Reading and Watching, 6/10

Moby-Dick (a bit), Cuckoo, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, and the films of Walter Hill

Hello folks; here’s a long-overdue update from the tail end of an unusually hectic and exhausting school year. There’s a vicious circle of sorts at work with these round-ups, which I will sometimes put off on the grounds that I’ve read or watched too much since the last one and will need plenty of time to do it all justice; but of course such a delaying tactic only expands the backlog. This one, therefore, is both slightly overlong and nowhere near a representative sample of what I’ve been doing since I last got in touch. So it goes.

My big “project” read for the year, now concluded, was Moby-Dick, a book about which there is simply no chance I will have anything new or interesting to say. Even the various scripts for being self-effacing about a belated encounter with this novel have become trite by repetition; “Area Man Discovers Moby-Dick Is Good” no longer plays, “why did no one tell me how funny it is” has run completely out of gas. So I will simply observe that it wears its greatness with insouciant ease, never seeming to strain for it, a book containing what should be ponderous immensity that feels almost playful in its unwillingness to bow under its own weight. Sections so astonishing I had to read them out loud to myself two or three times arrive without warning, as if from a clear sky. Merely another set of cliches about Moby-Dick? Almost certainly. But you go to war with the army you’ve got.

With Moby-Dick behind me I’ve been moving very quickly through Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo. I thought Manhunt was excellent, and Cuckoo only confirms my view that Felker-Martin writes gripping, ruthlessly effective horror. It always feels sort of silly to compare a horror writer to Stephen King, but in its structure and preoccupations Cuckoo *is* something unmistakably like Felker-Martin’s version of It, and fortunately for such an ambitious enterprise I believe she shares two of King’s most important qualities. First, King has always had a gift for character outlines so instantly recognizable that they flesh themselves out fully in the mind of a reader with just a small push, and in the introductory chapters of Cuckoo a similar gift of Felker-Martin’s appears to great advantage. King’s eye has always been especially keen when trained on down-at-heel or hard-luck types: the lifelong drinker in the roadside bar, the battered spouse and her abuser, the tired parent who does not much like their child. The struggles of characters like these, and the dynamics that emerge between them, rendered with neither judgment nor moral blindness, are always completely convincing elements of King’s broader narrative fabric, and in sketching the ruined homes of her conversion-camp captives—not to mention the sometimes hard and abrasive people these ruined homes create—Felker-Martin writes with the same combination of warmth and conviction. The second of King’s qualities that she shares is an equally essential companion to the first: she does not allow her obvious affection for her cruelly mistreated and marginalized characters to protect them from the teeth of her very bleak and nasty fiction. Horror fiction of this kind hinges on human confrontation with the extreme; it’s about people who have already suffered some of the worst things modern life has to offer encountering something a thousand times worse than that. If you can’t commit to both the human and the extreme, if you can’t write characters with care and attention and still throw them headlong into hell, the enterprise collapses. Many horror writers have tried and failed to clear this hurtle; Felker-Martin does not.

A minor quibble I will permit myself: Cuckoo, like a big percentage of all modern horror novels, opens with a short vignette—a kind of “cold open,” and I suspect very filmic and televisual in its proliferation—giving us a taste of the supernatural menace which will subsequently, gradually, reveal itself to the novel’s protagonists. For what it’s worth, Felker-Martin gives us a textbook example of the form, another very King-ian and very effective introduction to a poisoned family who are about to experience something nightmarish; and I think she would justifiably protest that it reveals relatively little of the novel’s central business when all is said and done. But I admit I find this enormously frustrating as a general habit of modern horror writing; it displays, not on Felker-Martin’s part but on the part of the genre more broadly, a lack of self-belief, a conviction that readers will not tolerate a “slow burn.” The process of introducing a coherent world and then allowing horror gradually to infiltrate it, the cultivation of dread before the reader knows what they are about to face, is one of horror literature’s greatest pleasures, in my view so often carelessly undermined by a clear-eyed view of the monster (or whatever) on page seven or eight. In eight cases out of ten, these “cold opens” ought to be dispensed with. Trust your reader; trust your own commitment to the art of literary atmosphere. No sneak previews. We all go together.

On a good friend’s recommendation I also read The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider, a 1956 western which has recently started to attract belated attention as a literary pillar of the genre. Its title character is loosely based on Billy the Kid, and to say the novel served as an inspiration for Sam Peckinpah’s bleak, brutal Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is to put it mildly; the heart of Peckinpah’s grim demystification project is already to be found here, in this slim, unprepossessing novel about the inglorious end of a notorious gunslinger’s life. In his effortless command of his narrator’s homespun, imagistic, Biblically-inflected idiom, usually matter-of-fact but marvelously elastic, Neider prefigures both Charles Portis and Cormac McCarthy, both of whom of course share Neider’s interest in the waning of the Old West, as well as its staggering, senseless brutality. The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is really not very much at all like Moby-Dick, but it is another case where passages would arrive without ceremony that prompted me to stand up and walk over to the nearest window, looking out at nothing with my hands clasped behind my back, a cartoon image of pensiveness. When reading one or two such passages aloud to myself, did I adopt an accent I felt suited the narrator, safe in the knowledge that no one would ever hear me? Reports remain unconfirmed. I wouldn’t want to speculate. But I do unreservedly recommend this book.

