous opening shot of a woman opening a door out into the wide open plains, shielding her eyes from the light as a figure rides up on a horse. The ending mirrors this shot, with Ethan turning to walk off the porch and back out into the wilderness as everyone else gathers inside, the door framing his exit as a retreat from civilization. The framing device might suggest that he remains at home in the interim, an oasis of domesticity in a life of exile, but the title gives the game away: Ethan is actually wandering for almost the entire film. There is a difference to the time the film covers: Ethan is searching, not just drifting at random. His very clear goal is to track a Comanche chief (Henry Brandon) so he can avenge the rape and murder of his brother's family and find - perhaps "mercy-kill" - his kidnapped niece (played by siblings Lana and Natalie Wood, as a child and adolescent, respectively). Ethan is a mess of conflicting impulses and signifiers: redeemer of virtue and revenge-obsessed madman, tender uncle and bigoted/misogynist hater of race-mixing, stalwart defender of white civilization and outcast from that same civilization. The movie both embodies classical western forms and subtly subverts them, drawing on the genre conventions that Ford and Wayne helped create while pointing toward the revisionist decades to come. Receiving decent reviews and perhaps turning a modest profit, The Searchers proceeded to disappear for a while; it didn't get much distribution and other Ford films were more frequently celebrated. By the seventies, however, most notably in Taxi Driver, the film had become one of the most influential works of American cinema. Its tough-guy antihero not only shaped the lonely, angry protagonists of New Hollywood but - directly or indirectly - the brooding men of cable TV's Golden Age. In terms of psychological impact alone, it has certainly earned its consistent place as the most acclaimed western of all time.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (#48)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973/USA/dir. Sam Peckinpah) appeared at #48 on my original list.

What it is • Pat Garrett (James Coburn), an old friend of robber and gunslinger Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), has taken a job as sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico. His first visit to Billy is cheerful but foreboding, filled with a mutual understanding that their interests are slowly being pulled apart. Warm feelings aside, they will inevitably become enemies. Over the rest of the film, that understanding is borne out by events, as Garrett attacks and arrests Billy, then pursues him once he dodges the hangman. The dance of death is a game in this movie, in the classic fashion of westerns where lawmen and outlaws can fluidly switch sides, where each side knows the rules, and where all parties abide by a certain code of honor and respect...at least initially (in one version of Pat Garrett, the director himself pops up in a cameo near the end, to call the film's "hero" a "chickenshit badge-wearing sonofabitch"). Against such a backdrop, the violence could seem arbitrary, like a gladiatorial contest to prove who's the toughest, cleverest, and/or fastest draw. But this dance of death is also determined by larger, more powerful forces - in this case, Governor Lew Wallace (Jason Robards) and the Santa Fe Ring, a cabal of wealthy, corrupt individuals who will eventually target Garrett as well. In real life, near as I can tell, Gov. Wallace (who incidentally wrote Ben-Hur, itself about a friendship falling prey to political power) actually fought against the notorious Ring. Within the film, however, we are given a sense of power operating without any moral considerations. The outlaws are certainly no worse than the politicians, and may be more honest: certainly Garrett does not come off well with his pitiless pursuit of old friends and adherence to a well-paying cause he doesn't believe in. To observe that the violence onscreen is meaningless is not to suggest it lacks gravity. This is most evident in the scene where Sheriff Colin Baker (Slim Pickens) is wounded in a shootout. He crawls off to stare at the dusk while his wife (Katy Jurado) drops to a knee at his side, tears streaming down her face. Depending which version of the film you see (and hear) "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" emerges on the soundtrack either with Bob Dylan's voice crackling in our ears or simply as a poignant instrumental (save for that spooky humming). Pickens turns to look past the camera with a haunted expression that speaks just as loudly as the iconic music. This overwhelming realization of mortality is among the most moving sequences I've ever witnessed in a work of art.

Why I like it •

Western Countdown - Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

This review, my first in over six months (the longest gap since Lost in the Movies began in 2008), is an entry in the Wonders in the Dark western countdown, where the 1973 Sam Peckinpah picture was voted #30. The piece has been cross-posted on Wonders, and you can visit that site for more comments and discussion.

Movies are motifs and moments as well as stories - individual, isolated campfires flickering in the desert dusk and not just landscapes strung together by a stretch of lonesome road. Perhaps Westerns more than most other narrative films rely on this identification with details rather than plot development. Indeed, often the plots exist as clotheslines over which to string the details: the kids playing in the dirt staring up in awe at the outlaws riding nonchalantly through town, the bedroom sequence in which a lonely drifter becomes loquacious with a local whore, the banter over whisky at the bar (nobody drinks beer in saloons, it seems). Audiences go to Westerns - or went to Westerns when they were more popular - less to experience surprise twists and turns in a novelistic story than to gaze with affection and curiosity at a portrait of a time and place both familiar and foreign.

"Revisionist" directors like Sam Peckinpah may have upset and upturned conventions, but they also honored and expanded upon those conventions in the first place. Watching films like The Wild Bunch today, their once-groundbreaking violence no longer shocks; one is struck instead by the ways in which they feel nostalgic or old-fashioned. They exude a sense of affectionate camaraderie which one seldom finds outside of buddy comedies (albeit sans stoicism) in 2013. Perhaps no Western more acutely captures the passage from warm if rough camaraderie into brooding, suspicious isolation than Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973). Even stylistically, the film - particularly when comparing its various incarnations (three have been released over the years) - is torn between a sense of long, lingering (perhaps excessive) attention to detail and a relentless march toward an inevitable outcome.

