Why "First Reformed" & "Mandy" is the Best Double Feature of the Year

I'm interrupting the regular programming. Occasionally some weirdo movies work their way onto this blog and this year has gifted me with "First Reformed" by Paul Schrader, starring Ethan Hawke, and "Mandy" by Panos Cosmatos, starring Nicolas Cage. One is about a New England priest grappling with despair and the other is a surrealist horror-revenge flick. Each of them is so fucking good and multi-layered and could spur like 200 thesis projects. I can't stop thinking about the striking thematic similarities between them and how the directors approach these themes with completely opposite styles.

"First Reformed" is purposely austere and cold (very New England-y, huh). The camera is constrained and the shots are long and methodical. We're in a very controlled setting.

seriously there is not even furniture in this room

"Mandy" is all warm reds and psychedelic fuzziness. We get fabulously weird establishing shots of strange landscapes, strobe lighting, you name it. However! Several key first-half shots are long and methodical. The director is also firmly in control here, even when it seems like we've entered bizarro land.

welcome to hell

We also see similar angles on the ethereal/savior woman trope. Both main women get trippy fantasy scenes and bookend their respective movies by appearing in the final shots as visions/miracles to the protagonists. Amanda Seyfried and Andrea Riseborough's takes on these two characters are full of depth and strength, despite the differences in storyline. Of course leave it to the women to be the stable people in movies about damaged men ... my eyes just rolled so hard they fell out of their sockets.

a miracle has perhaps appeared, although without furniture

that fateful moment of meeting

Both center around a type of "scripture": Ethan Hawke's priest narrates the movie via journaling and Mandy narrates (symbolic?) scenes from her fantasy novel. And of course there's the other Scripture. These are two movies that frankly involve plots to destroy churches. The cult in "Mandy" and the neighboring commercial-esque church in "First Reformed" exude a religious corruption/wrongness that goes hand-in-hand with the environmentalist themes; destruction of the earth is a sin and these hypocrites have to pay. We even get symbolic dead defenseless animals in both movies!

could this church be any less welcoming

fuck it, just burn it all down

Our protagonists, as played by Ethan Hawke and Nicolas Cage, are two tortured souls trying to manage (poorly) their despair after emotional losses. Rev Toller has lost his son, his marriage, and a parishioner he was trying to counsel. Red has lost the titular character, his wife Mandy. And we're just here along for the ride as they descend into versions of madness. Two of the most emotionally brutal scenes in these movies involve barbed wire, so we as the audience have a cringing visceral reaction to these images of physical pain (manifesting the characters' mental pain). It's hard to watch, and it should be. The culmination of these scenes is to go to the "next level" and realize how fucked up our protagonists have become -- we get Cage's screaming, vodka-chugging scene and Toller's, uh, almost Drain-O-chugging scene. These scenes come at different points in their respective movies, but the effects are very similar.

this is very unpleasant and close-up

this is also very unpleasant and close-up

Finally, there is a fun Hollywood triangle between Ethan Hawke, Nicolas Cage, and Paul Schrader! Schrader directed Cage in "Bringing out the Dead", then Hawke and Cage made "Lord of War" together (with the same director who worked with Hawke on "Gattaca"), then Cage made two more recent movies with Schrader, and now this Hawke/Schrader team-up. Also Hawke and Cage are fans of each other despite (or because of?) complete opposite acting styles. Let's all have a dinner party together, folks. Make it happen. 

Of interest:

Ethan Hawke Discusses 'Blaze,' His Nicolas Cage Obsession and Why He Had to Do 'First Reformed'

Paul Schrader Tells Nicolas Cage Why 'First Reformed' is His Masterpiece

Bottom line: Did you not hear me say GO SEE BOTH OF THESE MOVIES IMMEDIATELY

Tom Wolfe, Twice

Last summer I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and it gave me anxiety, and then this spring I returned to Tom Wolfe only because I had bought A Man in Full" at a used book sale so why not, and honestly you could've told me these books were written by two different authors.

