The Lawn Chair Boys

The most memorable nonfiction I read in 2017

2018-01-06T21:13:00.002-05:00

Below are some thoughts on some of the nonfiction I read in 2017:

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry (1997)

This book is an incredible feat about the horrifying attempts of the 19^th century to tame the Mississippi River. I read it over the summer, and while the book is about the double-edged sword of engineering, the book is also about the wild tides of racism and progressive forces at the start of the 20^th century. I read about the flood of 1927 as men of all ages and of mostly one race burned tiki torches and marched like idiots through Charlottesville in the night. I’m not sure a single book could be so depressingly clear about the snakes writhing at America’s roots and how they have always been there, albeit more dangerous in some times than others. Historical scenes from the 1927 flood include white men, the bosses, holding their black employees hostage atop the levees, fearing black flight from white authority. These scenes took place decades after emancipation and decades prior to white flight from the urban landscape. History isn’t so much a circle or a corkscrew as it is a river given to unpredictable flood cycles. You can grow desperate or satisfied in that awareness.

The Hitchcock Murders by Peter Conrad (2000)

If you want to know more about how Alfred Hitchcock’s film works, this book will do that. For a teacher looking to better explain how techniques and thematic concepts cross paths, this book provides both language and substance for proving you’re not just making it all up, even if you sometimes are.

Better yet, this book crossed my path when a student handed it to me on her last day of class. I am eternally grateful—my students since then maybe less so, for I am punishing them with excerpts about the links between cinematic cuts, appetite, and violence. Bon appètit.

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle by Kristen Green (2015)

My wife and father both read this book before I did. I read it on their recommendations and simply from observing how moved they were in reading the book. My wife is from Massachusetts and so everything is Southern to her except for polar bears. My dad, however, was born and raised in Altavista, Virginia, near Lynchburg. My mom was born in Atlanta, lived in Charlotte, and was raised in Halifax County, Virginia. I was born in Kentucky, lived in Georgia, and graduated high school from Fredericksburg, Virginia. I bring all this up because Green’s book tells a rather familiar story: people will go to great lengths to keep racist traditions and prejudices alive and acceptable. I bring all this up because those great lengths happened and do happen in places other than Alabama and Mississippi. They can happen in Prince Edward County. They can happen in Charlottesville. They can probably happen elsewhere too.

Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton (2016)

The opening essay is about the shared musical territories of Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan. Other chapters discuss Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Dusty Springfield. The conclusive essays focus on Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones. The information is nonstop, and the research is thorough. You will look either at music and artists differently. Certain truths will unravel, and you will hear certain songs as something else. This difference will not be necessarily better or worse, but it will be different and you will be forced to think about what the hell is rock ‘n roll.

Also, Hamilton’s not a bad follow on Twitter if you look him up.

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer (2015)

I have only read two of Krakauer’s books. This one and Into the Wild. If you want the best passages from Krakauer, Missoula is not necessarily the book to read. Missoula delivers a scathing case study pinpointing why and how the justice system fails the victims of sexual assault and rape: In the charging of just about any other crime the perpetrator is treated as a suspect and the victim as a victim. However, the opposite is often true when police departments investigate crimes of sexual assault and rape or when juries listen to lawyers deliberate.

Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis by Preston Lauterbach (2015)

I read Lauterbach’s book so I could write With the Memphis Blues Again. Somewhere on the book’s jacket a critic compares it with HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Seems true. Except Beale Street Dynasty contains more lives, more decades, more history, and more stories, as it traces the history of Beale Street’s development from the Civil War era to the middle of the twentieth century. I once vowed to read a presidential biography a year. I have not kept that vow. But I do think I would be more likely to read at least one American city’s biography per year. Memphis was a decent place to start.

Jerry West: The Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon by Roland Lazenby (2009)

A magnum opus about Jerry West. A tale rooted in colonial Virginia, backwoods West Virginia, and a dangerously depressing search for perfection proves West isn’t just a logo for the NBA, but a perfectly named logo for Manifest Destiny.

Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby (2014)

A magnum opus about Michael Jordan. While the whole book is really a case study about the modern athlete and the makeup of Alpha personalities, the passages about Jordan’s grandfather and life along those pinebrushed Carolina rivers really are the most intriguing.

Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America by Jennifer Price (1999)

Going into it, I expected a great deal about flamingos. I was not wrong. However, I now find myself spending an equal amount of time mourning passenger pigeons and shopping malls.

Levels of the Game by John McPhee (1969)

The man writes better than well on tennis.

Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli (2017)

I now know what a 3-Sphere is, but please don’t ask me to explain it.

How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson (2015)

I just jot down movies to watch while reading Thomson and grow angry at his sentences being better than mine. Then I assign Thomson to students, so we can all be angrily humbled together.

String Theory by David Foster Wallace (2016)

The man writes well on tennis.

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward (2016)

Adapting its title from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, The Fire This Time is a strong collection of essays and poems that serves as a primer on African-American perspectives in the 21^st century. I read it sometime late last winter, and it appeared on a reading choice list for my English 11 students. I probably didn’t give them enough guidance in working through each essay, but I could be wrong. My personal favorites in the collection are Kiese Laymon’s “Da Art of Storytellin’ (a Prequel)” and its endless thoughts on Outkast, Rachel Kaadzi Ghanash’s “The Weight” because of how it aligns voices from the past with the present, and maybe “Composite Pops” by Mitchell S. Jackson. But, if I were to read it again, I’m not doubtful that list would change.

After all, the list is always changing.

Bryan Harvey tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey.

The most memorable fiction I read in 2017

2018-01-06T11:24:00.001-05:00

Looking back on all the books I read in 2017, these are the ones that weigh the heaviest, meaning I think about them during class changes, on long runs, in the shower, or while making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They weren't all published in 2017, but a handful were. As always, thanks for reading.

Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie (1996)

This book is so many things: American satire, urban crime thriller, reservation punchline after reservation punchline, artifact from America’s ongoing culture wars, the collected chromosomes of so many shared literary lineages, from Leslie Marmon Silko to Washington Irving and Ernest Hemingway. The plot moves quickly through Noir alleys and collegiate classrooms, and then Alexie lands an Epilogue from the top rope that makes all the pain and tragedy from the book’s plot shrivel into nothing more than one rotten fruit born of many, and perhaps that’s the saddest truth of all: “The tree grows heavy with owls” (420).

The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder (2016)

I wrote a few paragraphs about Bachelder’s novel back in April. The novel is good and quick. If you see your high school and college friends less than you once did, the book may serve as a brief escape into the past. And, when that dream ends, you will awake to the echoes of Joe Theismann’s leg snapping in and through all time.

I Know Your Kind by William Brewer (2017)

The first poem in I Know Your Kind is “Oxyana, West Virginia,” and the poem is perfect in all its executions. This perfection is also devastating, as Brewer’s poems are the sad euphoria of West Virginia’s opiate epidemic. That first poem starts:

None of it was ever ours: the Alleghenies,

the fog-strangled mornings of March,

cicadas fucking to death on the sidewalks, (1)

and neither the single poem nor the book lets go, much like the substances they attempt to vanquish.

The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang (2016)

This book is a beautiful map of the Wang family’s many possible futures and their trans-Pacific past. Um. Maybe. Reverse that. This book is a beautiful map of the Wang family’s trans-Pacific futures and their many possible pasts. Jade Chang wrote a really beautiful book, and this book sat on a shelf in our house for about a year before I read it. I was a fool to wait so long, although the ending was perfect for wishing 2017 good riddance and welcoming 2018. The book is funny, astute, and sincere in its efforts to reverse the American vantage point from the European voyages across the Atlantic to Chinese journeys through the Pacific is brilliantly refreshing, like The Big Lebowski, Blood Meridian, The Great Gatsby, or anything really in reverse.

A couple other notes: One, this book’s discussion about minority voices in the world of American standup is both humorously depressing and thought-provoking and, two, the hospital scene where the Great Wall of China and the Pacific Ocean are reduced to a thin curtain is so obviously brilliant it’s almost hard to imagine it wasn’t already in existence in somebody else’s book. Well done, Jade Chang, well done indeed.

So Much Blue by Percival Everett (2017)

Percival Everett is either a chameleon or a genius, and I’m not sure which label is more complimentary. So Much Blue is a beautiful book telling the story of a family and a marriage in three different genres. Whereas so many of Everett’s past books are satirical sendups of particular styles and genres, the writing in So Much Blue is so sincere that the seams between a suspense thriller set in Central America and New England domesticity vanish into thin air.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman (2012)

Better than the trilogy’s first installment in my opinion. Here, Grossman continues to write an epic tale via backdoors and trapdoors that continue to renovate what a fantasy series can be while somehow managing to wax nostalgically about all that we probably loved about fantasy series as young adults and children. Also, my nephew liked it, and I’ll stop there before dropping an awful C.S. Lewis joke that is really neither here nor Narnia.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)

I wrote about Gyasi’s novel in April. A little bit after that I ran into someone else who had read it and questioned whether the book is actually a novel. I don’t know what else one would call it—it’s totally a novel and a beautiful one at that. Navigating in the wake of European colonialism and Chinua Achebe’s African Trilogy, the novel covers 300 years in 300 pages.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (2015)

Awe-inspring are the grounds and depths Lisa Dillman’s translation of Herrera’s book covers in 128 pages. Every word and sentence is deceptive as a shadow, meaning the size and proportion of both the menace and the beauty are difficult to describe accurately. The nameless young girl leaves home in search of her missing brother. She enters a world of crime. She enters a mythological hellscape. She crosses from northern Mexico into the United States. The film would probably be directed by Guillermo del Torro, except the book is too real and rooted in a material strangeness to be allegorical.

News of the World by Paulette Jiles (2017)

This book finds the love and the calm that are so fleeting in John Ford’s The Searchers or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. An old Civil War veteran who reads newspapers for a living ends up responsible for a young girl once kidnapped by the Kiowa. He aims to return her to her family of German immigrants, and amid all the violence that Jiles delivers in cinematic set pieces is the hybridity of Texas often lost in the legal maps and claims to those once wild territories.

Where the Light Tends to Go by David Joy (2015)

Some sentences struck me as posturing. Then again, the book’s narrator and protagonist is a kid trying to live up to his father’s expectations, so how could the voice not be posing, stretching, and cracking into something other than what it was? That same mutinous mechanism carves into all the dreamlike innocence in the book, leaving nothing but a violent conclusion reminiscent of the New Hollywood’s fatalism or Harry Crews at his slithering best.

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy (1968)

Tracing (or even retracing) Cormac McCarthy’s steps from southern Appalachia to the Southwest Borderlands and eventually into an apocalyptic future is, in my opinion, time well spent, especially as these earlier novels, as well-written as they are, are not quite what the writer will deliver in his later works when his manuscripts appear chiseled in volcanic rock.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy (1973)

The more I read McCarthy, the more I wish I could sit down with him and ask questions about his favorite movies. I don’t know how honest or sincere he would be in handling such questions as, “C’mon, that ____________________ (insert scene or detail) had to be influenced by ___________________ (insert particular film)?” but trying to see him not tip his hand would be everything, because, after all, that’s what his books manage to do so often. He writes in such a way that his writing appears older and truer than its referents—like his pen etched the landscape it draws upon.

I am sad I no longer have any of his books to read for the first time.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

I first read this book in 2014 and included it on whatever list I did at the end of that year, but when you teach a book, you understand better how it works, doesn’t work, is or isn’t interpreted. I taught this book last spring for the first time, which meant I also had to reread it. It goes without saying that I saw more than I did the first time through it, but I was also amazed by what my students did and did not see in it, especially how some students denied the book a chance to serve as either a lamp or a mirror. On the other hand, I watched some students respond to the book as if it had always been part of their lives and could never cease being so.

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2017)

I have yet to read Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, so I cannot compare these eight stories to highly regarded debut. I do know the story “Fatherland” is a powerful dissection of a Vietnamese family split and torn by oceans and war. Part of the family resides in the United States, while part of the family has stayed in Vietnam, where the whole country has become a park for tourists and Viet Cong tunnels are an amusement park ride as much as any Ferris wheel, at least in the eyes of the nation’s American guests.

If you’re a teacher, then Nguyen’s unique perspective and particularly the book’s coda is well worth integrating into any sort of Vietnam War unit that typically revolves around Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Lastly, this collection is memorable for its consistency. “I’d Love You to Want Me” is an incredible story about how love ages in the fog of forgetfulness.

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)

I didn't love the book, but I also didn't hate the book. Regardless, I can't stop thinking about the book, which means I can't dismiss the book. And yet, when I do think about it, I mostly end up thinking about images from the 1961 film The Exiles, which chronicles the lives of young Native Americans trying to find some compromise with modernity in mid-century Los Angeles.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)

Jesmyn Ward is an incredible talent. She writes male and female characters equally well. History and geography nurture her plots, and her stories bloom with a particular prescience that in the hands of a lesser writer would turn trivial and trite. Maybe she could be faulted for always writing a simile, but the similes are always coherent and true. While Sing, Unburied, Sing tells a tale that includes multiple perspectives, a road trip over geography and through generations, as well as a rough-edged blending of crime noir and the Southern Gothic, the novel’s delivery remains somewhat haunted by all the great Southern writers who have already dredged these waters, from Toni Morrison to William Faulkner to the Jesmyn Ward who wrote Salvage the Bones only a few years ago. In other words, the novel is good, if not that good, and maybe such a slight only matters in the slightest because Ward clearly can deliver a book that is that good.

Isn't that always the dilemma?

Bryan Harvey tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey.

On Federer's watch

2017-07-18T08:29:00.004-04:00

The greatest athletes often possess a knack for holding onto their talents longer than the sports world anticipates. Their focus and determination outweighs whatever focus the mob can muster. The late success of Roger Federer is only surprising when the crowd blinks first.

When he removes the bandanna these days, one can see how his hairline has widowed, not in a frayed manner, but with the semblance of prestige and wisdom that attaches itself to wealth and talent. Roger Federer is well manicured. Everyone knows this. So many writers and analysts have spoken about his cool demeanor—his precision—, the idea of a Rolex on his wrist is, for a man who dictates time in the tennis world, redundant.

Every year, after the tennis is done at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, sport gives way to pageantry. The Club presents the winner and runner-up each with a trophy. They in turn present their trophies to the crowd by walking around Center Court. The scene recalls the pomp and circumstance of a dog show. Some players appear uncomfortable in these moments. But Federer is not one of them. He never has been. He is always nice. He believes in the tennis world’s dimensions.

After showcasing the trophies, the players exit the court. The winner watches his name being added to the official board, which is green. The name will appear in gold. The process for placing the golden letters on the green board requires a slow-peeling of tape that makes the winner’s name appear as if it had always been there, waiting to be excavated.

This process feels slow, but takes little time at all, much like a major tennis tournament that concludes in two weeks’ time, or a prodigy’s rise to the top. Little time was ever spent waiting on Roger Federer. In fact, he has lived as a name in the books almost as long as he hasn’t.

Thus, with a stunning amount of speed, the alchemy of ceremony mutes the possibilities of live play inside the annals of history. What started as a 2017 crash course for the Big Four and all their challengers quickly became the story of a single player. This is not unique to this year’s tournament—this is how tournaments work. But, because Federer has won so often, the inevitability of his winning looms larger whenever he wins again, and whenever he doesn’t win, his absence at the ceremony is palpable. Here or not, he is always present. His winning is like clockwork, and yet this particular clock was reportedly broken.

When he defeated Marin Cilic in this year’s Wimbledon final, his name returned to The Gentlemen’s board for the first time since 2012. Because he once won the tournament five consecutive years, four years without winning can be viewed as a drought. Most players do not win a single Wimbledon. These timeframes and objectives can only be understood by a very small number of people. Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Andy Murray might understand, but even that is debatable. Federer has always existed as their measuring stick, but he also possesses the audacity to move the goalposts when he feels like it.

Federer’s return to form at this year’s Australian Open disproved a hypothesis, not a scientific law.

Still, one would assume a Wimbledon title would require more labor, and yet Federer did so without dropping a set. In his twilight, he should at least appear as the long distance runner, but he looked the younger man against Cilic.

In matches so lacking in typical plot structures, Federer exists in a space beyond time, where his will directs the ball as much as any racquet. Such an observation is one of fable, having been made by the likes of David Foster Wallace over a decade ago. Such a state of dynastic being should also render Federer as cruel as it does cool, and yet his grace saves him from playing the villain.

No other player in tennis attracts so many fans of all ages. Part of Federer’s draw is how the sport sets players up to be dissected and he has proven impervious to the scalpel and now, at age 35, even to time. The day his powers abandon him will not be celebrated. The tennis world will look to him with the sympathy most often reserved for relatives suffering from dementia. It will be unfathomable and sad. Even in the so-called off years, there were entire sets and matches where old Federer could pass himself off as young Federer, leaving most to believe there was only Federer. Such are the phases of greatness.

The degree between his career and perfection is so slight it would require the Hawkeye line –calling system to measure it. If his career does not paint the line, then it misses by the fraction of a fingernail. To root for him is to consume some of that wonder and, for the length of a tennis match, believe the world is larger and more permanent.

Nadal and Djokovic do not offer the same opportunities. The former tastes too much like clay and a sprinkle of injuries. His muscle yokes him to the earth. The latter squirms and grimaces. Something weightier than Andy Murray, he still comes across as Fed-Lite. His salutes to the crowd after a match are rehearsed, while Federer’s mannerisms compose themselves without awareness. He blows on his fingertips and pushes stray hairs behind an ear because that’s what hands do. Whatever strain exists within him is invisible. As long as Federer plays, everyone can sample from perfection’s plate.

Watching Federer is about feel, but accounting for his actions is something else. Push a pin into a butterfly and the wings will beat against the beauty of their own barrier. The record books measure and track Federer in a way his level of consistency demands, but they have also weaponized his talents in a way his demeanor on the court never intended. The numbers hide the kind artistry and reveal his predatory nature. His rare convergence of calculation and skill becomes a hawk, circling its target.

Federer now owns nineteen Grand Slam titles. With his eighth win at The All England Club, he broke his tie with Pete Sampras in all-time Wimbledon wins. If he wins later this year in New York, he will hold the record for US Open wins. If he were to win another Australian Open, he would stand even with Djokovic at the Grand Slam calendar’s first stop. The personification of late capitalism, Federer doesn’t appear to be after a number one ranking so much as owning history.