On the “watching” side of things, in preparation for a set of physical media essays (which I'll announce here, of course) I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with the Italian popular cinema of the 1960s and 70s. This period is a financial high watermark for the Italian commercial film industry, and I find it fascinating for a number of reasons, one of which is the extremely rapid development of trends in genre filmmaking during these years, as financiers and directors constantly trailed in the wake of the latest pathbreaking hit. If you look at the filmography of the average journeyman director in this period—and even some of the well-known masters, at least before they found the genre breakout that would enable them to call their own shots thereafter—you can watch as they churn through the same sequence of genres with almost machinelike predictability: sword-and-sandal or “peplum” films in the early years of the decade, followed perhaps by Gothic horror, then normally some combination of spaghetti westerns and “Eurospy” films (imitations and sometimes outright parodies of the James Bond series). In the later years of the 60s you’ll see some combination of gialli and poliziotteschi, the latter of which is often used as a general term for the Italian crime films of the era, though strictly speaking it refers more narrowly to cop thrillers. It’s a progression you can set your watch by in a lot of cases.

What interests me about this period is, first of all, that these genres have such an uneven footprint, at least from my perspective, in the world of modern Anglophone cinephilia. Gialli and spaghetti westerns continue of course to be quite widely watched, and their chief exponents continue to be internationally famous names; Italian Gothic horror gets some attention, and some important physical releases, in the context of interest in European horror more generally. Peplum films seem to me much more of a niche interest, however, outside of forays into the genre by iconic filmmakers who are famous for their work elsewhere (e.g. Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World), and I almost never see anybody talk about Eurospy pictures. Poliziotteschi land somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, I think; the more admired ones are certainly still watched, but the genre as a whole does not have a modern Anglophone following proportional to its prominence in 1970s Italy, where it was among the most important and commercially successful genres; audiences responded enthusiastically to films which seemed to reflect and comment on the violence and political tumult of the Italian Years of Lead, and if many poliziotteschi are essentially reactionary, plenty are also politically complex, subversive or even outright critical of right-wing forces at the height of the “strategy of tension.” Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) is an outstanding example, a sort of warped cousin of Moravia’s The Conformist, a film about a police captain and committed reactionary who believes that his own increasingly brazen murders—and the inability of the system to suspect him of them—ultimately affirm the righteousness of a state whose coercive mechanisms correctly behave as though he is simply not their target. Films of this kind speak to a fascinating historical moment in thorny and interesting ways, and deserve as much attention as the best-known Italian films of this period. More on this subject to come, I expect.

I’ve also been watching through the films of Walter Hill, a filmmaker previously known to me from touchstones like The Driver and The Warriors, but not a guy I’ve ever committed to in a sustained way. This turns out to have been my mistake, as he has a deep and idiosyncratic filmography, one in which even those films which are not out-and-out westerns (and he has several of those) bear the unmistakable mark of the genre; Hill has famously claimed that all of his films are westerns, in their heightened sense of moral action outside the confines of conventional society, and it’s an observation which really opens up his body of work. In particular, I was aware of his early role in HBO’s Deadwood, but detailed engagement with his filmography reveals the extent of his influence, both practical and thematic; virtually every one of his pictures stars at least one future Deadwood actor—in Last Man Standing (1996) I counted at least four—and Powers Boothe’s superb performance in Extreme Prejudice (1987) strongly prefigures the mix of vulnerability and menace that he brought to Deadwood. I’ve yet to see a picture by Hill that I didn’t enjoy, but I was especially blown away by Southern Comfort (1981), a barbed, nasty picture about a National Guard unit on a routine training exercise in the Louisiana swamp whose oafish sense of above-the-law entitlement invites violent retaliation residents of a nearby Cajun community. Hill has rejected the idea that this film, in which blowback from their own invasive actions inculcates in the unit a sense of grievance and retribution which quickly becomes self-replicating, has anything specific to say about the Vietnam War; from my formulation of this sentence, you may be able to guess where I come down on the matter. But even ‘merely’ as a broader study in boorish military masculinity, as an exploration of Hill’s recurring interest in both men on the margins of “civilization” and something like the imperial boomerang, and as a relentlessly effective action thriller, Southern Comfort amply merits your time.

That’s all for me for now. My summer is almost here, and that means, by god, you will hear more from me in the coming weeks, including certainly another long-form piece before too long. In the meantime I hope you’re all well, and thank you as always for reading.