Welcome, friend! This space... well, this space is something special. If you've followed the growth and evolution of my internal landscape over the last year or two, you may have noticed a certain disillusionment with genre fiction over that time. I had certain frustrations which reached a boiling point and frothed out of me like a venomous poison, venting and ranting and spewing. The toxic exorcism had one point: Genre fiction, for me, had become less about reflecting the issues of the real world and more about referencing its own self. I attempted to get that shit out of my veins immediately, and placate myself with something different. Something real, but also something with a hint of genre fiction to wean myself away a bit after that excremental exorcism.
The result was A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History. I watched the show Quantum Leap, talked about its highs and lows, and fell in love with it for being raw and real in a way I was missing. That's where we are today in the good old internal landscape, as I write this on January the 9th of 2023. Let me tell you, in brief, about the journey a friend of mine took. My friend Joe had and has a similar disillusionment with genre fiction, and his flavor is of the superhero blockbuster variety. The MCU wore this man's patience down like an eroding sandstorm, and like me Joe wanted escape to something raw and real. Joe found it by becoming a classic movie buff, escaping the orbit of nerdy interest fiction and setting sail on a cosmic journey of new experiences that really did reflect the real world.
Why do I tell you this? Because Joe has seen and heard my similar frustrations, and for the holiday season of 2022 gifted me with a lifeline. Thanks to Joe, I now have a year's worth of access to the Criterion Channel, a streaming service repository of classic films, offbeat arthouse pictures, and lots of other strange and wonderful things. The keys to my own rocket to escape genre fiction are here, and I'm ready to blast off... but where do I begin? Helpfully, there's a guide of sorts to that. I present to you the Criterion Challenge, 2023 edition. Here we have 52 distinct categories and lists of eclectic diversity, and the viewer is encouraged to build their own year-long Criterion film marathon from them.
I did just that, and I built my stepping stone path out into the mad wilds of Criterion, where I hope to broaden my media viewing horizons. It's a journey that I think I'd like to share with you, and so I'll attempt to write a little about each film I encounter. At the end of every month, I'll post my handful of capsule reviews, and at the end of the year we'll see what we have. This is a leisurely space for you to check into once a month, and maybe find some films and experiences outside of your wheelhouse. It's what I'm doing, and I invite you to come along for the ride. Being that I'm posting this at the end of January, if all goes well, you may have to speed through the first five or so films to get to the leisurely pace. It's okay, as long as you're having fun. Well, then. What did I watch in January? Let's start this madcap journey.
1. Citizen Kane (1941, dir. Orson Welles)
There's a quote from some Stephen King book that escapes me, and I don't know if it's said by a character or by King himself. "It is the tale, not he who tells it.". That quote simply does not apply to Citizen Kane, or at least it doesn't in 2023. To my modern eye, the broad strokes are familiar. Becoming rich and powerful means you lose touch with your humanity and surround yourself with empty expensive trinkets that mean so much as dust after you die? Tale as old as time. He who told it in 1941, Orson Welles? He turns it into a masterpiece. The editing and cinematography are utterly fantastic here, as is the structure of the story itself. It amuses me that the revolutionary editor behind this movie was Robert Wise, who went on to direct many a film (I'd love to see his Haunting Of Hill House adaptation someday), including... Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Something funny to point out the next time a Trek fan complains that the space cloud movie is so fucking boring, the guy who is putting that in front of you worked on Citizen fucking Kane so maybe he knew what the fuck he was doing.
Sorry, couldn't resist the space movie jab. With all that technical power and impressive scope behind this story, it's up to Welles and his cast to make us care about the life of this dead old guy who isolated himself from worldly concerns and human connection... and we do. We learn exactly how Kane isolated himself from worldly concerns and human connection, and he did it to his own damn self. The most tragic and telling for me is near the end, when his second wife leaves him and he coldly sputters "you can't do this to me", so blinkered and unaware of what he has been doing to her and all the other friends and lovers he's isolated over the years. In the end he realizes that, and that iconic dying word of his is the ultimate regret. He became the most powerful man in the world, and at the end of a life of accomplishment? He wished he had none of it and was just a poor kid playing in the snow. Fuck. I don't claim to have done the film justice here, these are just some thoughts I was struck with after watching it. It's a very good movie and has been talked about to death, and my two cents are in the pile now so let's move on.
2. F For Fake (1973, dir. Orson Welles)
It's a documentary, sort of. I say this because I watch a lot of documentaries, and they're very workmanlike and business as usual. You interview the people, you tell the story in a nice linear fashion, you craft the story you want to tell. Orson Welles throws all that out the fucking window. Yes, there's a story here about a notorious legendary art forger, and the guy who biographed him also being some sort of conman, but the film just jumps all over the fucking place. Its editing also jumps all around, hopping back and forth between the island of Ibiza in the 1970s where these two are staying, and Orson Welles narrating, seemingly in the editing booth working on the movie as we watch it. Like the beautiful art that Elmyr de Hory can create, imitating any style he so chooses, this movie is itself Orson Welles going freestyle on the canvas.