Directly after winning his eighth Wimbledon, he spoke about the six months prior to winning the 2017 Australian Open, when he took time off from the game, hiked, and did whatever it is aging prodigies do to rejuvenate. This sabbatical served as a catalyst for this year’s success, but hidden in the arc of this vision quest are the calculations. How much time did Federer spend in the gym? How many tennis balls did he hit? How often did he visualize himself outthinking and defeating the rest of the Big Four? In interviews, Federer references these parts of the process, but in the end, the only concrete image of him to emerge is the prodigy who won Wimbledon thirteen years ago and never looked back.

At thirty-five, anything resembling a sabbatical could easily bring about the life-changing decisions that alter career paths and cause individuals to spend more time with their families. Federer opted to have his children be witnesses to his greatness, which is a paternal kind of selfishness that can also be endearing. Perhaps such sabbaticals are necessary in keeping once in a generation talents from succumbing to their own appetites (a la Tiger Woods) or burnout.

Is it possible before this revival Federer may have been pressing, pushing his game, ever so slightly, outside the boundaries of perfection?

Late career renaissances occur in other sports. Michael Jordan left his sport twice and returned to different levels of success. Kobe Bryant scored sixty points in his impersonation of Nero. But these athletes and their late career successes and failures were bound by their teammates. Federer is alone. The closest analog might be Jack Nicklaus’ win at the 1986 Masters, but Federer’s revival looks to be something more than a magical weekend.

Following the match, Federer talked about more than his time away from the game last fall. He also offered a statement about the power of belief that coming from anyone else would have sounded as trite and delusional as a Journey lyric. But Federer is too cool to be a rockstar. He speaks as if he were his own guru. He speaks as if the words are true and, for a man of his talents and work ethic, they usually are.

Federer’s ability to perfect his game is beyond admirable. The sight of him is an ideal people can experience. Watching the onehanded release of his backhand is an iconic gesture that beckons onlookers to think everyone possesses an inner Roger; that restless spirit hiking in search of answers. Only when Federer seeks he finds, and that is, perhaps, far from typical. His ability to inspire, as well as his decorum, defangs him and makes him safe. But whatever processes have made him are the same that have stunted the growth and development of younger talents. This does not make Federer sinister. He is an athlete who like most successful (and unsuccessful) athletes never stopped believing, but the road to greatness paves over other careers, no matter how much they believed too.

In the first set of their championship match, Cilic fell. His knee may have been tweaked. It may have buckled slightly. John McEnroe guessed he popped some anti-inflammatories. He removed his shoe and sock. All of this happened in the haze and innuendo of real time. No one really knew what was going on aside from Cilic. One wonders what Federer thought. Chances are not much. Sport is about surviving and persevering. Federer is ultimately better at these two tasks than anyone else. And yet, even as Cilic cried on the court and Federer casually changed his shirt, it was difficult to imagine anyone other than Roger Federer as the protagonist. His focus on the sport makes it difficult to focus on anyone else.

After the match, Federer would say he didn’t notice his opponent’s suffering, and Cilic would claim “his mind was ‘blocked with the pain’ of a blister.” The historical margins between perfection and everything else are both as small and large as another man’s blister—or one man’s immunity to such blisters.

The illusion offered by Roger Federer’s greatness is that time stands still not only for him, but for everyone. The last six months have made tennis observers feel quite young again, but when Roger Federer is done, we will all know how old we’ve become. Cilic is 28. He’ll be 29 in September. He is not young for a tennis player, but he is one of only two players under thirty who have won a Grand Slam. He is buried in the history and knows it, but he is most definitely not alone. In some ways, that might make his circumstances all the more frightening.

The age of Federer cannot continue without a Cilic receiving physical and emotional treatments. To urge the permanence of one is to hail the fragility of the other. To not root for anyone against Federer is to accept the status quo. How he conjures loyalty is the true talent, because, in truth, he is so unlike the rest of us it’s difficult to imagine anyone else ever being like him. When he is gone, one wonders what could possibly be left behind in the void, if anything.

Bryan Harvey tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey.

The Wonder in 'Westworld,' a first impression

2017-07-05T07:35:00.000-04:00

The first, but probably not the last thing I write about WestWorld:

The show Westworld begins with a dejected Dolores Abernathy sitting naked on a stool. One arm hangs limply. Her lap cradles the other. Her knees lean in on each other, due to her pigeon-toed feet. Her blonde head tilts to the side, and, in a mostly dark room, she is the epitome of defeat and vulnerability. A fly crawls across her eye. She does not react. She is not irritable. She is not human.

However, while the show Westworld begins in such a finite manner, a day in Westworld begins in many ways. New guests arrive to the amusement park by train. Old guests wake from wherever they were the following night. The park’s robotic hosts fall into well-told routines, unaware of how their circadian days (and nights) lead back to the same starting points.

HBO’s Westworld founds itself on repetition and therefore describing how it begins is a rather difficult task. In the show’s first episode, titled “The Original,” Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) starts her day on an endless loop, and if not for her beauty, the audience might yawn at her in the same manner one blinks heavily at animatronic presidents in Disney World. This is intentional. The show needs viewers to accept an invitation to the park, the laboratory, the show, and so Dolores must be both pretty and innocent enough to elicit the concern of local news stories about girls gone missing and whatnot. The audience needs to ask: How and why did this young farm girl end up naked in a laboratory being asked questions?

Dolores Abernathy opens her eyes. She walks down the stairs. Her father greets her. She is in town, on the main thoroughfare. She drops a canister from her saddle bag. It rolls on its axis across the dirt road, much like a planet spinning round the sun. A man, usually Teddy Flood (James Marsden), stoops to retrieve the canister. They will then go horseback riding, and the ride typically ends with Flood’s death. This has all happened before. That much is clear. When did it begin? Probably around sunrise. When does it usually end? Mostly after dark. Abernathy and Flood, who are both androids, are not aware of all this, and we, as audience members, do not gather our insights from these perfectly configured protagonists, but from the Man in Black (Ed Harris). He is the man who shoots Flood. He mocks the blank slate of Flood’s memory. We are also as blank as that slate because, unlike the Man in Black, we have never been to Westworld. The Man in Black says he has been coming here for thirty years; we are not so blank as Flood’s nonexistent memory. We are one degree away from losing.

The first image in the show’s opening credits is an artificial sunrise. The second image in the opening credits is a machine arm drawing and crafting such artificial images. This is all very much a chicken or the egg sort of dance being done to a player piano, which is fitting. After all, the show exists on two frontiers: the setting of the Western frontier and the rising of artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the human guest (Ed Harris) murders the robotic hero and rapes the damsel in distress. Which of these behaviors is more natural? Which one is artificial? The villain's drives? Or the hero's desires?

Westworld broaches its themes and concepts at neck breaking speeds, and the meshing of all these frontiers is impressively American. Consider how the same nation born from the world’s largest genocide also put a man on the moon and mass-produced the smartphone. Manifest Destiny may have always had the horizon as a destination, but, at some point, the journey through unmapped territories was always a passageway through the self. Or, to put it another way, completing the transcontinental railroad was a journey rushing away from a well-defined humanity. The show Westworld appears to be thinking about all this and therefore is almost impossible to pin down in a single piece of writing.

But what one notices almost immediately is how quickly these fragments become familiar and how once familiar the fragments begin to look more like puzzle pieces to a map. A familiarity with genre conventions allows the audience to start charting a course, which is to say: Not far into the show the act of asking questions shifts naturally to making predictions, and predictions have as much to do with the past as they do with the future.

As in real life, remembering and imagining are difficult tasks to separate in Westworld, and both bear repeating. Almost every scene in the Westworld laboratories features a production line of Leonardo Da Vinci mannequins, spread eagle and dripping with possibilities, just as every scene within the virtual amusement park confines itself to the limits of archetype and narrative. The movement back and forth between the one and the other embodies the present’s daringness to make the future as much like the past as possible, making nostalgia the threshold for innovation and, in the case of the park’s visitors, the gateway for escape. The effect for the audience is to feel a simultaneous collapsing and expanding of a genre, or a story's possibilities.

Part of the fun for television viewers (as it is for all newcomers to Westworld/Westworld) rests in guessing who is human and who is not, and how those definitions are parceled out is a geeked-out journey into Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. His 1991 work ends with a figure of Christ staring at a Pre-Columbian godhead, suggesting how a person defines humanity often says as much about the self as it does the other.

In Westworld, how this configuration works is twofold. One, the show positions the two genres, the Western and science fiction, into a stare down, where looking to the past or the future results in a reflection on the present. And, secondly, both inside the park and outside it human beings and androids face off against the other in situations that cause a reading of gestures that raises a single question about past settings, which also serves as a hypothesis for the future: Are you real?

Those participating in such New World encounters are practicing a very old game indeed, for these practices date back to at least the fifteenth century and the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean. Also, at this time is when Europe began exporting its ideas of the self abroad and through time via the narratives written about exploring the Americas. The writers conceiving the amusement park plot lines for Westworld are essentially aping the narrative tricks that began with John Smith and Cabeza de Vaca and evolved all the way up through the twentieth century and the Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks and eventually Quentin Tarantino.

In fact, Westworld’s creator Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) rejects a storyline entitled “Odyssey on the Red River,” suggesting that the story’s plot was so full of stock characters and Western tropes that its corporeality would most likely suffer. In his rejection, Dr. Ford even suggests that the story’s outlandish violence reveals far more about its author than either the West or the park’s guests. In a similar fashion, Greenblatt often argues that European depictions of the Native populations as violent and savage were more likely to accurately categorize their European authors than their Native subjects.

After all, being outsiders to Native customs and not understanding any Native languages, Europeans were often left describing a game of charades in their narrative accounts than describing events as they happened. Moreover, due to this lack of understanding the other, they often filled in the blanks of the other’s consciousness with fragments of what they understood about themselves and their European cultures of origin. Thus, the Native presence in European narratives is never native to anything at all other than European viewpoints of cultures they can name but never interpret.

The amusement park Westworld’s writers conjure similar encounters between the park’s guests and its hosts when they write the host characters to be as savage or just as they anticipate the park’s guests to be. Thus, regardless of whether a guest chooses to behave as a hero or a villain, they are not alone, but with the hosts scripted to be most like their inner selves. Such moments also occur between the park’s hosts and the engineers who designed them.

Many of the scenes that include Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) feature him marveling at human facial gestures, and, in turn, other humans marveling at how he captures their human expressions in his robotic creations. For him, then, every android is a text of exploration, or an account of wonder. Thus, his ability to reflect (or project) humanity allows other human beings to reflect on being human. That is, they will experience such wonder if they are willing to play a particular role in a story made corporeal, only to play along with the story is to normalize one's awestruck first impressions at the park's abilities to engineer false realities.

In this way, to accept the story is to engage with one’s sense of wonder in a way that softens it, whereas a total rejection of wonder, most likely, results in behaviors that treat the robotic hosts as objects rather than subjects. The most clear example of this rejection is when guests to the park slaughter the hosts without purpose. However, the park's security protocol is primarily a defense against world-altering wonder. When Westworld robots fail to achiever their programmed objectives or become outdated, they are updated or replaced. But Westworld robots also are taken offline when updates render them too human to sustain the border between humanity and artificial intelligence. Deep in the Westworld laboratories is a room filled with hosts that are either too outdated and robotic or too sentient and human.

Because the park relies on narratives as a method for control, visitors to the park must recognize the shape of the park’s narrative arcs.

When guests to the park arrive by train to the town of Sweetwater, they are propositioned to either hunt outlaws in the surrounding hills or lay with whores in brothel beds. One can even imagine Westworld’s corporate writers committing godawful posse or pussy malapropisms in their creative meetings. However, this dichotomy is not an innovation by either the park or the show’s creative teams, but an understanding of Western plots, tropes, and archetypes.

In John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) avenges his brother’s death and then runs off with Dallas (Claire Trevor) beyond the Mexican border. In Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974), Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little) doesn’t even carry a gun, but overcomes his greatest threat, Lili Von Shtupp (Madelaine Kahn), via his abilities in the bedroom. Then, he and the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) exploit the boundaries between film and reality and make for the sunset, making it unclear whether art imitates life or life imitates art. Either way, however, narrative conventions circumnavigate the silver screen, flattening life into a series of collisions (or avoiding collisions) with violence or intercourse.

Lastly, in the bloody works of both Sam Peckinpah and Cormac McCarthy, heroes and villains are only diverted from acts of violence by sexual acts and vice versa. When McCarthy embarks on such practices, he seems to do so with an understanding that once upon a time the Aztec presented their heroes with virgins on the eve of sacrificing those same heroes on the temple steps. In a sense, every Western has always been a day in Westworld, and every white hat hero or black hat villain has been programmed to either shoot or screw as soon as he steps off the train. Such is the nature of narrative traditions.

When such Apollonian (and Dionysian) propositions present themselves in Westworld, visitors to the park are being interpellated to fulfill particular narrative roles, and the illusion is that they are indeed making a choice that is all their own, because, after all, their choices are functioning within a script. A sequence where this interpellation is most clear is when William (Jimmi Simpson) prepares to enter the park in the show’s second episode by picking out his costume and gun. However, his most important decision is between wearing a white hat or a black hat. This choice matters not only for him but will signify to others how he has chosen to play the game, unless, that is, he chooses to play it ironically and against the coding of his archetype. Most narratives would have started with this sequence, but Westworld delays it, revealing how a hero’s actions are mostly reactionary and naïve. When William steps into Sweetwater, the story's mechanisms are already moving, and he registers as a black sheep (despite his white hat) in a world propagated by vice and violence.

And yet, a show that is as much about cognition as Western frontiers must account for the randomness of choice or, in other words, what lies outside the realm of narrative.

One of the truly humorous moments in the show’s first episode is when two guests to the park, a husband and wife, join a posse hunting Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro). As the posse moves through the sunlit hills, the two guests give up on the quest because they cannot handle the Western heat. Because they give up on this Westworld story, Westworld’s audience also gives up on this particular Westworld story. And yet, later on, this same undeserving couple ends up shooting Hector right as he ends a killing spree and begins what is supposed to be a “chilling” monologue. As Hector falls dead and silent, the husband and wife then convert themselves into heroic heathens by demanding their pictures taken with the corpses of the vanquished. What these two guests do not realize, however, is that they have stunted one of the Westworld story arcs by not engaging with wonder (it could also be they never possessed the capacity for wonder).

In response to a series of malfunctioning bots, the park’s writers had been asked to write a cover up story that would account for why some fifty or so androids and their stories would be missing in action from the park’s daily mechanisms. Hector’s killing spree and monologue were that cover up story, and yet he never delivered the monologue because two guests too lazy to pursue Hector in the hills ended up killing him on the main thoroughfare. In Westworld, as in the West, the lazy and incompetent can be the victors just as easily as the wise and the brave, and just because a particular mythology exists, does not mean its narrative parts account for the how and the why of history. Chaos and order seem to exist simultaneously.

While the Man in Black (Ed Harris) obsesses over every detail Westworld has to share, this husband and wife neglect to listen, and yet so far the results are the same: Blood and carnage and decommissioned robots.

Dolores wakes from the dream and descends the stairs, but this time she swats a fly. The violent act is a wonder to behold; it is a diversion from the script.

Bryan Harvey tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey.

When winter never came, and the books read waiting

2017-04-16T15:17:00.000-04:00

I'd say blow the dust off the blog before continuing, but I'm not sure digital platform even collect dust. Anyway, the following are impressions of some books I read over the last few months when I wasn't updating the LCB blog with any sense of regularity:

The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder (2016)

While the two publishing houses differ, the font on the front cover of Bachelder’s novel resembles another book with sports at its center, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011). Harbach’s novel is, at its core, a book appreciating the national pastime, while Bachelder’s is a love song to football and, more specifically, a tribute to the play that broke Joe Theismann into a football Christ.

Both Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Bachelder’s The Throwback Special examine the intersections between teams and individuals, fans and participants, youth and experience. In doing so, they also delve into the processes by which team structures either construct or reflect masculine archetypes. In past decades, the team would have most likely been the military or the church, maybe even some strange cross-section similar to Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012). Projects such as these always risk a certain degree of navel-gazing, and I’m sure both writers deleted whole paragraphs and chapters while shaking their heads, “too much like Hemingway’s Nick Adams there.” However, by dressing wounded individuals in the games men play, these books somehow manage to take themselves both more and less seriously than those war-torn tomes of the past.

And it probably wouldn’t be too much of a mistake to suggest that how The Throwback Special simultaneously inflates and deflates modern individuals is partly the point. After all, a football field does not a battlefield make, and yet it is still a place of carnage, concussions, and Lawrence Taylor’s force.

What’s cool is how the roaming camera eye of Bachelder’s narrator never promotes one character more than another. The hero, if there is one, is either the absent Theismann or the ensemble. Every year they gather. Every year they play a role. Some years they are the quarterback. Some years they are the linebacker. Some years they are some lesser known figure in the apocalypse. As the novel’s last sentence surmises: “Everyone would get a chance” (213). This blunt truth could be mulled over tragically, but Bachelder manages to write it with equal parts sadness and humor, and the lasting impression is something much closer to joy—that emotion permeating from a turnover on downs, or a group of friends coming and going.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell (2013)

The language in Bell’s novel creeps like water through a cave. The connotations and denotations echo in the dark. They aren’t so much a cloud of smoke as they are a fog. The plot is there, to be found in the shadows, but that’s not really the reason to keep reading through the murk. The reason to keep reading is to witness one’s dark fears and paranoia take a strange and tangible shape on the page, to know how partners in a marriage might be monsters at best and strangers at worst.

The Hitchcock Murders by Peter Conrad (2000)

A student I taught in AP Language and Composition her junior year and then again in Film Studies her senior year handed me this book on the last day of school. On the inside cover, she wrote a lot of words I am thankful for reading, but probably didn’t deserve. One day she will take far more interesting classes, encounter far more inspiring teachers, and, simply put, do great things. On another note, she gave me an incredibly awesome gift. The Hitchcock Murders should be used in any class attempting to teach a little something about the literary merits to be found in American cinema. It also talks at length about the art and psychology of depicting murderous impulses on screen, and Peter Conrad’s critical eye is as sharp as his subject matter’s, the indelible Alfred Hitchcock.

Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey through a Country’s Descent into Darkness by Alfredo Corchado (2013)

I simply do not understand how one nation could legitimately consider walling itself off from another without considering the shared history of it neighbor. Corchado is a journalist who has lived on both sides of the US-Mexican border. His knowledge and experiences are invaluable, especially considering how the border has always changed and evolved, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, as certain ideas and notions have passed to and from popularity.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)

Having appeared on a ton of year’s best lists, Gyasi’s novel doesn’t need me or any other blogger to promote it. However, I have only spoken with one other person who read it, and they expressed some doubt as to whether the book actually qualifies as a novel. I guess I get that position. The protagonist is different in each chapter, making the protagonist something more along the lines of collective memory, or identity. Bachelder’s The Throwback Special is strangely similar in a sense, but, when compared with Gyasi’s project, The Throwback Special comes across as clever as opposed to all-encompassing. Homegoing is an incredibly ambitious feat, for in just over three hundred pages Gyasi’s book covers two centuries of Transatlantic experiences, moving from one generation to the next with each chapter, separating individuals with an ocean’s waves, only to reveal blood and memory cannot be so easily divided and are forever knotted. A truly beautiful book, to be honest.

Scratch by Steve Himmer (2016)

Scratch refurbishes the dark literary woodlands of Washington Irving, replacing a corrupt usurer with a naïve suburban housing developer. The trick recalls the haunted Indian burial grounds of pop culture circa the 1980s, when Stephen King and Stephen Spielberg were at their frightening best. The devil in Himmer’s woods, however, is more abstract than Satan, his goals more wild than targeted, making the arc of the story a bit more meandering and difficult to fathom. I say all that as a compliment.

Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, & the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis by Preston Lauterbach (2015)

I’m trying to write a novella about Memphis. I have never been to Memphis. I’m reading a lot about Memphis. I’m turning to Faulkner. I’m grabbing history books. This book was among the latter. On the back cover is a blurb comparing the real life Memphis underworld from the early 20^th Century to HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, and Lauterbach’s detailing the backroom political deals and the flow of money from whorehouse parlors and card tables and lottery games along Beale and Gayoso does bring to mind the Atlantic City relationship between Nucky Thompson and Chalky White. And, in Lauterbach’s account of the Church family and the Crump political machine is the telling of black and white fortunes in Bluff City all the way from the Civil War’s end to the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That story braids violence and music into a history more fascinating and magical than anything I could probably dream up about Memphis and its beloved Grizzlies, but this summer I’m sure gonna try.

Sometimes the Wolf by Urban Waite (2014)

You read an Urban Waite novel and you can immediately pick out Cormac McCarthy and Leonard Elmore as points of influence. You can even hear a student’s strain in certain lines as Waite forces those sentences into lifting the same weight as his predecessors. Sometimes the Wolf is the second of his books I’ve read. The first was The Carrion Birds (2013). Where that earlier book tracks the drug trade’s violence in the American Southwest, Sometimes the Wolf stalks its prey through the great woods of America’s Northwest. But, even as Waite’s protagonists become ensnared by generational pitfalls and family disappointments, a reader can’t help thinking that each page must draw Waite closer to his chosen mentors, or that at least in his mind such a feat is true.

When I read those older writers, I personally feel intimidated by what they conjure on the page. I do not feel that way with Waite. Instead, I feel some sense of kinship. I recognize his task. They are the myth he is chasing, that he is attempting to draw himself into. I don’t know if he will succeed, but with each book, he does appear to be gaining. And that’s still pretty cool.

String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis (2016)

I sometimes dabble in writing about tennis. I also sometimes dabble in playing it. I’m not as good at one of those as the other. I’m worse at both than Wallace. Until this book, I really hadn’t read much Wallace. I tremble before the idea, and literal weight, of Infinite Jest. This book, with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan, was a solid introduction to Wallace, the game he loved, and some absolutely stunning sentences weaving together the contemplation and the sport. But I'm still not rushing to read Infinite Jest.

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward (2016)

Last year, my English 11 classes read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me in conjunction with Frederick Douglass’ autobiography and a series of speeches from the Civil Rights era. Coates’ book draws heavily on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and shares with Douglass’ text a journey from out of Baltimore to New York City. It also shares a French connection with Baldwin. Anyway, it fits perfectly with those older texts, but it also makes for a male-heavy reading list. This year I wanted to offer students more options, as opposed to saying, “Here, we’re all reading this one book on race relations.” Among several options added to this year’s reading list is this anthology edited by Ward, whose novel Salvage the Bones was also added. The collection features work by seventeen different writers, and, like a good anthology should, the voices share the subject matter with all the aplomb of a beautiful basketball team zipping around the perimeter, diving and edging into the post, moving within the idiosyncrasies of lived experience. It’s a moving, redemptive read! I hope the students who choose to read it feel some of those same vibrations.

Bryan Harvey tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey, mostly about basketball.

Books I'll remember having read in 2016

2017-01-04T16:00:00.000-05:00

Looking back at the books I read in 2016, these are the ones that left the greatest impressions:

Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution by Jonathan Abrams (2016)

Yes, the book is obviously about basketball, but it’s also about how individuals in the United States go about careening through the ephemeral dreamscape we call the American Dream. And it’s about basketball.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)

This novel is almost two years old. I read it a year ago. Since then, it has won the Man Booker Prize, so you probably don’t need me for an introduction to Beatty’s work. Still, the book reminded me some of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo—there’s something not quite whole about it, even as it tucks joke after joke inside silhouettes of the Little Rascals and that time in the United States when the United States couldn’t decide what to do with or how to think about blackness. And then that laughter you hear when you’re reading a book all alone becomes altogether too real and too strange and you realize you shouldn’t be laughing because these funny circumstances aren’t so funny. They are keeping the past alive in ways that can’t be healthy. And you laugh. And you wonder why you’re laughing.

The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba by Brin-Jonathan Butler (2015)

Read the title and then ask, what isn’t this book about?

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown (1970)

For reasons I cannot explain, I read this book in the delivery room of my first child. Anyway, it later became the foundation of my AP and English 11 curriculums this past fall. I only regret not reading and teaching it sooner.

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon (2009)

Whether his projects succeed with daring or falter under the weight of his sentences, Chabon ultimately succeeds, at least for me, in his ability to inspire. After reading one of his novels, I always want to try and write something I haven’t quite tried before. Also, the essays in Maps and Legends definitely work, and the last essay in the bunch is ready made to sit beside Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or Life of Pi in a high school English curriculum.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (2016)

Walk a mile in other people’s shoes. Maybe it would be better to live a month in other people’s apartments. While I read Matthew Desmond dissection of urban America's ailments, specifically the traps of poverty and unaffordable housing, not once did I hear one of his proposed solutions mentioned in the course of the 2016 Presidential Debates between Clinton and Trump, as if both candidates existed on a stage divorced from the city streets, kitchen tables, and school desks that make up the American reality. Sadly, that’s something not likely to be remedied anytime soon, which makes Desmond’s work even more impressive: he’s finding solutions where most aren’t even seeing the problems.

Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching ‘80s Movies by Jason Diamond (2016)

I really enjoyed reading Diamond speak about how he dedicated himself to a passion of his, and when his efforts failed him, he turned something into nothing. The keyword from the title really is “searching.” I took a lot away from this book on a personal level I hope to detail at some later time, possibly.

Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers (2016)

I always tell students how Eggers is a sneaky writer. He’s not writing confusing sentences. He isn’t loading up on SAT words. He doesn’t make obvious allusions. Instead, he presents what appears to be simple and lulls the reader into a sort of sleepy comfort. That is, unless one has already read Eggers or is naturally suspicious of narrators and human wisdom. If the latter is the case, then his characters become worthy of ridicule. What makes for an even better reading of his material is when we as readers share the traits of his subjects, fictive or not, because then our impulse to critique turns inward and we have to face our worst or at least most foolish selves. Aside from constantly finding new ways to play this game with his readers, Eggers continues to grow in his ability to create cinematic set pieces and Heroes of the Frontier contains some of his best.

Sudden Death by Àlvaro Enrigue (2016)

While I probably didn’t understand a lot of what Enrigue does in Sudden Death, this translation of his 2013 Spanish novel prompted and instructed me on how to finish Everything That Dunks Must Converge, especially the introductory chapters for Act One, Act Two, and Act Three.

Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta (2013)

I wouldn’t exactly describe this book as an entertaining read, but it fascinated and frightened me nonetheless. Essentially, it is a book about how a country can lose control of its capacities for reason by ignoring both credible sources of knowledge and the needs of its people, trading in these pillars of stability for pride and pettiness. Also, and perhaps just as interesting, is how Hotta’s depiction of prewar Japan casts the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as an act of desperation rather than as something simply cunning and militaristic. In other words, countries that can’t face their own weaknesses end up doing stupid shit they regret for decades.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (2015)

You pick up James’ novel and there’s heft to it. You read the description on the jacket and you latch onto the familiar, which also happens to be the iconic. You latch onto that name you know, Bob Marley. You hum part of a refrain. Then another. You hum fragments from Legend (it played at all the high school parties you vaguely remember). Then you wonder how a novel about him that’s not really about him but a place and a time that is really something else altogether could consist of so many heavy pages. What you hold in your hand—the literal weight of pulp and ink—is something akin to an island lost in time. You flip the pages back and forth. You reread passages. You’re searching. You’re hoping it doesn’t end, and you’re searching. In the end, you find yourself in a small New York diner. You’re reading the names of Jamaican foods. And by this time, they almost read with an old familiarity, like you can remember how they taste—and yet, you’ve never tasted them, never been to the island, never even left your snug living room. And so then you know Marlon James is a magician, and he has ripped out the center of your middle class life in the middle of the United States’ eastern seaboard and sunk it deep in the blue Caribbean tide. And you will never find your way back to believing Bob Marley is the whole of the story because the book will wake you with the weight of the worlds you never knew, that you failed to know, that you could not have known without this book or some other mother to hold you.

The North Water by Ian McGuire (2016)

The book jacket makes comparisons to Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy, and I get that. McGuire’s book, after all, contains a sea voyage and violence. But I also think critics and readers have started throwing around McCarthy comparisons a bit too lightly. In some ways, doing so is a compliment to the man, but it’s also kind of lazy. Other writers do exist. Ian McGuire might even be one of them, and his book’s journey from shipyard crime scene to polar bear cage is worth a read. It might remind you of McCarthy and Melville. It might remind you of Robert Louis Stevenson or Gary Paulsen. Maybe you’ll read those authors and think of Ian McGuire.

The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan (2016)

Morgan’s second novel is an ambitious one. The narrative essentially follows three generations in the Bluegrass state, which rather forcefully causes us to think of plotlines and bloodlines and people and horses as all being intertwined. In this sense, the book feels a bit like Steinbeck’s East of Eden, at least in the scope of the project. There are also passages that read like Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner (I guess I make lazy comparisons too). And, in a sense, the real jockey here is Morgan because she manages to stay on top of her ambitious narrative, steering and manipulating all of its unwieldy sinew and muscle and bone around the track, relaying a rather furious send up of genteel Southern honor and its eternal bedfellow, racism.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (1955)

What can I say here about Flannery O’Connor that hasn’t already been said? I read most of this book with my newborn daughter strapped to my chest. I want her to understand the south’s underpinnings, its deplorables and unmentionables, and how those cruelties are in her blood and therefore she need own up to them. God, I’m already ruining her life, aren’t I?

Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction by Benjamin Percy (2016)

I don’t read a lot of craft books, but this one made a lot of sense to me, plus the eyeball on the front cover hypnotized my infant daughter. What really clicked for me in Percy’s writing tips is how he aligns writing fiction with iconic moments in cinema. I used to teach creative writing, but I haven’t for a few years now. I have, however, started teaching a Film Studies class. Strangely, and unexpectedly so, I think the latter has helped me improve my writing more than the former. I could also be gravely mistaken. Anyway, Percy’s book, published via Graywolf Press, would make an excellent resource for either high school literature or creative writing teachers.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones (2015)

This book takes on a lot. Its concerns traverse national borders as well as decades. It examines the fraying of family relationships, the disintegration of ethics in the medical profession, the vulnerabilities that come with having everything, and the desperation born from having nothing at all. Sometimes governments and institutions fail people because they cling too tightly to power. Sometimes they fail because they do nothing at all. This epidemic appears to be more of the latter, at least in terms of proportion. After all, humanity’s desire for easing its pain is nothing new, but once upon a time, doctors may not have so easily prescribed manufactured poisons to an entire generation. There is a lot here. You should read it. Then we should all figure out what might possibly be done to help those in need. America’s pain needs more than slogans and tax breaks: it needs professional help.

The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic by Ginger Strand (2015)

Sometimes the world is a stranger place than anything the writer might imagine. The world in Kurt Vonnegut’s books, however, at least as far as I knew, always flaunted such maxims. The island in Cat’s Cradle is a weird place, as are the travel habits of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. Then you read Strand’s book and how it places Kurt’s literary work side by side with his brother’s scientific work at General Electric, and you find that the imagination of Kilgore Trout may not be strange enough to articulate the truth of it all.

The Coyote’s Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire by Kimball Taylor (2016)

Place an obstacle in front of the human imagination. Tell a person that history and politics have decided a particular fate for them and their families—that parts of the world are forever roped off to them—unless they participate by certain imaginary rules, and they will invent new rules. They will build pathways over, under, and through the physical impediments that separate one side of a border from another. Borderlands are mysterious geographies, full of deceit and magic tricks. This book is a love story written to such places and the people who inhabit them. The games played there are really about more than life and death—they are about drawing substance from the dream. This book really is worth considering every time someone thinks or speaks on the certainty walls may or may not defend.

Authority by Jeff VanDerMeer (2014)

First, I’m not sure where the spaces and capitalizations should be for Jeff’s last name. I looked at the book and online and I’m not sure anyone’s spelling it consistently. Maybe there’s more than one Jeff Van Der Meer. Anyway—

it’s in how the last scene just allows all the tension and repression and running on a wheel to just uncoil into the great unknown of whatever the third book in his Southern Reach series holds in store. Well done.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)

For me, the natural comparisons are to The Buest Eye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Swamplandia! In that sense, this book belongs on high school reading lists. I want my own daughter (who is currently just shy of six months old) to read it, if only for the strength to be found in the last line.

Bryan Harvey tweets about books and basketball mostly @LawnChairBoys.

Previewing the ACC-Big Ten Challenge From A Skewed Perspective

2016-11-29T20:31:00.003-05:00

Isaac Haas will look to be a beast on the block for Purdue against Louisville Wednesday night in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge (Getty).

My time as an ACC basketball fan started in the early 90's when I first arrived from Chicago to the wild and wonderful town of Fredericksburg Virginia. I followed the league heartily throughout my youth and fully embraced the Carolina-Duke rivalry as a fan of the squad in sky blue uniforms.

Flash forward to 2013 when I started writing for RushtheCourt. I initially wanted to write about the ACC, but spots were needed covering the Big Ten. I've been covering this league now for four years and have become much more familiar with this conference than the one I was obsessed with years ago. So this makes the ACC-Big Ten challenge strange for me.

In the past, I obviously would have ridden with the ACC and wanted them to win all 14 games. Now, while I'm still a Carolina fan, I'm fully rooting for the Big Ten to win the event. Monday's games left both leagues tied 1-1, with Florida State beating Minnesota and Northwestern taking down Wake Forest. These were merely an appetizer for the proceedings coming tonight and Wednesday. What follows is what to look for in the best six games to come, with an extra little prediction thrown in for good measure.

Syracuse at Wisconsin: This one has the makings of a classic, with both teams residing within the top 10 on KenPom. The Badgers are only shooting 31 percent from behind the arc and have a tendency to take way too many threes. So how they handle the Cuse zone may very well determine the outcome. Another troubling element for Wisconsin is that they actually have been really sloppy this season (20.4 percent turnover rate). One thing they do really well, however, is crash the glass on the offensive end. Defensive rebounding has never been a strong point for Jim Boeheim coached teams, and that's still the case. The Orange have started off the season really shooting well from the perimeter, though, with four of their primary five deep shooters hitting over 46 percent. Prediction: Wisconsin in a close one because road games and Syracuse really aren't a thing this early in the year.

Michigan State at Duke: This is not a typical Michigan State team, at least not yet. They are painfully young, and they have almost no size except for Zach Randolph clone (Tom Izzo's words, not mine) Nick Ward. Duke is still Duke, even without the services of three absolute stud freshmen. Without going into a full-fledged breakdown on the numbers, I already know that Sparty has almost no chance here. The caveat, however, is whether or not Grayson Allen plays. If he's out of the mix, then I'd say the end result is a coin flip. My best guess is that everyone's favorite villain plays and the perimeter attack of Allen, Luke Kennard, and Frank Jackson prevails. No coin necessary. Prediction: Kind of made this clear already, but Duke wins by 15.

The somewhat hated Grayson Allen will lead Duke to a win over Michigan State tonight (Mark Dolejs, USATSI).

Virginia Tech at Michigan: This one barely makes the cut as one of the six best games here, but should be a sneaky good game because both squads should end up as tournament teams in March. Dan Brody's favorite coach has a 5-1 team that is one blown lead against Texas A&M from being undefeated. They have a bunch of rangy guards that shoot the ball well and don't turn it over, coupled with Zach LeDay as the one banger in the post. Michigan is built a tad different than the teams of the past five years, because they actually have much more size than the Hokies with the trio of DJ Wilson, Marc Donnal, and German Moritz Wagner. They used this size to cripple Marquette, the former school of Buzz Williams, and a solid SMU team to win the 2K Classic. They can shoot it from deep, and the aforementioned bigs do a really good job in pick-and-roll situations where they casually saunter to the rim for dunks and layups. This should be a really close game that will come down to the last couple of possessions. Prediction: Michigan will use their size to barely pick up their third quality win on the year.

Purdue at Lousiville: This one is another sneaky good game, but with a higher ceiling. Unlike the VT-Michigan matchup, both teams are ranked and both could be legitimate threats to win their respective conferences. This isn't the same defensive team for Purdue as last year, with the losses of the very large human AJ Hammons and perimeter pest Raphael Davis. They are better scoring the ball, however, due to the fact that they are simply much larger than most in the paint, with the tag-team of Caleb Swanigan and Isaac Haas. They've surrounded the monsters in the paint with a bunch of shooters than can make it rain from distance. On the other side, Louisville boasts the number two most efficient defense in the land and could force the Boilers into a tough shooting night. The question here is will they develop anything remotely resembling competence on the other side of the floor. Prediction: Ricky P and the Cards will frustrate Purdue and hold them in check with their defense. Louisville squeaks by.