I love Kerouac's On the Road so I naively expected a similar experience with Kool-Aid -- oh how wrong I was. Yet another book where I kept needing to Wikipedia-verify that I was actually reading a realistic account of real people. I only vaguely knew of Ken Kesey and the LSD scene prior to this book, and obviously my impression of Neal Cassady was from his youth during On the Road, so I was not anticipating an encounter with such total human wreckage. The fact that Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then went on to have this wild faked death and fugitive period in Mexico is incredible. I guess this book is a great read for people looking to be dissuaded from doing LSD. As someone who can be a control freak, reading about people living in literal, total, mental chaos gave me this morbid creeping anxiety. The Cow Palace concert with The Beatles is something I've thought of several times since I read this book, where everyone just begins to have a vividly terrible trip.
TL;DR -- Drugs can be not great, Bob.

Wolfe wrote Kool-Aid from the perspective of a journalist a la Hunter S. Thompson (hey look another chaotic anxiety-inducing narrator) and used a stream-of-consciousness style very much like Kerouac. This was fine, but it wasn't inspiring enough for me to want to go out and read more of his work afterwards. I ended up coming back to him through the "to-read" stack and this time it was the fictional/satirical A Man in Full about, I guess, Atlanta in the early 1990s.

A Man in Full was one of the most entertaining books I've ever read, period. If it was about anything, maybe it was about the Stoics and the redemption of a real estate developer and the relationship between black and white in suburban Atlanta and racist policing and trophy wives and Trump and college football and plantation history. There is something for everyone. I loved the characterizations in this book, holy shit. The descriptive writing was pure art-- a sumptuous style that you can really just sink into and enjoy the words and the image it creates in your mind (Cormac McCarthy's Suttree is another book that does this to perfection). Protagonist Conrad Hensley takes a whole damn journey -- his worst chapter was a painful nightmare to read, but after the Stoics get introduced things really take off into a wonderful direction. The plot is improbable and zany, characters come in and out and some of them have no resolution, and I loved it. I didn't want the book to end! Considering it was published back in 1998, it's aged extremely well and many of the power situations in the book are, unfortunately, still evident today. I thought Charlie Croker for the majority of the book could've been a dead ringer for Trump, but maybe that's just where my mind is these days.

Looking back at these books side-by-side and my nearly opposite reactions to them, they both have large and hyper-detailed casts within a loosely-structured story. I just don't think I cared for his stream-of-consciousness style choice in Kool-Aid -- maybe I would've enjoyed that story more if it was written like A Man in Full but you can't really have Kool-Aid without that creepy/crazy style.

Really excited to pick up Bonfire of the Vanities.

"One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for. ... What is it you're looking for in this endless quest? Tranquility. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you." -- Charlie Croker

Bottom line: I repeat, A Man in Full was one of the most entertaining books I've ever read.

Post-script: I left this book at the Hong Kong airport bathroom as I was embarking on a trip around Southeast Asia because I just didn't have the luggage space. Hope it found a good home. A few months later, Tom Wolfe died. I saw him years ago giving an author talk at the Philly library for Back to Blood, before I knew anything other than his famous name, and I wish I had read his work earlier. 

This is Not About Toto's Africa

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had been on my "to read" list for at least two years and I'd heard nothing but glowing reviews, so imagine my chagrin when I realized I wasn't digging the main character, Ifemelu. Otherwise, the writing was excellent, the story was wide yet detailed with interesting framing and compelling secondary characters. I had to Wikipedia the book to make sure it was independent from "Dear White People" because many of the same points spring up (blogs, racial critiques & racism, Ivy League schools, hair, etc). I spent a lot of this book questioning if I disliked it because I'm a WASPy American and I just didn't "get it" -- also possible, although I was concurrently reading Yaa Ngasi's Homegoing and loving that book, so ... different strokes for different folks?

Homegoing lacked the literal confrontation of Americanah's blog post excerpts and had less fleshed-out characters in favor of a poetic magical-realism vibe that spanned hundreds of years. I couldn't believe this was Ngasi's first novel and can't wait to read more from her. The novel follows two branches of the same family who lose their history because of slave trade. The separate threads continue in Africa vs America until the two re-tie at the conclusion; in general, this is also the plot of Americanah. Ngasi and Adichie are both writing about black identity (loss of, discovery of), but their styles are quite different.