More to that, it really resonated with me because it's all about the contradiction of truth and lie in fiction and art. This artifice is something that speaks to me very strongly, and Welles navigates it expertly. Moving us from topic to topic, he weaves us through a story not just about art and forgery, but the forgery of fiction itself... which leads him on a tangent about his infamous War Of The Worlds radio show. Then it leads him to talk about the biographer, Clifford Irving, who faked a biography of Howard Hughes, a rich man who isolated himself from worldly concerns and human connection. You know, like Charles Foster Kane. Orson Welles is finding synchronicity in his own story as he tells it, and that really sparks me. The final act, an elaborate story about an elderly Picasso meeting Welles' partner, Oja Kodar, is masterful as Welles and Kodar act it out for us, wrapping the whole thing up beautifully. I mean, holy fuck. The way this movie is made and the things this movie is about light my internal landscape ablaze. This Orson Welles fella was really something! Pity I have no more of his movies on the challenge. I have seen The Third Man, though. Joe shared that film with me, and it was quite fantastic. Just like F For Fake. Don't sleep on this one, please. Fire it up, you won't regret it. With a fond salute to Mr. Welles, I have to make my next stepping stone somewhere else...
3. My Dinner With Andre (1981, dir. Louis Malle)
I have never been in a sensory deprivation tank, but I imagine that watching this movie is what it's like in a sense. In a tank, you're cut off from other senses and forced to delve deep into your own introspection and internal landscape. With My Dinner With Andre, there are no other senses or distractions on the screen to divert your attention from the focal point of the movie. Here we are at dinner, Andre is talking about his amazing experiences and worldview, you have nothing else to focus on and so you will focus on this and let it resonate with you. Here I was, then, laying on my couch with a cool drink and just listening to Andre move from topic to topic, sparking my own personal introspection as he spoke. He talks of everything from spontaneous creativity to synchronicity to just the struggle to connect and find something meaningful in this world. That's what makes that Twitter shitpost so genius: Andre's rants about society in the early 1980s living in a dream world and unable to focus themselves, when paired with the flashy distractions of social media, are a prescient and darkly comic joke.
And then you have his dinner date, Wally, who takes the opposite worldview, and enjoys his creature comforts, his electric blanket and his books, and his burning need to occupy his time somehow, unable to just truly unplug from the world like Andre can and has. We can see the encounter, the titular dinner, does change Wally slightly. I have to wonder if Wally changed Andre's mind a little, but that's all it is. Just a wonder. A long time ago, a friend likened my writing style to catching up at a coffee shop while I told my coffee date about an experience I had and how it changed me. My Dinner With Andre is like if they made a movie of that, only for even deeper thought-provoking stuff than how a Japanese cartoon made me cry or whatever. Still, I find meaning in my little world, just as Andre finds meaning in his endeavors... and how Wally will find new meaning and come out of the dinner a little more enlightened. I think anyone who comes out of this movie has a little more to think about, the conversation and the thoughts stirred from it as nutritious and healthy to the mind as the food was to the body. It's a fascinating film, and one you ought to sit down with and just... let wash over you. You will have a peaceful and serene time, and it'll stick in your mind.
For me, on the other hand, the dream dinner now transitions into a hazy ethereal nightmare.
4. Eraserhead (1977, dir. David Lynch)
The easy track would be to say that this is an obvious allegory for the anxieties of fatherhood, with Jack Nance constantly out of his element and not sure how to take care of his own child, this gonzo fucked-up thing that resembles a baby and cries like one. Certainly, it's a reading that seems tangible and easy to grasp. I don't know, though. Knowing what I know about Lynch's later style, I think the esoteric bits of the film don't lend themselves to such a simple explanation. It's too easy, too clear-cut obvious. It's valid, of course, because I'm a strong believer in Death Of The Author, but solving a David Lynch movie should not be something that is possible. As I said of Twin Peaks, it's not about what happens but what it stirs up inside you. What Eraserhead stirs up inside me is an oppressive sense of unease, and the chief culprit here for that is the sound design.
Eraserhead is a noisy fucking film, constantly battering you with the sound of incessant industry and machinery. Trains rolling by, things clanking, pulsing, crackling. That's even before you add on the inhuman wails of the baby thing, shrill and unpleasant to listen to. This film gives off a vibe, and the vibe is that the life of these people is one of constant oppressive noise that will never fucking cease. The mother of the baby has to retreat from it, and though she leaves the film I don't think she ever finds peace. Throughout the entire run time of this avant-garde whatever the fuck, there are precious few solitary seconds where you're not being metaphorically poked and prodded with a needle by the sounds of this movie. If Lynch loves to make a dream world based on vibes, this is clearly a nightmare of a film. An oppressive, noisy, and brutally visceral collage of images and noises that is occasionally lightened by reprieve, be it from the strange lady in the radiator or that odd sequence where the title of the film is literalized. I don't know if I love it as much as Lynch's other films, but it's a nightmare I won't soon forget.
That was January for the Criterion Challenge. I'll be doing another Lynch film to start off February, and then... who knows? There's no map where we're going here, but already I can feel myself growing and changing, as well I should. It only took three directors with unique visions to do that for me. Anything's possible as we go along. I'll see you in another four weeks, then, sweethearts. Enjoy yourselves, and throw on a good movie to relax with.
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