Ohio State at Virginia: This one could get really ugly for two reasons. The first of which is that Ohio State has played only one semi-decent team, and haven't come close to seeing anything near what Virginia brings to the floor defensively. So they obviously could struggle to score points, which I hear is a problem when trying to win basketball games. The second reason is that the same core beat Kentucky last season, but lost to UT Arlington and Lousiana Tech at home. Whether or not this group has matured since, suffering the sting of not making the NCAA's in 2015-16 will be on display here as they travel to Charlottesville. Tony Bennett's team was insanely good when I watched them dismantle Iowa. They scored at will and did not allow the Hawkeyes to accomplish anything on offense. Despite a lack of star power, the system is working for the Cavs. Prediction: This one will be close for a half, but UVA will run away with it in the last ten minutes.

North Carolina at Indiana: If someone were to give me five dollars each time this game is referred to as a track meet, I wouldn't be living in a 350X350 studio apartment . Needless to say, pace has been mentioned quite a bit leading up to what arguably is the best game on paper of the Challenge's fourteen. Carolina and Indiana have both surprised pundits and fans alike by being a bit better than people expected out of the gate. Carolina is getting insanely stellar play from Joel Berry, and they are rebounding 46.6 percent of their misses thanks to Kennedy Meeks and freshman Tony Bradley. The two have absolutely owned the backboards. Indiana, meanwhile, shocked the college basketball world by beating Kansas early. But they then fell back to earth, losing to Fort Wayne last week. Both of these teams could easily win their leagues and could end up in the Final Four. If I were a betting man, I'd say the over is a safe play. Prediction: It's hard to go against Carolina with the way they've been playing, but I think Indiana playing at home will shoot the lights out much like they did against Kansas to get the win.

That reverse jinx was brought to you by Bill Simmons. Enjoy the hoops.

Brendan Brody tweets @Berndon4.

Read Everything That Dunks Must Converge (a novel in 3 Acts) at You Can't Eat the Basketball

2016-09-17T12:01:00.003-04:00

(Cover art by Todd Whitehead)

Things have really slowed down here at LCB, and I feel kind of bad for that. Posting here is a sentimental affair; aside from black and white marble journals, I’ve written here more often and longer than anywhere else. On the other hand, I’m not sad at all. In the last couple months, I worked to set up You Can’t Eat theBasketball.

What is You Can’t Eat the Basketball? I hope it becomes a place for long form projects about basketball and, specifically, the NBA. This past week Mike Langston, Daniel Rowell, Todd Whitehead, and I published the first two acts of Everything That Dunks Must Converge at the new site. (The third act will be published next week and will include contributions from all of us, plus some artwork by Elliot Gerard.) Anyway, the enthusiasm and creativity of all those individuals made the experience a lot of fun, and I hope YCETB will be able to provide more opportunities like this one in the future, to not only the previously mentioned individuals, but anyone else who wants to create longwinded art about the game of basketball.

And, while I’m at it, I should also thank Josh Spilker, Jason Gallagher, and Ian Levy. A few years ago Josh published an early version of Everything That Dunk’s first act. He helped select and edit a lot of the stories from the extremely rough drafts that appeared at this blog. I’m not sure anyone else, especially at the time, would have dedicated as much time and energy to those early scribblings. Later, Jason posted similar nonsense at ESPN True Hoop’s The Baller Ball, as did Ian Levy in The Hardwood Paroxysm Quarterly.

Sometimes it’s not that something is widely read, but that it’s read at all. After all, many of the most exciting and fun experiences in basketball occur in local parks and driveways, without a clock and with no referees. The intimacy of those pickup games, at least for the participants, mattered as much as anything else, and everything else is just a timeout.

Anyway, thanks, and below are links to Acts One and Two:

(Cover art by Daniel J. Rowell)

Click to access ACT ONE: The 5th Sun. Click to access ACT TWO: Guards of Cronos. ALSO, ACT THREE: Through the backboard will debut sometime the week of September 19th. You can sign up for the You Can't Eat the Basketball newsletter here.

(Cover art by Todd Whitehead)

And, if you've been an LCB reader for a while, Mike and I totally appreciate it. You can find me tweeting @LawnChairBoys most of the time.

A world of child soldiers and cowboys: 'Beasts of No Nation's' Extended Family Tree

2016-07-28T09:23:00.000-04:00

And AK-47s that they shooting into heaven

Like they're trying to kill The Jetsons

--Lupe Fiasco, "Little Weapon"

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film Beasts of No Nation (2015) began its journey as a novel by Uzodinma Iweala. Published in 2006, the film’s hypotext appeared on bookshelves a year earlier than Ishmael Beah’s bestselling memoir A Long Way Gone, which, although categorized as nonfiction, also began as a novel in a creative writing workshop. Around that same time, in 2008, Emmanuel Jal released his album Warchild, which received critical acclaim from publications like Rolling Stone. In other words, a general discourse about boy soldiers, colonialism in a post-colonial world, the relationships between violence and natural resources arose in the middle of the twenty-first century’s first decade, and this discourse could be equally packaged as either an entertainment commodity or a curriculum for high schoolers and neighborhood book clubs.

Perhaps the most mainstream examples of this exchange between one part of the world’s pain and another’s need to lionize the act of secondhand witnessing are the 2006 film Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCapprio and Djimon Hounsou, and the television show Lost, which introduced Mr. Eko during the course of its second season. (The character came of age as a boy soldier in an unnamed African village, and the season ran on ABC during the calendar years of 2005 and 2006.) Eventually, his character was killed by the show’s mysterious smoke monster, which, like any generic fad in entertainment or literature, could appear out of nowhere, slay its audience, and disappear back into the larger world.

While a certain level of exoticism surely exists in the appeal of these boy soldier narratives to an American audience, these stories also tend to arrive in somewhat familiar packaging. For example, in Beah’s A Long Way Gone the allusions are to Hollywood films like Rambo, American hip hop, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Some of this is due to how stories about similar events develop into something like a genre, complete with its own tropes and conventions. On the other hand, this effect may also be the residue of colonial power structures and their globalized byproducts writhing deep in the shape of these narratives.

Perhaps how humans experience and heal from violent trauma is universal. Maybe both the violence and the healing are learned. The story of the event, too, might be nothing more than rehearsed echo. Who knows? Then again, maybe that echo is not by accident. The possibility exists that the oppressed voices in these stories mold themselves to Western forms and constellations as a way of suggesting this violence did not begin here in our hearts, but in the minds of those who came—and still come—to our lands and villages with visions of colonialism dancing in their heads. In other words, the similarities are as much an effort to be polemical as they are to be both familiar and understood.

I can still remember the first time I watched Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys (1972). I was in my family’s living room. I was young. And what happens at the film’s end was not supposed to happen.

The scene is dark. Trees circle the outskirts of a low burning campfire. Men, boys, and horses gather too. John Wayne’s Wil Andersen and Bruce Dern’s Long Hair wrestle in the sloppy macho way that men in Westerns do. They lack skill. Everything is brute force and rugged effort. Andersen, the old bull that he is, bests Long Hair. According to Western mythos, the Andersens of the world will always best the Long Hairs when it comes to gritty effort and the good fight. They will do so on honor and experience. The thing is, however, that Long Hair can’t accept this fact, so he reaches for a gun and shoots Andersen in the back several times as the hero attempts to walk away.

For a kid like me, who grew up on a steady dose of Star Wars, Spielberg, and Disney this development in the film felt treacherous, if not altogether wrong. Andersen was not sacrificing himself a la Obi Won Kenobi. He was playing by a different set of rules, and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge evil’s unrelenting violence cost him his life.

As his body lays spread eagle and bleeding in the dimly lit shadows, a group of boys gather round him. The fire burns to the left and in the distant background. The boys kneel. No one speaks. The camera withdraws slowly. Eventually, though, these boys will arise and avenge the old man. They will kill Long Hair.

As a kid their bloody vengeance felt shocking, but the John Williams score in the background remained inspiring. And it’s the children scheming against a ban of outlaws accompanied by that score that makes this revisionist Western an odd precursor to so much of Stephen Spielberg’s efforts in the 1980s and 90s, from The Goonies (1985), which he wrote, through Hook (1992). Yet, while those later films feature children and adolescents at war against crooks and pirates, the violence is all plywood to the crotch and slipping on marbles. When Rufio duels Captain James T. Hook, his own death allows him to die without having truly lost his innocence. He is not a killer, and, in the end, an adult Pan doesn’t even slay the film’s corruption. Instead, he listens to his daughter, who pleads, “He’s just a mean old man without a mommy,” and turns his back on the old pirate, who eventually meets his maker via crocodile.

The Cowboys never really hides the violence that is always brewing just beneath its surface. Derne’s personification of barbarism is well-communicated in the early going, but the boys’ youth—their willingness to do a job well and therefore to be good and loyal citizens—often eclipses these concerns. Perhaps that is the film’s intent, or maybe the effect is simply wishful thinking on the part of the audience. After all, we want our children in life and on the screen to remain relatively innocent. Moreover, the role of children in Westerns is to observe violence, but never to shoot. Think specifically of Joey in Shane (1953), or count up the innumerable kids play fighting on dirt streets and in front of general stores. How many of them actually bleed or spill blood? Heck, even in the indiscriminate violence of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) the children are largely observers to the gunplay, ants, and scorpions. But not in The Cowboys.

In this film, the same kids who introduced themselves one by one, like members of the Mickey Mouse Club, as they got bucked from a horse take up arms. Imagine if The Mighty Ducks (1992) had featured the murder of Coach Bombay (Emilio Estevez) at the hands of the Hawks and their coach and then concluded with the surviving Ducks beating the Hawks and their coach to death with hockey sticks. Whatever that is that’s The Cowboys, which, with its chalkboard lessons on how to drive cattle, walks a fine line between the generational dynamics in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the anarchic violence in Lord of the Flies.

And this Western, where the guns are locked up until the climactic finish, is not that far removed from Beasts of No Nation.

The film begins with the whimsical escapades of Agu (Abraham Attah) and his friends. They carry around a hollow television set. They call it “Imagination TV,” and they act out different genres and tropes for their audience, usually a less than interested adult soldier who asks them to move along. They act out soap operas and Kung Fu scenes. They even attempt to make the performance a 3-D one by sticking their heads beyond the place where the television’s screen should be. The playfulness in these scenes and the childhood sense of wonder are reminiscent of the dance group Ishmael Beah and his friends belong to in A Long Way Gone. Imagination TV is also what’s at stake in a world resting on a violent threshold.

When the war arrives in their village, families are torn, the idea of play evaporates, and reality’s blood seeps into the soil. This destruction of home and community makes boys like Agu ripe for manipulation. Just like with Ishmael or Emmanuel, his fear and anger allow a man like the Commandant (Idris Elba) to make him a soldier. In a film like The Bad News Bears or The Mighty Ducks, this lack of stability would make Agu and the other orphaned boys excellent baseball or hockey players. In Hook, they would be lost boys. Moreover, they would all be indoctrinated into flying v’s, the value of the team, and learn how to be men of some unnatural mold. None of these films deny the malleability of youth; in fact, they all exploit it.

And the same can be said for The Cowboys.

When the idea of using boys on a cattle drive is first broached, Andersen doesn’t like it. Despite having set out as a cowhand at an early age in his own life, he believes the boys in the one room schoolhouse are much too young and inexperienced. Yet they persist. They are eager to prove themselves as men, and, seeing as how both his sons reside under tombstones, he longs to be seen as a father figure, even if he’s not fully aware of such a need. What’s interesting, however, is that some of the boys already have fathers and come from all-American families. The significance of their privileged backgrounds is in direct opposition to the circumstances of the children in boy soldier narratives.

In sports movies, the Bad News Bears and Mighty Ducks are also made up of boys from traditional family backgrounds and those who are not. In this way, the teams function as microcosms of the middle and working classes rising up to win the trophies formerly belonging to snobby rich kids. In Hook, Peter Pan acts as both hero and father to the lost boys, and, in turn, is both a father and hero to his own children. In Beasts of No Nation, though, the family is obliterated, and the unit of boy soldiers contains only orphans. In other words, the ingredients are much the same as these genre films, but the consequences are much more dire.

And, whereas the lives of boy soldiers are determined by a voided system's violence, these young cinematic cowboys and athletes are gifted with the ability to change their lives' courses merely by believing and participating in a particular system's values.

The Cowboys begins as a film about a down and out cattle rancher, but ends as a film about boys who have worked and killed like men. Beasts of No Nation begins as a film about boys, but is hi-jacked by Elba’s character, the Commandant. Eventually the film returns to being about the boys and their recovery, but the moments where it gravitates towards the might, power, and surprising vulnerability of the Commandant are the most startling. In these moments, the film manages to promote the slightest of sympathies for one of cinema’s most despicable creatures.

The Commandant and his squadron of boy soldiers have just accomplished their biggest military goal. They await, in the big city, a meeting with Supreme Commander Dada Goodblood (Jude Akuwudike). They wait. They wait some more. The meeting does not come. The Commandant’s importance in front of his boys begins to wilt as other individuals bypass him in line. In the vicinity of the waiting area is a mural depicting the nation’s past: the slave trade. Many of the individuals taken before the Commandant to see the Supreme Commander are foreign investors and businessmen. When he finally does meet with Goodblood, his boss informs him that the squadron will no longer be his. He will receive a new position, but clearly he is being demoted. Also of note is how much of a pawn he is within the political games of his nation and the world at large. He is a big man, but not much bigger than the boys he leads.

At this moment, one begins to understand, which is different than forgiving or approving, how a man like the Commandant could commit such despicable acts. He is, in a way similar to Andersen, a strong man completely dependent on the work of others. Moreover, he is also a small man. In The Cowboys, wide western landscape renders the physique of John Wayne’s character small. Yet, in medium and close shots he looms large. The same can be said of Elbis’ Commandant. He appears large next to the boys, but is, in truth a small man.

One last similarity between Andersen and the Commandant is how they are both victims and profiteers of economic systems. The reason no grown men are around for Andersen to hire is because they have all left the cattle ranches for the gold fields. In kind, the reason for the war and turmoil in Beasts of No Nation is the desire to exploit the nation’s natural resources, including the nation’s younger generations. These two men are essentially both grappling to either keep or to earn a seat at a larger table.

Of course, the Commandant is also a lot like Long Hair. Where Andersen’s wholesome opinions about a good day’s work place the boys in danger (one boy is trampled to death by the cowherd), men like Long Hair and the Commandant are without a code to live by. They are blood thirsty. They are coyotes. They are the ultimate danger, even if they are not the only danger.

In the later portions of Beasts of No Nation, the Commandant revolts against the Supreme Commander’s plan. He devises an assassination plot against his would be successor, and he flees into the wild battlefields with the boys loyal to him more than the cause. In one sense, he is like Brutus. In another, he is less honorable. He is more like the Colonel Kurtz belonging to Conrad and Coppola. Later, when the boys look to abandon his leadership, they will accuse him of “madness,” and the cinematography within the blood red soil of his camp will signal the surreal representations of war to be found in Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987).

The heart of The Cowboys never resides in so dark a place. The boys worship and revere Wayne’s Andersen. He is akin to Henry Fonda’s title role in the 1955 film Mister Roberts or Tom Hanks’ role in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). The Cowboys may have more in common with The Green Berets (1968) than Apocalypse Now, but that’s scary too.

The Cowboys is a film born of the New Hollywood, but the violent turn in its nature is not appalling, but in danger of being rejoiced. This is similar to what occurs at the end of The Revenant (2015), where vengeance is justice and does not seem to taint those the camera anoints as heroes. In the atmosphere of the New Hollywood, which is the atmosphere that gave cinema the viewpoints of Coppola and Spielberg and Kubrick, the horror is always that the young become like the old. In The Cowboys, though, this is no horror at all, but the film’s proud purpose. Yet the film isn’t quite that obtuse either.

Maybe the movie grins too much at the young boys taking up guns to avenge a Western patriarch. But the film also is smart in how the boys cannot locate Andersen’s grave. Instead, they leave a marker in proximity to his resting place. This moment places his death within a succession of Western violence. Earlier in the film, one boy asks Andersen about a horse’s skeleton, and Andersen remarks that the carcass is a ruined monument to the battle of Little Big Horn. These wholesome boys came from good stock, and that good stock built homes on land that once belonged to the Sioux. That land did not come without cost. The story of the West cannot be told without blood. Maybe the John Williams soundtrack revels too much in this, but the idea is true nonetheless.

A film that links the Western’s violence with the jungles of Vietnam is The Big Lebowski (1998), with its crime noir maze and tumbleweed rolling into the Pacific. The film allows its audience to imagine at absurd lengths what if the Vietnam War was a natural progression of Cortès’ apocalyptic march to the sea and the burnings of ancient Mexico. And so, too, is Beasts of No Nation a part of that history.

Most boy soldier narratives allow a Western audience to look in at the violence, removed and in awe. The healing at the end of such narratives often also suggests that the worst is over. Ishmael Beah’s novel Radiance of Tomorrow (2014) begins with a village reduced to bone dust and continues to observe how even after a war the gears of commerce continue to grind. It looks for hope, but seems to acknowledge that hope is not certain, that war and violence could strike again.

In 1959, Francois Truffaut filmed The 400 Blows. This film and others of Truffaut’s helped to shape a generation of filmmakers within and without Europe. The ending of the film, where Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Lèaud) escapes a correctional facility, whose purpose is to fix him via isolation and reflective interviews, and runs towards the ocean, became the template for almost all the New Hollywood endings. Essentially, Brando, McQueen, Newman, everyone was enacting some rendition of Doinel’s flight to the ocean. Interestingly enough, France had a hand in Vietnam up until 1959 and a hand in a variety of African nations up until the 1980. How far would Doinel have had to run in order to escape French values, the Enlightenment, etc.?