The Searchers

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Usually when we say a film starts "in medias res" we mean that we're plopped right down in the midst of action, with the plot already begun. That's not the case in The Searchers, which follows a conventional story arc. Beginning with Ethan Edwards' arrival at his brother's homestead, the film waits the requisite ten or twenty minutes before introducing the "inciting incident" in screenwriting terms: a Comanche attack on Ethan's relatives, killing the parents and son, raping the older daughter, and kidnapping the little girl. Only after this does the central action of the story begin, with Ethan and his part-Indian stepnephew, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) trailing the Comanche war party for five years, hoping to either rescue little Debbie or put her out of her perceived misery, as her teenage years will bring a dreaded miscegenation. Then the movie follows an episodic course, cutting between accounts of Ethan's and Martin's hunt and the "homefront" where Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles) pines after Martin and considers her other options. So no, The Searchers doesn't start "in the middle of things" as that Latin phrase would have it and yet in a sense it does: a whole world, historical, social, psychological, stretches out before the film even begins and the movie itself almost seems like the tip of the iceberg floating on waters which conceal its vast depths but let us imagine what lies beneath.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch, 1969, directed by Sam Peckinpah

Story: After being set up in a bank heist, the dwindling and aging Wild Bunch (a band of outlaws operating in the American frontier of the early 20th century) crosses into Mexico. Pursued by bounty hunters led by one of their former members, the Bunch agree to steal a cache of weapons for a corrupt Mexican warlord – but eventually, they must decide what’s worth more: his gold or their vaguely maintained code of honor.

The Wild Bunch is notorious as a subversive take on the Western genre, with the opening lines of Pike (William Holden) – “If they move, kill ‘em!” – supposedly a declaration of independence from the old-fashioned sanctities of the form. And the ensuing massacre would seem to confirm that we’re a long way from the moralistic shades of High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953), what with old ladies of the Temperance Union being killed in the crossfire by careless deputies, cowering bank tellers being taken hostage and used as live bait by the titular antiheroes, and the innocent babes of the town wandering through a town square littered with the corpses of their elders as they imitate the outlaws’ gunfire. Meanwhile, other children light a bonfire over battling scorpions and red ants, piling violence upon violence in a microcosm of the film’s pathology: lethal but somehow poignant old cretins – the bunch – pitted against the ruthless, small-minded hordes – the bounty hunters and Mexican soldiers and railroad men who are just as violent as the outlaws, but somehow more petty.

The Naked Spur

I don't have too much to say about The Naked Spur, given that a good deal of my reflections have already been summed up quite succinctly by Jonathan Rosenbaum - even to the point of quoting, as I had planned to, the prospector 's line (confusedly turning his shotgun from person to person: "It's gettin' so I don't know which way to point this no more!") as an appropriate summation of the film's morally ambiguous ethos. Ah, the ignominy of being scooped by a published critic (years in advance, no less!) However, I really wanted an excuse to use this picture on my blog, a picture which I found in a google search, saved with reservations (thinking well, I guess it'll work), and now somehow can't get enough of it. Something about the surprising richness of a primarily brown palette, I suppose. Though the print I saw televised was poorly maintained - discolored, faded, and wildly unbalanced from frame to frame - Anthony Mann's vision still came across.

3:10 to Yuma

The images in 3:10 to Yuma have a beautiful clarity - open skies, sloping dunes, mountains looming behind makeshift towns. Variations of these images can be found in all Westerns, but here there's a simultaneously dreamy and sharp quality - the purity of the compositions and the setting are both meditative and focused. There's something primal and direct and right about the visuals, yet they also suggest something greater, something beyond, intangible in the desert air. This complements a story which is morally clear at any given moment yet morally ambiguous when taken as a whole.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford definitely veers into Terence Malick territory, but with some interesting differences. Firstly, the obvious similarities. Both Malick and Assassination director Andrew Dominik love to set lonesome types adrift in stunning vistas of natural beauty, draping the proceedings with intricate, evocative narration. (In her amusing but scathing review, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon writes that "when Jesse's wife ...wipes her hands on her apron, we're told that she 'wiped her pink hands on an apron' -- because, you know, we probably ascertained that she has hands, but we might not have noticed that they were pink.") Certainly both open themselves up to charges of pretension and self-indulgence, as well as praise for taking their time to evoke a delicate mood and definite perspective in their visuals, instead of just shooting a mere setting in which stuff happens.

But the differences are telling, particularly in terms of cinematography, by the master cameraman Roger Deakins. In Assassination, wide-angle lenses are not favored and when master shots are used, the edges of the frame are blurred, drawing our focus to the people at the center of the frames. In one memorable shot, Jesse James (Brad Pitt) stands on a railway awaiting an oncoming train in the black of the night. We only see him and a few blades of grass illuminated by the lantern and as the camera zooms over his shoulder, the darkness is all that remains for a few moments, until the train arrives and illuminates a corner of the screen (though, revealingly, not all of it). Here, as elsewhere in the film, Dominik chooses to isolate his elements of interest and obscure the rest.