While I thought both books had unwavering focus on the black/African experience, I felt at several points in Americanah that Ifemelu was completely consumed by thinking about her blackness, constantly, to the detriment of more fully realizing her character in the book. Part of this could be that Ifemelu is occasionally (but not exclusively) the author's mouthpiece, and commentary sections that could've been written by the author-as-omniscient-narrator were instead framed as Ifemelu's thoughts and blog entries. Anyway, she was just straight up mean to her closest friends and family and that part of her character never improved. A morality tale this was not. Better summary here.

However, this interview with Adichie was illuminating:

"I think we often expect female characters to be easily likeable, in a way we don't expect male characters to be," the author explains. "Do we expect to like Nabokov's or Roth's characters? No. We expect them to be interesting. And I wanted Ifemelu to be that kind of character, where sometimes you want to smack her and sometimes you want to hold her close. Because I think that's human."

I was immediately reminded of how much I COULD NOT STAND the main character Coleman Silk from Roth's The Human Stain. Interesting? Yes. Did he make that novel excruciatingly frustrating to read? Yes. Was he also a huge dick to his family? Oh yeah. Same deal with Humbert in Lolita and, I fear, whatever the hell is going on in Pale Fire. Look, I understand the naturalism of having your "protagonist" be someone with human faults but I'm also trying to get through a 500-page journey with them. Be kind, I beg of you.

Fav quotes from Homegoing:

"Weakness is treated someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves." (p38)

"How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it -- not apart from it, but inside of it." (p295)

Bottom line: Both excellent reads about racial identity and separation.

To Recap 75% of 2018...

Well, this year escalated quickly. Quick check-in with what I read this year and what I want to blog about (underlined):

Pachinko

A Man in Full

Hillbilly Elegy

A Higher Loyalty

The Evil That Men Do

Little Fires Everywhere

Homegoing

Americanah

And yes, I am still trying to read "Pale Fire" after misplacing it for five months. 

A Note on Essays as Memoir

I was super excited to read Roxane Gay after hearing some buzz, and one of my book club picks ended up being her essay collection Difficult Women.

So this essay collection was brutal. Like take-no-prisoners here-is-the-misery. My favorite essay was "North Country" because the writing was just beautifully sparse and evocative. Her straight-forward, short writing style in telling all these painful, emotionally-complex stories was sort of stoic, I guess is the word? What really struck me about halfway through the book were the similarities between almost every essay: grief, child loss, rape, self-harm, "twisted" relationships, general violence. After I finished the book I looked up Roxane Gay's bio and realized one of the final essays really was based on her own trauma.

I think it can be misleading to read too much into fictional text as a reflection of the author, but in this case I believe it's essential to appreciating the whole book. I interpreted it as each essay was an attempt to tell her own story, over and over again, concluding with the essay closest to her actual experience. It was like a kind of fictional PTSD (therapy?), re-living and re-interpreting and trying to find meaning in each new take on the same events. I don't know if this would be a literary version of therapy or the self-harm described in the stories, but it's definitely repetition of a single raw life story -- difficult woman as told through difficult women.

Gay recently came out with her actual memoir, Hunger, so I'm interested to read that and see how these essays fit into the picture.

Bottom line:  This isn't a book I would feel comfortable recommending to any random person, but it's also important that these often-stigmatized types of stories be heard and discussed, and that the reader is taken outside their comfort zone.

To Recap 2017 ...

The difficult thing about ambitiously joining book clubs and vowing to read more is that I apparently end up with no time to blog about these literary orgies. In chronological order, since I last wrote about the excellent The Argonauts:

- The Handmaid's Tale
- Difficult Women
- I Am Malala
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
- In the Woods
- Dear Life
- Disgrace
- All the Light We Cannot See
- The Silent Sister
- Mindhunter
- Middlemarch
- Lincoln in the Bardo

Seriously, holy shit.

Underlined are the books that've made me want to sit down and record a reaction because I keep thinking about them. I really LIVED in Middlemarch this winter; it took me forever to get through and will take me forever to blog about. Just finished Lincoln in the Bardo and it gave me Feelings. So anyway, this is my little summary bookmark post for myself and a motivator to get my shit together tomorrow for #backblogging.