The end of Beasts of No Nation takes place at a camp for boy soldiers. Agu and his peers sleep and eat next to the ocean. They frolic in its waves. They make plans for their futures by a campfire. The camp aims to restore their lost youth. They go through interviews, much like Doinel in The 400 Blows, where they must work towards an understanding of self and community, of what was and what could be. The idea is to return these boys to a place where Imagination TV can be up and running again. The problem is that even Imagination TV requires a box, as do most stories, and trapped in that box is a world in need of new stories.

What I aim to say is that the plot thrusting those boys onto the trail and manhood in The Cowboys also transformed Agu into a soldier and victim in Beasts of No Nation, and that’s a most difficult thing to wrap one’s head—and heart— around. After all, that plot lives and breathes and kills outside the screen and off the page.

Doinel and Agu meet at the fence, or the ocean, perhaps somewhere in space. Fin.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

Early summer reads: Paying urban rent, tennis balls made from hair, masked men, & stories I didn't understand

2016-07-09T13:05:00.002-04:00

Image taken from the teaser for the book.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (2016)

The most poignant aspect of Desmond’s writing is how he understands the conjoined relations between experience and data. The first 292 pages of Evicted focus primarily on the lives of tenants in Milwaukee’s urban neighborhoods. These tenants are mostly single mothers and the children for which they struggle to provide. These stories immerse the reader in the everyday lives of the urban poor, and their battles become more real and less imagined through Desmond’s prose. In these sections, he sprinkles statistics amidst the testimony, but the people are not lost in the numbers. And yet his epilogue “Home and Hope” is twenty or so pages of data-driven argumentation. The shift is beautiful and exactly as it should be. Moreover, Desmond does not hesitate to propose solutions to a crisis he has both recreated through story and sketched with numbers, and the result is the whole elephant in the room, not just a trunk, not just a tusk, but the entire, unavoidable beast.

Furthermore, Desmond cuts to an issue that is a bed rock of so many other issues. This past week my social media threads read as if people lived in several different Americas. And that’s probably true. Desmond’s work in Evicted suggests as much. Our cities and neighborhoods were designed in other times, with other thoughts and feelings about what America should be, and yet those skeletal structures still stand. We, as citizens, live and breathe, play and die, within the spaces of yesterday’s blueprints. We are a country that dreams largely the same dreams, but we live in separate spaces—and we forget what lives exist beyond the walls of our own dwellings and Facebook feeds. Desmond’s Evicted is a plea not to do so, and, perhaps more importantly, his research and testimony prove that there are no facts without both the contextual story and the statistical data.

I look at the past week—the violence done to black men and to police officers—and I think any discussion about how Black Lives Matter, police brutality, gun rights, mental health, and what have you requires both elements (the experience and the data) if they are to be constructive of a nation in which we can all live.

Sudden Death by Àlvaro Enrigue (published in 2013 and translated from Spanish in 2016)

I like tennis. I like the game’s shifting geometries and the net as nylon metaphor. I like tran-Atlantic subject matter. I like hearing about the Aztecs and the Spanish empires. Enrigue’s book draws all of this subject matter together via a tennis ball made from Anne Boleyn’s hair. The result is a novel that is both serious and whimsical. While faith and history pump through every sentence, so, too, do the forces of creation and apocalypse. The result is comically devastating look at the deaths of two old worlds and the birth of a new one. The chapters imagining the bastard romance between Cortès, the clueless conquistador, and Malinche, the oft-noted scapegoat, were my favorites.

This image courtesy of NPR.

The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley (1924)

As a kid, two staples of my TV-watching schedule were Disney’s 1957 version of Zorro and the Adam West version of Batman. I liked both. I reenacted both. My parents and neighbors probably wondered what the hell my sister and I were doing in the yard. The answer: we were saving all of Gotham City and/or southern California.

As an adult, I read McCulley’s book (plus the introduction by Robert E. Morseberger and Katharine M. Morseberger). I liked it. I have not reenacted it. The dynamic between Don Diego and the masked outlaw is more interesting now than it was as a kid.

What is not yours is not yours by Helen Oyeyemi (2016)

Before reading this collection of short stories, I had never read anything by Oyeyemi. After reading it, I’m not sure I’m smart enough to get it. Or, I didn’t have the right background experience or identity to get it. Maybe the problem was when I read it—during the middle of the school year. I feel like maybe I need to reread parts of it or pick up one of her other books because what I do understand I like. This is probably the worst review of book ever, and Helen’s work probably deserves better.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

The end of history, or Andy Murray's attempted rivalry with Novak Djokovic

2016-06-21T10:33:00.000-04:00

As of June 5th, the tennis season is through Roland Garros. Wimbledon will start before the end of the month. In between those two swells in the Grand Slam ocean, Andy Murray made history by winning the Queens tournament for a fifth time. He is the only player to do so, having laid waste to Milos Raonic in the tournament's championship match. This summer has also seen Murray reunite with his former coach, Ivan Lendl, in order to start winning Grand Slams again, which is the sort of history that tends to matter most in the tennis world. Of course, this accomplishment would also entail solving the Novak Djokovic conundrum.

Some puzzles, like Raonic's serve, are easier for Andy Murray to solve than others. And at this point in their careers, Djokovic's game must appear to Andy like a rubik's cube with no matching tiles. The two players are what remain of the Big Four era, and yet they are not on equal footing. Djokovic currently holds every trophy that matters, and will not see the court again until he’s under the starch white lights of Wimbeldon. Meanwhile, Andy is a king without a kingdom; the Stannis Baratheon of the professional tennis ranks. No minor tournament win can change that no matter how many times it happens, and his turning the page back to the days of Lendl is a gesture wrought from nostalgic desperation. He is, in this way, chasing a birthright he can no longer possess.

When Andy won Wimbledon in 2013 (the second of his two Grand Slams), he pulled within striking distance of Novak Djokovic, who, at the time, held six Grand Slam titles. Since then, however, Novak has won six more major titles and Andy none. Gone are the days when the tennis world could envision Murray out dueling to the ends of the earth the player he grew up battling on the amateur circuit. As Louisa Thomas writes, “He is no longer playing for history.”

While Andy has become an on-the-court metonym for turmoil and despair, Novak has become a token for inner peace. Whether this state of being is the cause of his winning or a result of it, the Serbian player did not so much cross the Rubicon as he became the river. His power and might span both waves and continents. He is everywhere, and the rest of the tennis season will be about his historical reverence. Little else will matter, unless that little else is the twig that dams Novak's onslaught.

And while Murray has failed more often than not in Grand Slam finals against Novak, Andy is still the most viable option the sport possesses for redirecting the Djokovic’s floodwaters. This tennis season could have been different, and, for a flash at Roland Garros, that difference could still be seen.

In Paris, Andy Murray moved from distraction to focus in his march from the tournament’s early challenges to his winning the first set in the tournament’s championship match. He struck decisive forehands. He maneuvered in front of the baseline, rather than sulking behind it. He looked tall and alert, less like a bloodhound, and more like an elephant. He was not so much a barbarian blubbering at the gates, but a general with a game plan.

In his latest showdown with Novak, the two exchanged shots. They collected clay in the grooves of their shoes. They clanged the tension in their rackets against the heels of those red-stained shoes. They hunkered down for a battle that promised, at least in its early going, to be writ large as the Arch de Triumph.

Except that promise mistook illusion for its keystone. As much as Murray’s early energy commanded respect, his success benefited greatly from Novak’s temporary loss of nerves. When the man seeking the career Grand Slam finally found his game and quit landing his forehand out of bounds, Hannibal’s march through the Alps fled on sight, as if besieged by an army of rodents.

Still, this loss unfolded somewhat differently than so many of Andy’s major losses to Novak. Less obscenities exited his lips. He did not berate himself nor his box, at least not to the point of embarrassment. Perhaps the early experiences of fatherhood or some other realization of the good life have quelled his on court tantrums. On the other hand, maybe his retreat from anger is a letting go of frustration; an acceptance of the world according to Novak. After all, no matter how much control Andy possesses of himself, he will never compose the tennis world in the same manner as Djokovic.

Up 15-love and five games to three, Andy Murray tossed the ball over his head and arched his back, like the stroke of a cursive pen. Opposite him, in back of the ad court, crouched Novak Djokovic. His left leg losing contact with the red clay before Andy even struck the ball, always a fraction ahead of his would be rival, anticipating every move the Brit might make. Then the confusion started.

The ball landed on the centre service line, possibly in the deuce court and out of play. Novak attempted a return; the ball sailed widely out of bounds. As Novak returned serve, or before, or after, Damien Dumusois, the chair umpire, yelled, “Out!” Then the two met at the centre service line, like two men inspecting a fender bender or a bit of roadkill. Dumusoi repeated multiple times, “It’s this one here. It’s this one here.” He pointed each time, and Novak bemoaned the official wearing a light blue blazer and navy slacks in disbelief. Seconds later, the Hawk-eye review system revealed that Murray’s serve had caught the line with a thickness relative to a cheese slice. The crowd began to boo. Novak exited the disagreement with a sarcastic thumb’s up, insistent that he only hit the ball out because the umpire had already called the ball out. The point went to Andy; the boos continued.

When Murray leaned into his service routine, with the score 30-love, the crowd still booed. He exited his routine. He waited. The crowd would not stop, and then, with Novak gesturing to let go of the recent past, the crowd began to cheer. Further gesturing from Novak — his hands in the air as if conducting a symphony —caused the red clay heart of the tennis world to hold its breath. Andy would win the game and the set, but what else could he manage against an opponent so in control, not just of himself, but the arena and the world at large? Rare is the power of Novak Djokovic, who silenced a kingdom with neither a word nor a dragon.

Maybe it’s hyperbole to suggest that this rivalry is as lacking in substance as the one between Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams. After all, Andy Murray did defeat Novak Djokovic in the Italian Open leading up to Roland Garros, but such moments are so few and far between in recent years. In the five other clay matches between the two, Andy went win-less. Moreover, the win in Rome was just Andy’s second victory over his would be rival in their last fourteen matches. To a degree, whatever this match-up offers can be defined by what it’s not, and what’s it’s not is an even fight, where each encounter redefines the two competitors. Instead, the two men leave the Coliseum exactly as they entered it. They are the two best players in the world, but they are not equals.

Imagine if Andy Murray had been the victor at Roland Garros: he would now be holding three of the game’s major championships, just like Djokovic. He would be the man between Novak and that coveted French Open, and Novak would be the man between him and that coveted Australian Open. That kind of fun would have provided the game with an almost too perfect degree of symmetry.

Maybe tennis needs the Djokovic versus Murray rivalry to materialize into something less predictable. Then again, maybe tennis only needs Djokovic — the alpha and omega. Either way, the game is an old one, with roots groping back nearly eight centuries. While somewhat of a competitive letdown, Murray’s shortcomings in the face of an all-time great aren’t quite the stuff of a herniated Atlas. He is still the second best player in the world, and he is still the best viable option for delaying the end of tennis history, which means, even at his worst, he’s still the game’s best wrinkle.

Bryan Harvey writes in a variety of places around the internet and tweets @LawnChairBoys.

Truth and lies in Pixar's 'The Good Dinosaur' (2015)

2016-06-04T12:53:00.001-04:00

A bird in the Venerable Bede's monastery.

Bob Peterson and Peter Sohn’s The Good Dinosaur (2015) is one part lie and another part truth. These ingredients do not make for a particularly unique story. Rather they spin from the DNA of past fiction a tale that is something less than myth and a bit more than history.

The film begins with the lie. In the great frontiers of outer space, one asteroid in a belt collides with another. The image resembles Newton’s cradle and is an example of order falling into chaos, for these galactic marbles do not swing back and forth on an office desk but careen off into space towards a familiar sun and its familiar planet, Earth.

On the surface of this planet, dinosaurs graze in ignorance that they and fate are about to collide. And yet, fate misses them. The asteroid grazes the planet’s blue atmosphere and continues off into the darkness and frontiers of unknown space. Like the flight of the Venerable Bede’s sparrow, the meteorite takes reprieve from the storm’s chaos within the planet’s walls and windows. Of course, later in the film, this planet will prove to be something other than peaceful—storms will roll through its canyons and across its mountains. And, of course, this opening sequence is a lie. That asteroid did strike the Earth, and the dinosaurs did perish. Death is a part of history.

At this stage in writing about The Good Dinosaur, I should state that I began this film full of doubt. I watched it wanting to ridicule it. I hadn’t spoken with anyone who saw it in theaters. I’m not even sure if anyone I know bothered to see it. I also struggled with the premise that the dinosaurs didn’t die. Moreover, they’re lack of extinction didn’t bother me so much as the idea that in their not dying humans would somehow still be alive. In other words, how does one pull out a card in time and not expect the whole house to collapse?

I didn’t understand, or rather didn’t like, the notion that in removing one of the planet’s great apocalypses, the universe could still arrive at the same moment of genesis that shaped Adam and Eve, or you and me. Such a story sounded preposterous. Such a story sounded naïve and egotistical. Such a story suggested that extinction comes for no one—dinosaur, human, or gorilla. And lastly, such a story, in an age of climate change questions and mass extinctions, seems like a story that might excuse a rather dangerous form of self-centered decision-making.

But I was too quick to judge The Good Dinosaur. After all, this film keeps the dinosaurs alive not to avoid discussions about death and extinction, but in order to explore the frontiers between life and death.

After the film’s great revision to the annals of history, The Good Dinosaur roots itself to an agrarian myth that is both distinctly Americana and universally human. The visuals of an Apatosaurus husband and wife tilling the land, seeding the soil, and watering their crops are all stunning in their majestic incongruities. The sights are beautiful, but they also fill the audience with questions. Why are these dinosaurs living Little House on the Prairie? Why in a film without history are we witnessing the conservative family structures of Shane? Then, this couple hatches three sons and raises them to do farm chores, like tend to the chickens. Why would a family of herbivore dinosaurs need chickens? The movie, while visually appealing, is, in the early going, both magical and weird. The words stupidly clever might also come to mind at seeing a dinosaur ironically cower before those anachronistic chickens. Then again, the whole premise is absurdly anachronistic.

Seeing the other in a frontier setting.

In the plot’s early going, three Apatosaurus siblings attempt to impress their parents through hard work around the farm. The goal is to “make one’s mark.” And, in order to leave one’s actual mark, the family members place their muddy footprints on the family’s stone silo. This family ritual is fascinating to ponder. After all, these are living dinosaurs erecting monuments that look exactly like the fossils left by dead dinosaurs. Furthermore, the silo stores what looks like corn. Do dinosaurs eat corn? In a strange manner, the film appears to have read Michael Pollen’s essay “What’s Eating America” and turned it inside out, especially when Poppa chooses the youngest and most incompetent of his offspring, Arlo, to guard the grain elevator from a varmint, who it turns out is a human child.

In short, The Good Dinosaur defamiliarizes eons of world history, but does not alter that history’s basic mechanisms. Instead of robbing what the dinosaurs left behind in terms of fossilized fuels, the boy robs the dinosaurs of what they need to survive the next winter, which looms as large as any or all ice ages. The two species are placed at odds within the film because one is dependent on robbing the other for its survival. The film’s cleverness, however, allows for the boy and Arlo to see one another face to face and eye to eye. Poppa’s trap catches the boy in his thievery. And all Arlo must do is club the wild critter over the head, and the family order will persist—another asteroid will be avoided. But Arlo doesn’t go through with the sacrifice. Instead, he sets in motion a sequence of events that threaten the family’s survival, and all so a small, wild boy can live.

Much of the film’s scenes are familiar. Any Disney or Pixar fan will recognize scenes that are similar to The Lion King and Finding Nemo especially. But the film’s performance of genre pastiche also aligns it with Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre (The Crossing and The Road specifically) and Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñàrritu’s The Revenant (2015). Nods and winks to other Westerns, like John Huston’s Red River (1948), also permeate the story, but the points of similarity and difference with McCarthy and especially Iñàrritu’s film are the most striking.

Man or pterodactyl?

The storm-riding pterodactyls and pillaging velociraptors gesture towards the brutal cannibalism of The Road’s post-apocalyptic vision. A nihilistic fatalism circulates through these predators, and, in their malice, is the same fearful violence that moves the hand of John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) towards killing the son of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCapprio) in The Revenant. But what’s so surprising about these points of comparison is how Pixar’s version of the frontier manages to be more tonally complex than the super serious Iñàrritu film.

As the film’s journey intertwines the lives of Arlo and the boy, who comes to be named Spot, their relationship begins to resemble that of the boy and the man in McCarthy’s The Road. The two clearly love and depend on each other, and all the strangers Arlo encounters view the human boy as a resource. In The Road, the man’s son is often viewed by strangers as either a source of protein (or worse). The man protects the boy, and the boy’s presence gives the man’s life hope and therefore a purpose beyond death.

The Revenant, however, provides Glass with only one purpose: to kill. And, while the film clearly sides with the father, the film also renders him nearly as sad and lonely and desperate as his son's killer, Fitzgerald. The both of them are pterodactyls circling one another in an apocalyptic storm, and all the love and hope in The Revenant are past tense and beyond saving. Thus, when Glass exhales at the film’s end, there is nothing but empty darkness. Whereas, in The Good Dinosaur, Arlo’s exhale resuscitates Spot, and there is life, to hold and to cherish.

The works of Jack London are another textual comparison for The Good Dinosaur. Spot often howls into the distance out of loneliness. He is, for most of the film, more dog than human. He also teaches Arlo to howl with him. The call is both humanizing and animalistic. Towards the film’s conclusion, another human answers his call. The two eye each other like wolves and sled dogs. The scene is also reminiscent of those raised fists in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). The boy looks with longing towards his own kind, but Arlo delays the White Fang moment, believing the two can both live together on the dinosaur family farm.

"Son, you smell like dinosaur."

Moments later, this parting, which was always in the cards, takes place. Spot crawls into the circle of a human family. The species enters into the happy greeting on all fours, but they exit on the advancement of two-leggedness, walking into the future, into something less imaginative and more like the record of historical fact. Arlo, too, rejoins his mother and siblings. They will continue to farm in the shadow of those snowy mountains, breaking the earth for what’s to come.

The ending of The Good Dinosaur, however, is not quite a happy ending. Extinction and evolution loom in the background. The storms, avalanches, flashfloods, and snowflakes all gesture towards some cataclysm on the horizon. The reunions at the film’s end cannot stave off the inevitable; they are as fleeting as a child’s belief in transcending the historical record. These two species could not live together, and yet they would both be dead if they parted. The journey tells us so.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

To their own devices: A reflection on Pablo Larrain's 'The Club'

2016-05-22T11:30:00.000-04:00

A man stands on a beach, holding a long pole. He turns in a circle. Tethered to the pole is bit of fur, possibly a rabbit’s. A dog chases the fur. The man drags the fur in the sand. The dog lowers its neck. The man raises the fur high into the air. The dog raises its neck and snout. The dog chases the fur in orbit around the man. He is the center. He is a priest.

Pablo Larrain’s The Club (2015) begins and ends under a gray, overcast sky. In the shot where the dog wears a track around the man, the ocean, at low tide, waits at a distance. For a film that takes place along the water, the water and the natural world are held at an odd distance, perhaps a reminder that the world need not confine itself to artificial orbits.

The majority of the scenes take place within the walls of a high yellow house, and, in many of the scenes that take place outside the house, the house is still visible. The first frame of the house foregrounds a closed wooden gate. Behind the gate is a set of stone steps, and a woman scrubs them clean.

This yellow house is dull with grime, even gentle in its old age. The first shots inside the house feature two old men on couches, watching television. The photography inside the house suspends the men in a gray mist, as if the clouds over the ocean are inside the yellow house, too. Somehow the outside world manages to appear brighter through the windows, even though it is still overcast.

The next frame is of the earth’s deep brown soil and an old man’s pick axe. As he tends to his garden, he wears a sweater. He is tired. The sound of his lungs sucking for oxygen is clearly audible. The camera cuts to the ocean. The low waves furl over jagged rocks. A sail bobs in the distance. A man—the priest with the long pole—smiles at the water. His dog kneels beside him in obedience. Their silhouettes blot out the rising sun. When he kneels to pat the dog, the glare of the sun causes the audience to squint.

This man is not of the light, but between it and the rest of the world. He is a wooden gate and stone steps; a yellow house filled with gray clouds. He trains the dog to be fast and to chase meaningless baubles. And he is proud. So proud. His family of fellow priests look at him and smile, as if framed within a family portrait. They are old. They appear fairly harmless in their rituals.

After a scene of these priests at the dinner table, they will attend a dog race. They will lead the dog to the site of the races, but they will watch from afar, on top of a hill. They will peer down with binoculars, and this distance will make them appear, at once, as both the town’s race day authorities and its outcasts. The woman who earlier cleaned the steps of dirt supervises the dog’s entry into the race. She loads the dog into a gate, whose dull yellow paint matches that of the yellow house at the end of the road.

She is, in this way, a stand in for the Virgin Mary, and the dog is a strange substitute for Christ; for the priests enter into the town’s everyday affairs via the dog. In this sense, the dog is also a substitute for them, which renders them as holy and distant from the world as any Catholic’s God.

The Club therefore is a film that at its core is essentially about place and distance. The first words from the film are written, rather than spoken: “God saw that the light was good, and he separated it from the darkness.” These early lines from Genesis are about the geographical differences between good and evil, or the defining of abstract borders. The start of this film sways the audience to believe these men are good, even if they are mischievous in their betting habits. Still, such vices appear rather harmless in the grand scheme of heaven and hell and the eternal fate of human souls.

But then a fifth priest joins them. And, in the meeting of this priest, the yellow house reveals itself to be something other than a retreat for old men of the cloth. The yellow house is a place to set aside thedarkness, so the Catholic Church, as an institution, may remain a beacon of hope in a dark world.

Furthermore, in this scene a stranger, whose name will later be revealed as Sandokan (Roberto Farìas) appears at the wooden gate and begins yelling words that, depending on one’s allegiances, are either truthful or blasphemous. He accuses, in profane detail, what this fifth priest, Matìas Lazcano (Josè Soza), did to him years ago when he was a boy. Sandokan has followed Padre Lazcano to the end of the road, to the yellow house, to wail his holy complaints about foreskin, semen and salvation.

The other priests give Padre Lazcano a gun. They want him to walk down the stone steps and scare away the stranger and his truth. They want to separate the darkness from their pretense of light. Padre Lazcano takes the gun. He walks down the steps. Sandokan continues his violent recital. The father raises the gun. He pulls the trigger. The bullet flies through his head, and the steps must be cleaned of a stain that it can be argued both Lazcano and Sandokan are responsible.

I do not mean to argue that Sandokan is not a victim, nor that Lazcano is not a man of evil acts. What I mean to suggest is that The Club’s version of victimhood is beyond what most films and conversations about child abuse, rape, and sexual assault tend to depict. There is, in other words, no space between good and evil. Sandokan both loves and hates Padre Lazcano, and, as a victim who feels conflicting emotions about his assailant, he cannot separate the light from the darkness. For him, the priests are both holy and monstrous. They sinned against him, and yet he finds holiness in the deceit. They showed him love, and he is tormented not only by the crime, but by the crime’s lack of simplicity.

As Sandokan’s pain washes over the film, this lack of simplicity treats the film’s audience like Padre Vidal (Alfredo Castro) leading a dog in circles on the beach, only Sandokan’s presence, along with a sixth priest’s investigation into the yellow house, unmoors the daily rituals of these four unholy men and their housekeeper (or guard), Hermana Mònica (Antonia Zegers).

The film’s climax is a montage that includes the murder of two greyhounds, including Padre Vidal’s dog, Rayo. The beating of Padre Vidal on the same beach where he trained Rayo. The scapegoating of Sandokan. The masterful plotting of Hermana Mònica. And the ambiguous involvement of the sixth priest, Padre Garcìa (Marcelo Alonso). Through this entire montage, the camera looks up at the action, floating and bobbing, not stable and decentered within the sea of crime and deceit.

When the sequence is over, the camera will cut to the sun dying in a horizon of pink blood. In the next frame, Padre Garcìa will wash Sandokan’s feet, wrap them in a towel, and kiss them. When this father leaves the yellow house, he will leave Sandokan in the place of himself and the deceased Padre Lazcano. The lost lamb will have been begrudgingly accepted back inside the gates into a space that the Church never intended for him. And he will eat and sleep beside the very same men who ruined his life and to whom he still feels tragically indebted.

If Sandokan’s character appeared more stable, this scene might be about forgiveness. But he isn’t. He is a man of both hate and love. Earlier he vowed to penetrate the priests as they did him, while in another scene he confessed his love for the priesthood. His sincerity wants to destroy and preserve their sanctity. Thus, the film’s conclusion is less about his offering forgiveness and more about the priests serving penitence.

Yet, if penitence and forgiveness necessitate such complicated circumstances, the acts are rendered quite unnerving in their messiness. In the context of these crimes, which harm the body and the faith, belief traps victims and perpetrators together, meaning that the healing process may not result from separation, because separation may be impossible within communities of faith. After all, the ideologies of the Catholic institution rely on notions of convergence. Such is the last scene of The Club.

Inside the yellow house, Padre Garcìa, Hermana Mònica, the house’s four resident priests, and Sandokan sit around a coffee table. Sandokan provides a long list of prescription drugs he needs to remain stable. This list suggests that faith alone is not enough to survive in this world and that his presence within the house could be a temptation to these priests looking to escape their crimes. Then Padre Garcìa begins to sing “The Lamb of God.” The others join him in the singing. Padre Garcìa rises from his chair. As they continue to sing, he exits the house and walks down the stone steps. The fate of the priests and Sandokan in the yellow house is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the individuals within the yellow house will be left, for better or worse, to their own devices. The investigation will report nothing of consequence.

Whereas a film like Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (2015) extrapolates these intersections within a particular neighborhood and the city of Boston to be globally awful, The Club confines these experiences within a claustrophobic space that only the victims who can’t stop believing could ever really understand.

Another way to think about this difference is to observe the obvious. Spotlight, while a masterful film, is a Hollywood production about metropolitan Boston. While the victims in this film lived well outside the city’s margins of wealth and power, the victims and perpetrators in The Club exist even more outside the margins of power and concern. I don’t know quite what to make of that other than to ponder the world’s many hiding places and how those places must be filled with ample opportunity for both good and evil, whatever they might be. We can either peer into them or not, but either way responsibility will find us.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

Spring Reading: Basketball, Opiates, & Bicycles

2016-05-05T09:37:00.000-04:00

Some books I read on a beach or late at night:

Boys Among Men by Jonathan Abrams (2016)

Pretty much required reading for writing and thinking about the NBA’s one-year rule and the generation of players spanning from Kobe Bryant and Kevin Ganett to LeBron James and Dwight Howard. Of course, anyone familiar with the Abrams and the book’s cover could tell you that. No, what truly imprints the book’s message into a reader’s cerebral cortex are the personal stories and anecdotes about the players who either disappeared after the draft or vanished without ever being drafted in the first place. As a high school teacher and an individual who came of age with LeBron and his peers, these buzzed with a static intimacy that at times struck as large as any lightning bolt. On the other hand, as a writer, I admired how Abrams trusted the breadth and depth of so many lives that seemed to start on a basketball court and end up somewhere else. He did not write this book with a heavy hand. He simply raised awareness, which is something quite complicated, but true to what sport does once you’re too old, and too slow, to play.

Ball Don’t Lie: Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball by Yago Colàs (2016)

With source material that includes as much Aristotle as Rasheed Wallace and as much Walter Benjamin as Manu Ginobili, this book came to wreck minds. Colàs entrenches the NBA narrative within the American mythos and rips it all apart. The Jordan I thought I knew is not. The Wilt and Russell dichotomy collapses. An empire got swallowed up! All this time I’ve been watching basketball, and now I don’t even know anymore. And yet, I want to pick up a ball and dribble and shoot and spin more than ever.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones (2015)

If you are a fan of television shows like Breaking Bad or Justified, this book might be something that pulls back the Pollos Hermanos curtain and reveals a franchise of small town boys selling heroin like pizza, like it was nothing. If you’re a fan of No Country for Old Men and Sicario, this book might be worth reading for how it recognizes the humanity on both sides of the border. If you were ever prescribed a painkiller over the last twenty years or so, you might want to read this book to understand the differences between a drug dealer from small town Xalisco and a large drug corporation. If you know someone who lost a loved one to this epidemic—if you’re lost yourself—, I am sorry. This book is about the desperation of dreamers, and the sadness of those who already possess the substance of the dream. This is about falling apart and what to do with the pieces.

The Coyote’s Bicycle: The Untold Story of Seven Thousand Bicycles & the Rise of a Borderland Empire by Kimball Taylor (2016)

If Quinones’ Dreamland is about desperation, corporate culture and death, then Taylor’s book is about movement. This is not to say that The Coyote’s Bicycle is a story without sadness, but the windblown qualities of a bike ride are so much more invigorating than the stupor brought on by overmedicating chronic pain. This book is about the game played between the castle’s guards and the inevitable shadows that creep—and ride—with an irresistible spirit.

Bryan Harvey keeps the LCB blog afloat and writes at places like The Cauldron, The Classical, and Hardwood Paroxysm. He tweets @LawnChairBoys.

Number of the Day: Duncan turns 40

2016-04-25T22:06:00.000-04:00

Or four thousand. Who knows? So it is written. So it shall be done. Or, as Duncan once said to Ramses, "Dungeons and Dragons was a much cooler game when it was real."

Here's picture of Duncan in the time of the infidel:

As illustrated by Jacob Weinstein for FreeDarko.

And here is the Aged One celebrating a much earlier birthday, in a time when myth was history:

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

Work in the Hardwood Paroxysm Quarterly (Vol. 1, Issue 3)

2016-04-20T12:00:00.000-04:00

Art by Elliot Gerard

Because I have a hard copy arriving in the mail sometime, I will probably comment more on this later. After all, anyone who knows me knows that if you put me near a computer I waste a half hour for every five minutes of productivity, which means for me to say anything of note I will need the hard copy that is currently en route.

Art by Daniel Rowell

So here’s the short of it: Ian Levy did a great job editing the issue and the artwork is sublime. The articles I’ve read so far make me jealous. I was glad to be part of a project so well put together. I don’t think I’ve been part of something that’s looked quite this good and polished. More than once, I've thought about framing every page. At this point, I'm only wasting your time. Just do one of the following:

Go here. Order a digital copy. Order a hard copy.

The art alone is worth it. But the words are nice, too, with essays and interviews on everything from LeBron James to Porzingis and the McDonald's All-American game.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

Some lighthearted baseball talk (NL East edition)

2016-04-20T09:00:00.000-04:00

The following is not a preview, but a lighthearted conversation about the NL East, baseball and other things:

Freeman: Was it always this lonely? Chipper: Nah man, it was beautiful and busy and full of life.

Atlanta Braves

Carlos Sampedro: I hate when teams dump everyone and everything.

Bryan Harvey: Me too. I think I could survive a winless season if said season included Andrelton Simmons.

CS: You still have Freddie Freeman.

BH: At this point, rooting for Freeman feels like eating vegetables. You do it because you have to. The team should probably just trade him too. Apparently, the high water mark for the Braves this decade was April 2010 when Jason Heyward went yard in his first Major League at bat.

John Hoffman: Long gone are the days of Ted Turner and Jane Fonda.

BH: All that consistency somehow turned in on itself and ended in the abyss where it started. This is Finnegan’s Wake.

JH: I look at your team and think Deliverance. No hope here.

CS: Yeah, you guys have gone full Astro. Nobody goes full Astro.

JH: What about Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight?

BH: I’m not listening anymore, John, all I hear are banjoes, as Jeff Francoeur walks up to the plate about ten years too late.

"It's just your typical contract, Giancarlo. You get some things. We get some things. You know, your soul."

Miami Marlins

BH: So let’s say a team lost three straight games to a team that had previously lost nine straight. That would be a really awful team, right? Like that team would be the worst, am I right?

JH: It would definitely be a team devoid of fans and culture.

BH: I remember kids in elementary school wearing Marlins and Rockies gear when the teams first appeared. I sometimes wonder where all those kids went.

JH: Did Carlos have anything to say about the Fish?

BH: He did not, which means he neither likes them nor dislikes them. He sorted every team into those two categories. The teams he did not sort do not exist.

JH: Do you think Drew Barrymore is a Florida fan?

BH: I do not know.

JH: J-Lo? Don Johnson? Jimmy Buffet?

BH: Sometimes I wonder if there’s a Pedro Sancarlos living in Fairfax County who is a huge Florida Marlins fan, like painted his entire basement teal and worships Craig Counsel huge.

JH: What about The Golden Girls?

BH: You’re just naming things that are old now.

JH: Hemingway would love this team.

BH: Do you think Giancarlo Stanton’s mattress is stuffed with actual cash? Let’s take your Old Man and the Sea premise to its full extent. Stanton’s not the old man—he’s the prize catch lashed to the boat and everything else is a shark.

Hope.

New York Mets

CS: Love their rotation.

JH: You thinking about Seinfeld, Edie Falco, Chris Rock, and Chris Rock more so than Kevin James and Adam Sandler?

CS: I’m talking about actual pitchers, John.

JH: Picture this: Oscar Madison Mets caps on both Jack Klugman and Walter Matthau.

CS: What?

BH: He’s being obscure, Carlos, at least I think that’s what he’s doing.

CS: Whatever, I don’t love the team’s defense, but I think the pitchers should win them the division.

BH: What I like most about this team is how they ambushed Washington last season. By definition, that can’t happen two years in a row. Then again, Syndergaard. Is he the best pitcher in baseball right now?

Philadelphia Phillies

BH: Really? No one wants to talk about the Phillies. Then let’s just do what Philly does and fill the void.

JH: Art Garfunkel.

Washington Nationals

BH: Seems like Nats fans are more tepid this year, which is understandable.

CS: Well, there’s last season and the season before that. I also don’t think they improved really.

BH: A lot went right for this franchise in terms of building a talent base. However, baseball, like so many sports, is a game of limited opportunities. I’m not saying they can’t win a World Series anytime soon, but I still say they shut down Stephen Strasburg in the year that may have been their best shot. As a Braves fan, who watched my beloved Bobby Cox’s teams squander championship opportunities postseason after postseason, that Nats postseason, while cautious, was also a tremendous act of hubris. Maybe it was right for Strasburg’s health, but it wasn’t right for the franchise. I also don’t feel at ease with how I’m suggesting he should have acted as a baseball martyr, just that you never know what year is your year, which is both hopeful and haunting.

JH: Kevin Durant has a Washington Nats logo tattooed on his stomach.

BH: But is hopeful or haunting? Seriously, I’m only kind of joking.

CS: I would go so far as to suggest they fire GM Rizzo.

BH: Really?

CS: He’s at fault. Their lineup isn’t great. The pen isn’t proven. And they’ve fired multiple managers.

BH: You have a point. Also, if you fire the manager and not the GM, you’re firmly stating you believe you have talent. If you believe that and it’s not true, then what you have is not only hubris at work, but delusion.

Naivete.

JH: You also have Bryce Harper.

BH: And you do have that, which is as much or more than anyone else.

The participants above are all high school teachers with nothing better to do. Funnel any complaints or actual opinions to @LawnChairBoys.

Translating the word Wahoo

2016-04-12T10:17:00.000-04:00

College towns are insular places. They feel like the world entire to freshmen. They start feeling cramped to seniors. Charlottesville is one of these towns. Tucked between the Shenandoah and Richmond, the town possesses a hint of Washington Irving’s narrative fiction—ghosts abound in Charlottesville. Thomas Jefferson is over one shoulder. Ralph Sampson is over the other. Somewhere on the Lawn is a room where Edgar Allan Poe toiled away, most likely in misery, or at least anticipating misery. Perhaps Sampson is nothing more than Poe’s imagination stretched so thin on a rack that his knees buckle and break. Oh! The misery!

The refrain in my childhood home about anything UVA sports related was some alternating rendition of “Come on!” and “Typical Virginia.” Sometimes a good ol’ “pathetic” was tossed in for good measure. All of which is to say, nothing good ever came from rooting for the Wahoos.

Sure there were some bright moments on the lacrosse field, and the baseball team has found success of late. But the 1990’s and 2000’s watched both the football program and basketball team fade not so much from glory realized but even glory imagined. George Welsh retired, but even before that, Beamer and the Hokies eclipsed a program founded primarily on one glorious upset of Florida State. On the other hand, the basketball team squandered talent until there was none left to squander.

I think these feelings, more than anything, seeped into my piece The Cauldron about the UVA seniors fromthis year’s basketball team and the word chokein amateur athletics. Sometimes, I guess, our emotional investment in a sport becomes so much that only words connoting death do the events justice. I guess. Then again, I’m not even really a UVA fan. I’ve always pulled for North Carolina in basketball. Maybe that has something to do with bandwagons. Maybe it has something to do with loyalty to my dad. Then again, he’s the one who always took the failings of Virginia sports so personally. I guess some things hurt on principle and others—well—they hurt because pain can be geographical and hard to explain. Some of the ghosts wail from Monticello, and some hurl remotes through house windows.

And then there are those that simply move on with the living, outside the history, outside the ball fields and arenas, in the rest of the greater world.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

If you're not teaching Jesmyn Ward's 'Salvage the Bones,' think about it.

2016-03-18T09:30:00.000-04:00

The words and sentences and paragraphs in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) gather like pollen on a car hood; slowly, but surely, coating readers in a golden fleece of Southern mythology. The beauty and power of these particles is how they gravitate towards the body and spirit of Esch, whose knack for seeing and surviving in the world of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi walks in the literary footsteps of Scout Finch and Huck Finn and Claudia MacTeer.

Still, even though these other characters made it through the fire, Esch’s journey always feels so much more flirtatious with apocalyptic forces, as if by not already being canonized she is in even more jeopardy than her iconic predecessors. And then there is the hurricane.

As she reads Greek myths, watches one brother play basketball and another raise dogs for fighting, little Esch’s whole world appears ready to topple into the hollowed Pit below her family’s homestead. And then there is the hurricane.

A contemporary peer of Esch’s would be Karen Russell’s Ava Bigtree, from Swamplandia! (2011). Both are the daughters of deceased mothers. Both girls live incredibly lonely lives. These are the girls clinging to every scrap and thread of a bare childhood, because, to them, that childhood is the world entire. They have a friend in Hushpuppy from the film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Except all three girls live such intimately isolated lives that they could never know of the other, of anything else other than what they know. And, in this, they are always at the center.

And then there is the hurricane.

Image from The New York Times

This new wave of Southern girl protagonists is so miraculous because of how each girl is defined through movement. Hushpuppy dances and dashes. Ava wrestles. And, in the case of Esch, she swims, runs, and, unfortunately, has unprotected sex with multiple partners.

For much of the book, her brothers’ friends view her much as they do the dog China. They see her for her sex, for her ability to breed, and yet they do not recognize her fighting spirit—her power. When she first becomes pregnant, the mystery gathers as a burden inside her. And then there is a hurricane.

Esch’s pregnancy runs in parallel with hurricane season. The storms gather and disperse and gather again. Weather reports come and go. The life inside her does not. Eventually, she cannot hide it, and the storm comes. Yet this storm is an actual storm, rather than a metaphorical judgment of her youthful missteps. The Gulf Coast is left in ruins. She is not. And, in the midst of post-apocalyptic debris and nothingness, the burden buried inside of Esch's body lightens with hope.

At the novel's end, the characters gather round a fire, waiting for a runaway dog to return, waiting for a dead mother to rise up, beside a fire they wait. And there, beside them, is Esch, a soon to be mother, at the center of the world entire. And there was life.

Bryan Harvey tweets, mostly about basketball and nonsense, @LawnChairBoys.

I'm sorry Atlanta twitter (ooh) I am for real.

2016-03-08T09:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, an article of mine about the Atlanta Hawks playing the Golden State Warriors went up at Hardwood Paroxysm (thanks to Ian Levy). I didn’t really think much of it. Whenever I guest post somewhere, the article goes up, a couple tweets and retweets occur, and then I usually don’t hear anything else about the piece. Like most writers or aspiring writers, I’m already working on something else. But yesterday was different. The good people of Atlanta, or at least the good people of Atlanta on Twitter, did not, at least from what I could tell, enjoy the article or my opinions.

On the one hand, I was glad people even looked at something I had written—as I always am. On the other hand, I was surprised, maybe even taken aback by the negative comments. After all, I didn’t think I’d written a negative article on the Hawks, but an impression of what a good basketball team looked like while playing a great basketball team. The Hawks are not playing at the level they did last year, but to say that is not to say they are a bad basketball team. They are indeed a good one. They could make some noise in the playoffs. They could also go quietly.

While their defense is much improved and statistically one of the tops in the league, their offense is not the same. They are also still figuring out some quirks in their rotation. Do they play Jeff Teague at point guard down the stretch or hand the reins over to his backup Dennis Schröder? Against the Warriors, they opted for Schröder, as they have in other games of late. Is this stretch of the season a microcosm of what the coaching staff will opt for the rest of the season and on into the playoffs? Or, will they still be tinkering?

I ask these questions because the Hawks are often discussed as a finished product. As they won sixty games last season, it became popular to question whether they were as good as their record suggested. Such questions are kind of silly. If a team can win sixty games, the team is sixty wins good. Then again, the regular season is not the playoffs. Perhaps the question, when such things occur, should be whether or not the team can win in the playoffs like it has or did in the regular season. This argument is largely about semantics. It returns to the idea that the Hawks are good, but not quite good enough. It also makes them more interesting than the idea that they can be defined solely by a system.

In other words, the Atlanta Hawks are something besides a machine. And a heckuva lot more interesting, too.

Teague and Schröder are a lot of fun to watch with the ball. They play like X-wing fighters crashing a party at the Death Star. Sometimes this is awesome. Sometimes they fly too fast and too reckless for the team’s own good. Kent Bazemore is still figuring out what it takes to be a starter for a team that may or may not be elite. He’s a guy figuring it out, pushing against the boundaries of his talent. That’s fun to watch. And then there’s the frontline tandem of Paul Millsap and Al Horford. The undersized Millsap does a bit of everything. Al Horford and his broad shoulders are the anchors to the much improved defense. He is also an offensive player with a portfolio of diverse skills, even if he does often shirk and shrug his talents.

I have always had a soft spot for the Atlanta Hawks. The first NBA games I ever attended were in the old Omni. The kids I went to elementary and middle school with were torn between Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins. My first memories of sports writing involve digging through the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for the sports section and unearthing the secrets of Dikembe Mutombo’s finger wag. I wanted Aland Henderson and Tyrone Corbin to be the missing pieces. I loved the name Mookie Blaylock.

I would never claim to be a die hard Atlanta Hawks fan. I have always had amorphous NBA loyalties. But it was weird yesterday when a handful of Hawks fans thought the article was “trash” or horribly written. Maybe it was the word “counterfeit” that set everybody off. After all, such a word is often read as “fraud,” but I meant it with a wink. These Hawks remind me of John Falstaff, a man who fakes his own death. I’m not sure there’s a more southern character in all of Shakespeare’s writing. There also may not be one more beloved. But Shakespeare isn’t inherently southern, so I discussed opossums playing dead. To be fraudulent is as southern as Brer Rabbit and the briar patch. To accept or embrace the fraud is as real as it gets.

These Hawks aren’t as mechanically flawless as a system. But they do appear to be on a rather predictable arc. They’re just good enough, trying to get better, and that’s painfully fun to watch, but, believe me, the pain will surface. This can’t end well, at least not this year. Hence, there’s something rotten in the Hawks of Atlanta. I mean that as a compliment.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys, mostly about basketball and books.

What Oscar forgot: Finding Teyonah Parris' formation in Chi-raq

2016-02-28T12:58:00.002-05:00

If anything, himself.

First, Spike Lee’s Chi-raq (2015) is, especially upon one’s first viewing, an uneven, or at least unwieldly movie, and reactions to the film reveal it as such. After all, while the film garners only a 5.7 rating on IMDB, the film also topped Paste Magazine and The NewYorker’s best films of the year lists. The metamorphic girth of this satire makes it typical of Spike Lee’s artistic wheelhouse, which has less to do with George Lucas pastiche and Stephen Spielberg perfection than Woody Allen’s strolling rants. Even more, Spike Lee’s New York sensibility—his ranting away from traditional plot structures and streamlined coherence—places him in constellation with African-American satirists doubling as novelists.

Chi-raq is as much an heir to I’m Gonna Get You Sucka (1988) and Black Dynamite (2009) as it is a cousin of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) and anything written by Percival Everett. Moreover, the sheer mass of the film’s pursuits is in the stratosphere of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952) which questioned the validity and soundness of living in a “dream world” decades prior to Ta-nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015). Ellison’s work has long held sway over Lee’s direction; scenes and image and concepts from Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) appear on screen as if lifted from Ellison’s pages. That earlier Lee effort, it should be noted, was welcomed on the bridge of two cinematic centuries rather coldly, yet, in hindsight, seems to have foretold the complex maps that are the careers of Kanye West and Dave Chappelle. And, then, there is Spike Lee’s constant clashing with the remnants of classic Greek culture. This clash links Lee’s aesthetic choices with the likes of Ishmael Reed’s post-modernist soup Mumbo Jumbo (1972).

The pronounced source material for Chi-raq is the Greek playwright Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, but the play is only one of many influences, acting more as a vehicle for social commentary on the roots of American law and order—Greek democracy. Lee, like Ishmael Reed or even Mark Twain, shatters the world with his satire by presenting its reflection to his audience through a fractured mirror. When he does this through an adaptation of an ancient Greek play, he does so to say, Shit’s been broken for a long time, which is to say, as the last lines of the film do say, “Wake up!”

Besides the early fears that Lee might have been exploiting Chicago’s gun violence for movie-making, which maybe he was, most negative reactions to the film struggled to grasp the dream world Lee created in the tradition of what Henry Louis Gates deems the signifying monkey, but all of these intentions and their roots were hidden in plain sight. Samuel L. Jackson’s Dolmedes wasn’t rambling; he was citing sources and testifying. More importantly, while testifying to the present and citing the past, he was also testifying to the past and citing the present. And, through his narrative vision, the world is falling apart and coming together as it always has, meaning the continuity of traditional plotlines is a hoax. No wonder the chorus in bright suits is always laughing. He’s seen all of this before and knows he will see it again. Critics and directors, for the most part, are the same way.

While male violence and storytelling splice up the world and confuse time periods, the film is navigable due to its female performances. Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) starts strong and stays strong, while the younger Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) becomes strong.

Absurdly historical.

The film begins with a map of the United States on screen; red, white and blue. A closer look reveals that the map is a collage of gun silhouettes. The style and shape of these silhouettes brings to mind the colors and fonts of an Ishmael Reed paperback. The screen then goes black. Eventually, song lyrics appear, revealing a paradoxical sentiment of pride in Chi-raq and criticism of Chicago; love and blame. One of the song’s last lines is “Dis story a fact.” Then the film becomes a public service announcement, flashing and announcing: “This is an emergency!” Statistics comparing the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Chicago are soon to follow. But the film’s introductory materials are not finished. The voice of Father Michael Louis Pfleger condones the 7,356 Chicago homicides as being “committed by young black males against young black males.” This sequence, to a large degree, is sensory overload and highly depressing.

At this point, my wife, who is pregnant, stated that she might be done with it. She wanted no part of its death. Yet this death wants a part of us. For death is always hungry.

The first real visual in the film that belongs to a movie and not a documentary is of the elevated Chicago subway. For anyone who is familiar with Spike Lee’s career, the sight of the tracks recalls one of his other films on urban gun violence, Clockers (1995), where the tracks represent a largely inconceivable escape beyond the city’s unruly frontiers of crime and drugs. Then, the camera in typical Spike Lee fashion descends to street level and tracks a killer standing in line outside of the club Da End Up.

Once inside the club, purple glow sticks rock back and forth over the heads of the crowd, marking the tempo of the club and the streets. Everything is synchronized and everyone chants, “Chi-raq! Chi-raq!” Dolmedes is on stage. He dances, but his playfulness almost betrays the intensity of the crowd. They did not come to hear him emcee their lives. They are largely unaware of his historical presence. They are dreaming.

He will freeze them in mid-chant. He will narrate. He will announce that the players in this film, who do not realize they are such, will speak in verse, in the “style of his times.” But are these modern times or Greek times? To Dolmedes, perhaps, these are the same. He will exit, and, in his place, will enter Chi-raq (Nick Cannon). He is also an emcee, but he is not blessed with a knowledge of antiquity. He knows only his city, and his city is composed of death and decay, as are his rhymes. As he raps over a syrupy beat that still manages to bang and pop, the crowd, mostly composed of young women, rolls their hips in unison, drops their hips in unison, makes love to the idea of violence in unison.

The synchronization is eerie, and Spike Lee’s ongoing conflict with the mass ornament of hip hop is well-pronounced. He has, after all, always preferred jazz and blues. To him, music should be about expression—about the soloist rising above the noise and the rhythm’s hypnosis—but in Chi-raq there is little to no jazz at the start of the film. And the rapper of the same name on stage delivers his message over movements of mass conformity. Lysistrata is front and center. Chi-raq kissed her when he came on stage. He has her blessing. As he raps, “What da fuck you posin’ for?” it will all come to an end. Gunshots shatter the dream and the charade of unity scatters in fear, as if speaking death’s name can bring it into being.

On the verge of iconic.

However, in due time, Lysistrata will come to the same conclusions as my wife did. She will want no more of death, but in her first conversation with Miss Helen she will appear to relish it. And, in the scene before that, any foreplay between her and Chi-raq conflates violent conversations with pillow talk. Lysistrata quotes Biggie to Chi-raq, and he quotes Tupac to her. Are they lovers posing as rivals? Or are they rivals posing as lovers? This is the first time, but not the last that the film will discuss sex as an act of conquering violence. The problems in their world begin and end within the microcosm of a four-post bed, as the presence of Dolmedes suggests they always have and always will.

Not until Lysistrata encounters a mourning mother will she really start to hear Miss Helen, and at that point, she infiltrates the syrupy rhythms of hip hop’s mass ornament—of black culture—and orchestrates a protest against violence, using the female body as a weapon for life and love. Her movements and the movements of her followers will mimic the step lines that have been the face of black sororities for decades. They will harken back through the works of Reed and Ellison and Baldwin all the way back to Africa. The world is abuzz with Beyonce’s “Formation” lines, but Chi-raq and Teyonah Parris had a grip on this defiance well before the Super Bowl.

Spike Lee is a controversial character. He mixes his art with politics, always has and always will. The formula does not always go down smoothly, but to critique too harshly for that is to make the assumption that art should go down smoothly, that to be stylized is to be streamlined. Chi-raq, like the city and country it critiques, comes glossed in rough edges and tangles of uncertainty. In kind, I understand the questions that undermine its acceptance as a successful satire. On the other hand, I don’t see how a person could not praise it for its daringness, which is embodied in Teyonah Parris’ performance. In Chi-raq, she is a long way from the soft spoken correctness of a Mad Men secretary and the self-hate of a confused college girl in Dear White People (2014). But, given the range displayed by her career’s early arc, she’s going to be around for quite some time, even if we miss seeing her at tonight’s Oscar parties.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

Damian Lillard, his numbers and his words

2016-02-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

This past Friday the Portland Trail Blazers handed the Golden State Warriors only their fifth loss of the season. In this upset, Portland’s point guard Damian Lillard turned in an iconic performance in which he scored 51 points. The cliché structure of that lead sentence and the miracle nature of Lillard’s performance are, for the most part, self-evident. What’s not self-evident, however, is why this game was relegated to the backchannels of the NBA universe. You could not and would not have seen it on ESPN, TNT, or TBS, which means the phenomenon of Lillard out dueling not just Steph Curry, who had 31 points, but the entire contingent of Splash Brothers is an event left to the imagination.

In a not-so-subtle act of self-promotion, I imagined such a performance looking something like “Damian Lillard was Sentenced to Prison inFrench Guiana”, at The Baller Ball. However, I wrote this bit of fiction in the days leading up to Lillard’s explosive proclamation, when the politics of basketball saw fit to leave him off the Western Conference’s All-Star roster.

The piece I wrote explores the relationship of Lillard to the Portland franchise. After all, a year ago the Blazers could still imagine themselves as title contenders, for they featured one of the best starting lineups in all of basketball. The offseason watched all of that disappear suddenly into what is now a Portlandia diaspora. Good bye, Batum. God bless, Wesley Matthews. You are missed, Robin Lopez. Cursed by thy name, LA! In this wreckage, the Blazers should have died. But they have not. Lillard (and CJ McCollum) keep them fastly alive. And the team currently sits ready to assume the Western Conference’s seventh seed.

What I find so fascinating about Lillard and the Blazers is how his taking the franchise’s reins is about more than basketball. His association with Adidas is well-documented, but he is also quickly becoming the one of the League’s most vocal stars. He is a rapper, but his raps are also as political as they are personal. There’s this freestyle on Sway’s radio show that’sworth a listen, and there’s also this video which debuted in the limelight of aTNT prime time game. These attributes, as much as his point guard skills, are why Lillard follows in the footsteps of a Bill Walton or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And, moreover, they’re also why the basketball court is such an easy staging area for social commentary and allegory.

Maybe I'm wrong, but Damian Lillard feels like something bigger than a basketball player.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

On watching tennis, or beating against the boundary

2016-02-20T10:54:00.000-05:00

The last few years I’ve watched more and more tennis. I’ve mentioned this before, probably many times before. Anyway, much of this rise in my attention to a sport I previously ignored is due to my wife, Gillian. Tennis is her favorite sport to watch. We also play each other with some frequency, although, because she’s four and a half months pregnant, we haven’t played in some time. The reason I think both of us enjoy tennis so much is that even though we each have particular players we pull for, the fluidity of the sport demands and allows for supporting quality play more than a particular player. In other words, you root for the long, creative point over the short, decisive point. You root for order that frays into chaos and not sudden trauma.

A month or so back, the Australian Open provided plenty of these slow, playful grinds. A five-set match between the usuallystellar Stan Wawrinka and the upstart Milos Raonic was perhaps my favorite match of the year’s first Grand Slam. I wrote about it at The Classical. I also enjoyed those matches blessed with the presence of the forever flexible Gael Monfils. Still, as always, the points and horrors suffered by Andy Murray intrigued me most.

Andy Murray runs into Novak Djokovic, again.

The January 18^th issue of The New Yorker ran an article by Tad Friend about the struggle to remain a relevant squash player in one’s later years. Or, maybe Friend didn’t write so much about the struggle to remain relevant as he did about the desire to simply play a game with quality. One of the more memorable passages in his “Holding the T” is when he writes on the unfettered emotions that take flight in moments of intense competition:

If you love a demanding task, one that requires both discipline and talent—shooting hoops, playing drums, writing code—you eventually discover an innate boundary: you can apprehend real virtuosity, especially as it’s used to best you, but you can’t quite incorporate it. You will never be more than almost-great. The same wistfulness I now felt also crossed Will’s face when he recalled winning a single point against the great Jahangir Khan, and Richard Chin’s face when he recounted his brief match with Ramy Ashour, the standout of the past decade. Yet the truly great players sacrifice so much that they stare back at us with equal longing. Or so we console ourselves as we batter against the boundary, moths outside a screen door, fluttering toward the light.

When Andy Murray lost to Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open’s final, not only did he and every other competitor whose tournament ended with a loss appear as fragile as a moth, but the boundary became something more than a net or a screen. Until further notice, Novak Djokovic is the barrier between the field and the light.

These walls can dance.

To have a living barrier is not new to tennis. On the women’s side Serena Williams is this obstacle. Everything and everyone in the game must pass through her. The task is not impossible, but its accomplishment is rare. Germany’s Angelique Kerber did manage to defeat Williams in Melbourne, and she did so by extending the point. She stayed in the game, and Serena faded and frayed as slowly as a flag in the sun and the wind. The victory lacked the power and violence of the epic. Instead, it arrived with the monotonous ability to endure.

The competitor who endured the best against Djokovic was France’s Giles Simon in the fourth round. He lost in five sets, but his willingness to “batter against boundary” was admirable. After all, only in the battering do we find ourselves in the rush of the living.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

Fictional Science: Ginger Strand's 'The Brothers Vonnegut'

2016-02-17T09:06:00.000-05:00

Written to avoid all spoilers (or something like that):

I arrived late to the pages of Kurt Vonnegut. Aside from reading “Harrison Bergeron” in middle school, I don’t think any of my English teachers wanted to go near the man and his quirks, at least not for any longer than a short story. When I first started reading Kurt’s novels, I treated them as supplements to the television show Lost. What explains the show’s last season better than Time Quake’s sentimental notion of a clambake? In this way, Vonnegut’s humor has always struck me as both moving in its desperate humanity and scientific in its striving for answers.

Read Ginger Strand’s The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic (2015) and this latter gesture--the science fiction that is wrought from real life--comes beautifully to life. Strand divides each chapter into episodes and passages between the brothers: Bernard, the scientist, and Kurt, the writer. While the former's tinkering in the lab appears as cause, the latter's typing at a desk surfaces as affect.

Throughout the book, Strand questions how on earth one activity could exist without the other, at least with any purpose or meaning. Science without ethical reflection would lead to destruction, and reflection without science would have few questions to tease and pester it. Strand portrays both brothers as artists in their fields, and, drawing on a quotation from Einstein, she positions fiction as no less real than science. Both fields function at their best when motivated by wonder.

At a time when the Cold War threatened to the existence of open-ended questions, the world's sense of wonder often gave way to fear. The daily routines of the Vonnegut brothers existed on this invisible boundary. Each man dedicated himself to walking a tightrope through the fog. And, with his brother pressing against the physical frontier, Kurt pressed him self against the imaginary. Except Strand's exploration of how both brothers spent their time at General Electric reveals that the imaginative acts of Kurt Vonnegut weren’t so much fictive but an echo of reality. Bernard's world was a launchpad for Kurt's stories. And these stories have far too often have been categorized and reduced to the genre box of science fiction. When, if anything, they were as real as any laboratory hypothesis.

With World War Two positioned as the Big Bang for the Vonnegut universe, Strand begins the book with a description of Kurt hunkered down in the fog of Europe, on the verge of becoming a prisoner of war. From there, she briefly discusses the relationship between meteorology, the laboratory, and the battlefield. Her underlying premise is that science—the description of the physical—and fiction—the record of experience—intersect most in scenes of combat, as well as the laboratories and factories that plan for combat. When World War Two ended, the laboratory remained a terrain threatened by warmongering. In The Brothers Vonnegut, Strand studies how such working conditions can inspire a great deal of fiction from both writers and scientists alike. The intersecting lives of these two brothers and their chosen fields makes for a fascinating study. Moreover, their stories bear witness an onslaught of technology against an ocean of humanity.

I am now an English teacher. And, while I have included Cat's Cradle on independent reading lists, I have never taught a Kurt Vonnegut novel to an entire class. I don’t know why that is; I have yet to read a book of his that didn’t prompt me to both laugh and cry. Other teachers have told me they just don’t get him, that they don’t the kids would either. Part of me wonders if what we just don’t get is how real the absurdities are; that the irreverence reveals the irresponsibility of our species; that a trip through the twentieth century requires a tour through General Electric; that labeling Kurt’s observations science fiction was always about creating distance between our own comfort and the looming possibility of widespread death.

Thus, what's more real than life's clambakes, however few and far between? I'm not sure I have an answer, and I'm okay with that.

Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.

A reflection on Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñàrritu’s 'The Revenant'

2016-02-10T09:47:00.000-05:00

"Leo is a man. Are you a man?" "I;m not sure he is, Alejandro." "Guys, I'm totally a man. I'm like the dude of all men."

The best description I’ve seen of Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñàrritu’s most recent film was by some film critic on Twitter, who described seeing it at year’s end as akin to eating a steak dinner after having already gone through a buffet line. I can’t do better than that, but I will try in the name of Iñàrritu’s excess. I think he of all people will appreciate the masculine ego involved in such a task.

The Revenant’s source material is Michael Punke’s 2002 novel of the same name, but cut into the film and there is a labyrinth of ground beef worms crawling in and out of Iñàrritu’s Western-style hamburger. For example, The Revenant’s last few frames appear lifted almost directly from Sydney Pollack’s 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford. An endless number of plot points and counterpoints also engage these two films in dialogue with another. Yet, it is those final frames of The Revenant—a lone white man staring across a stream and into the eyes of the Native population—that prove to be the film’s nexus.

Of course, this contemplation of the other—and therefore the self—is an archetype of frontier literature dating back to the fifteenth century and Christopher Columbus. And neither The Revenant nor Jeremiah Johnson invented nor discovered these cross-cultural moments. They also feel somewhat incomplete.

The Revenant takes two and a half hours to arrive at this crossing. While this moment is quite similar in shape and occurrence to the contact zones in Babel, the scene also shares something similar to the moment where Riggan (Michael Keaton) in Birdman walks down an urban sidewalk on the brink of a breakdown and crosses paths with a homeless King Lear. The two men are binaries, only to recognize the one in the other collapses the binary. Throughout The Revenant, Iñàrritu creates this oppositional space between the film’s two primary patriarchs: Hikuc (Arthur RedCloud) and Hugh Glass (DiCaprio). And the final scene attempts to traverse it.

Even before Glass loses his son at the hands of John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), Hikuc leads a group of Pawnee men in search of his daughter Powaqa (Melaw Nkehk’o). In the end, they do find her. However, they only reunite with Powaqa after Glass saves her from a group of rugged French fur trappers. In the film’s conclusion, she eyes Glass with silent recognition. He is no longer a father or a husband. He is a ghost. And this ghost saved her. Therefore, she is a survivor of rape as well as a witness to Glass' possible merits as a frontier hero. Yet defining her in such a muted manner feels akin to having whittled Glass' epic down to the words: man survives bear.

While the film doesn't explore the notion fully, Powaqa is something more than a woman at the tomb. Or at least could and probably should have been. Alas, the film gravitates towards a gendered male center, which isn't exactly a negative, but is a missed opportunity to reinvigorate the Western genre.

Alejandro to Leo: "Make that intense face you do so well." Leo: "Am I doing it? Is this it? I can't see myself."

The Revenant’s opening frames focus on the water flowing over and through the wooded roots of the American wilderness. This natural beauty and its tranquility are soon clouded with gun smoke and set on fire with blood as a group of Pawnee attack a group of US fur trappers. This group of Pawnee, as stated earlier, seeks a stolen daughter. Her theft precedes the film’s beginning and alludes to the original sin that is the root of the European narrative in the western hemisphere: the theft of land and violence towards pre-Columbian peoples. Hence, this setting is already in apocalyptic upheaval. And the disruption flows like water.

Iñàrritu completes these combat-intensive frames with a series of tracking crane shots that hover just over the shoulder of his actors. The jarring results render the woods like the beaches of Normandy in the eye of Stephen Spielberg. In spite of all this mayhem, however, the film’s first on screen death belongs to a deer at the hands of Glass and his fellow hunters. They kill a buck and skin it for food. This killing out of necessity contrasts directly with the killing for fur and profit. Back at the trappers’ camp, Fitzgerald and other men fret over loading and storing the bounties of this latter type of killing. Meanwhile, the Pawnee hunt and track this band of white hunters while engaged in a third type of killing: the vendetta.

In this hierarchy of killing, hunting for food is natural. The film is at its most awe-inspiring when DiCaprio’s Glass morphs into a bear eating a fish or a wolf devouring a buffalo carcass. This latter scenario takes place in the presence of a Native American stranger. The two men behave like animals in midst of a snow-covered circle of blood and flame. Having yet to read Punke’s version of the Glass story, I cannot speak to whether this scene exists as so in his novel. But I do know that the scene correlates directly with one to be found in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985).

In McCarthy’s novel the unnamed kid and all the animals of the desert circle round a tree lit aflame by lightning. As the night passes, the young man feels part of a sacred kinship with all the organisms in creation. Yet, after this natural beauty surrenders to the hot, rising sun, the kid returns to a manner of living at odds with antiquity and nature. Instead, he and the other characters in the book aim to shape the world on principles that result in a violent, misbegotten logic. For McCarthy, this logic is the language of all human stories, and what is lost cannot be restored. The last scene in the novel’s epilogue is a description of holes being dug for fence posts. The drawing of the border between US and Mexico, according to McCarthy’s imagery, is a masculine ideal penetrating the earth’s indefensible body. It is, in other words, nothing short of a rape scene.

Iñàrritu’s depiction of the fur trade follows in the tradition of McCarthy, which follows in the footsteps of John Smith, Frances Bacon, and even Mesoamerican tales of the apocalypse. In all these narratives the land becomes gendered, and in the process, these narratives conflate the female body with the earth. When Glass rescues Hikuc’s daughter, he does so as a French fur trader Toussaint (Fabrice Adde) rapes her against a tree. In fact, her one line in the entire film is a rejection of masculine power and authority: “I’ll cut off your balls!” And, participating in that third type of killing, the vendetta, she does.

This scene, among others, positions the film’s search for vengeance in direct opposition to the film’s search for monetary wealth. Consider how when Fitzgerald murders Glass’ son he does so with the fear that the boy and his father are too much of a burden, that bearing them back to civilization will cost the men the profits of their fur-trapping expedition. Then, too, there is the vengeance Fitzgerald seeks against the Native populations, having himself been scalped at their hands. But what launched him into the wild other than a taste for profit and a dream of land in Texas? Vengeance in The Revenant, like anywhere else, is reactionary. This status renders the film’s most violent men more effect than cause, including both Fitzgerald and Glass.

When Glass witnesses the murder of his boy, he does so while on his back. Minutes later Fitzgerald and Bridger (Will Poulter) bury Glass and leave him for dead. At this juncture, the film also opens itself to a wide array of justifications for retribution against Fitzgerald, the Enlightenment, and the economic mechanisms that thrust men such as Fitzgerald into the wilderness in the first place. Keeping that in mind, Glass’ reliance on vengeance as a motive renders him as weak as it does strong. His life hollows itself in pursuit of one goal and a fatal one at that.

"Actually, Alejandro, the directions are pretty easy to follow. Now when do I get to talk about that squirrel god?"

Because the Western genre traditionally centers male protagonists as martyrs and scapegoats, interpreting The Revenant falls into similar ruts. Glass is buried alive. Glass crawls from the grave. Glass sleeps inside a smoke tent. Glass has visions. Glass rises from the tent. Glass rides off a canyon. Glass crawls naked into the warm womb of a dead horse’s body. Glass emerges from the dead horse. These scenes long for archetypal meaning, for Glass to arrive at some more mature, even spiritual understanding of the world, but he learns very little. Every time he is reborn his purpose remains the same: to kill the man who killed his son. Whatever pivot the film might make towards the spiritual is undercut—even bloodied— by its inability to let go of the Western protagonist’s traditional purpose of frontier justice.

When Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) recognizes by torchlight the long left for dead Glass, he exclaims, “Jesus!”

On an allegorical level, he could be labeling Glass a Christ figure. On a material level, though, he could simply be in disbelief and grasping at religious straws to explain what appears to be nothing less than a miracle. Either way, the resulting exclamation is either blasphemous or simply bad theology. And Glass’ own violent conviction subverts his christening.

On the verge of completing his revenge, Glass floats Fitzgerald down the river towards Hikuc and the Pawnee. Seeing Fitzgerald’s humanity floating in all its frailty recalls earlier scenes in the film where Glass’ own body cascaded down a torrent of waterfalls. Furthermore, just before shoving Fitzgerald’s body downstream, Glass observes, “Revenge is in God’s hands. Not mine.” Yet the proximity of the Pawnee renders this line mute. The scene’s baptism fails, and Glass does hand Fitzgerald over to a violent death. Thus, not only is Glass not Christ-like, but Hikuc’s own spirituality unravels. As the Pawnee patriarch scalps Fitzgerald, it becomes difficult to believe Hikuc’s words: “Revenge is in the creator’s hands.”

At this point any validating search for Christian values in The Revenant is a red herring. They do not exist here. In fact, Iñàrritu appears to look on the presence of Western religion in the New World as an impossible undertaking. A French sign, hanging from a lynched Native American, declares, “We are all savages.” So much for the Christian mission. And, when Glass ventures into the ruins of a stony church, he finds no roof and no written words, only a tree growing in place of the cross. This portrayal is in kind with McCarthy’s border novels, where Billy Parham finds church after church and town after town split asunder by earthquakes and time. According to these authors, nature’s disorder supersedes everything in the hemisphere, including God.

In accordance with this tradition, if Glass and Hikuc’s killing of Fitzgerald is to be read victoriously, then vengeance would have to belong not to them but to the natural world for which they have become the benefactors. After all, Glass cannot bring back his lost family, just as Hikuc cannot bring back a time without the white interloper. In this vein, what they needed from Fitzgerald was not death, but conversion to some prior order, unless death is the only true conversion.

In other words, the film suffers from a missed opportunity to be something different than its many Western predecessors. The choices made by Glass and Hikuc limit the world’s possibilities by opting to believe in a world devoid of both meaning and redemption. While not necessarily wrong, this story already exists in every Western gunfight or duel with a knife.

"In all of nature's infinite glory, I became trapped inside of myself, inside of a horse."

Perhaps the more daring ending would have witnessed both Glass and Hikuc, on either side of the mountain river, observing the passing of Fitzgerald’s still living body into the wilds of nature. Instead, the film offers the violence of Fitzgerald’s bleeding scalp and the sentimentality of seeing Glass’ wife conjoined in the shape of a paradoxical bowtie. The brute’s scalp is the reality of the physical world and the wife’s ghost is the glimmer of the spiritual one. Glass, because Hikuc passes out of consideration of the camera’s lens, is unable to transcend the boundaries between these two planes of existence.

Furthermore, he is no different at the end of his journey than he was at its beginning, and his hero’s journey is a confirmation not of valor but of the hero’s inability to grow as a human being.

In turn, this inability of the hero to transcend the boundaries of the spiritual world roots the film in the physical separation of male and female bodies. From Glass’ failure to protect his family to a mother bear’s fight to protect her cubs, this film is essentially about how manmade values co-opt the sanctity of the family, and lead to losses in reproductive power. Without family, Glass is no longer a man. Instead, he is a killer. But all this is old hat. The theater of the frontier is almost always a laboratory for exploring when and how law and order create and break apart, and the hope in the future that bonds communities often surrenders to gun smoke and disruption.

Consider Shane’s retreat away from the valley town and into the rugged mountains. Without Mary, or any woman, by his side, he is but a gun and a ghost of life’s more peaceful alternatives. The difference, however, between Shane and Glass is that Shane leaves something in his wake. He restores a community’s promise, even while abandoning it. Glass’s retribution, on the other hand, is fatalistic. Far from any fort or homestead, he may very well bleed to death in the snow-capped American wilderness, and for what?

When I saw it in the theater, audience members cheered Glass’ pummeling and slicing of Fitzgerald’s body. This cheering made me wonder whether Glass’ journey transformed him into being a better man than Fitzgerald or if the film had simply converted its audience into being more like Fitzgerald. In other words, The Revenant’s aura not only presents two failed ventures, but its power as a film subdues the audience into believing such failures are the underwritten structures of the universe. The first venture is the fur trappers’ failure to bring back all that they have killed, and the second venture is Glass’ failure to bring his family back to life after they have been killed. Interestingly enough, the only person in the film to ever question Glass’ purpose is Fitzgerald, which means the audience is never forced to confront Glass’ morality as a man in the context of the greater universe.

Instead, he can only be viewed in relation to the despicable Fitzgerald and the mournful Hikuc. Furthermore, the film’s dependence on a major film star (yes, DiCapprio) had all of us barking up the wrong ghost, conflating Oscar-gold with human blood, as Fitzgerald’s death became the film’s only possible ending. Little does the film pause to ask why or what else.

"Still waiting on my epic movie."

If the audience were to look past The Revenant’s marketing campaigns and award show acceptance speeches, then perhaps something beyond the film’s impotent male bodies and self-centered imagination might surface. Perhaps the title could be interpreted to reference something much greater—the continent in all its defeated glory, its felled trees, its dammed rivers, its slaughtered beasts—than bloodlust. For this to happen, the ghosts in the picture would have to be perceived as something other than human and, more specifically, something other than male violence and its archetypes would need to be featured subjects. Perhaps the only character in the film who could have told such a story is Powaqa. After all, she endures so much and speaks so little. Her silence ruminates through all the world’s trees, and her gaze at film’s end, her recognition of all that Glass is and isn’t, still haunts me, if not Iñàrritu and the Academy.

Bryan Harvey tweets with greater brevity @LawnChairBoys.