F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Struggle in Hollywood

In the Nov. 16, 2009 issue of the New Yorker (“Slow Fade”), Arthur Krystal examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hollywood years, when the writer of The Great Gatsby made attempts to redeem his fall from fame and fortune by trying his hand at screenwriting. The results prove to be disastrous and Fitzgerald never succeeds as a screenwriter, his desire “to impart a moral lesson while illuminating the hidden facets of its characters” being somewhat incompatible with the standards of screenwriting and the demands of movie studios.

I really liked how Krystal describes the complex character of Fitzgerald, an idealist trying to be many things and all the while pleasing to everyone. I particularly enjoyed this passage (some parts condensed):

Fitzgerald’s scripts were hobbled by the same quality that lifted his fiction above the superficial: the complicated nature of his mind. He had started out thinking he had genius and a special destiny, and it was this belief in an ideal version of himself that, when transmuted into narrative form, won him both a wide audience and critical esteem. But that idealized self in all other respects eluded him, not because he drank too much or behaved badly but because he was a writer at war with his own inclinations. A self-professed “moralist at heart,” he also wanted to be a hero and an entertainer… And it was this dichotomy — the receptiveness to life’s most profound lessons coupled with a need to win over the world by the force of his personality — that made him capable of being, in equal measure, aesthetically rigid and blatantly manipulative….

He said that he knew more about life in his books than he did in life, and he was right. In life, he simply wanted too much. He wanted to be a great novelist and a Hollywood hot shot. He wanted to box like Gene Tunney and run downfield like Red Grange. He wanted to write songs like Cole Porter and poetry like John Keats. He wanted the trappings of wealth but was drawn to the social idealism of Marx. He wasn’t so much a walking contradiction as a quivering mass of dreams and ambitions that, depending on how he was feeling and whom he was talking to, created a dizzying array of impressions.

The way that Fitzgerald so confidently marched into Hollywood believing that he had the talent and the determination to succeed there made me think for a bit about my own dizzying array of aspirations. As the years go by, my feelings of “special destiny” (if you could call it that) seem to dissipate more and more. And I often find myself still wanting to do everything — grow a successful business, write a great story, launch a helpful non-profit, become athletic again — all while unable to focus and looking for quick wins rather than hunkering down for something more substantial. It would have been a happier story had Fitzgerald just stuck with writing short stories and novels, but then again, a Fitzgerald without a Hollywood wouldn’t be as interesting of a character, just like a life without follies probably wouldn’t be as enlightening.

Filed under: Article

Started Some Fiction Again

It’s been a while since I read a novel. I tried to read Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale earlier in the year but gave up about 300+ pages in because all the fantasy and romance stuff stopped resonating with me and the characters were too starkly good vs. evil.

I wanted something easy to read, so I picked up Tom Perotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, which, from what I can tell from reading the inside cover and the first 150 pages, tells the story of a controversial sex ed teacher (a divorcee) and a former rocker/drug addict born-again Christian (who happens to be the soccer coach of the sex ed teacher’s 11-year-old daughter) against a suburban backdrop. I haven’t read Perotta’s Little Children but I did see the movie and this book seems to carry more humor and takes a lighter approach to life in the suburbs. Whereas Little Children was about the suffocating life of a young woman and man raising their respective children with gloomy personal prospects and cold marriages, The Abstinence Teacher has more elements of satire and a less sombre tone.

What stuck out to me is the way that Perotta describes clothing, especially the way the women characters wear them.

A few examples:

On the first day of human sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-helled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn’t have won on a date–not that she was going on a lot of dates these days–let alone to work.

Allison stood in the sunlit, two-story entranced foyer… looking sweetly disheveled in a gold silk robe that Tim had never seen before, tied just loosely enough for him to get a tantalizing glimpse of the sheer black nightgown underneath.

In the name of facing temptation, Tim met Deanna at Starbucks the following Thursday morning. She wore a skirt, high heels, and a shirt with a plunging neckline, and he couldn’t keep from telling her how good she looked.

She stepped inside, wearing sneakers, Lycra shorts, and a pink-and-purple sports bra.

I don’t think it really applies, but I kept thinking about the “male gaze” and how these descriptions, in some ways, sexually objectify women. Maybe not so much in the old classical Hollywood way, but what these women wear seem to reflect their agenda and the effect they hope to have on men.

Maybe that was a real lame way of trying to bring up something I learned in college, but I thought it’d be fun to review (thanks Wikipedia) what I remember about the “male gaze”:

In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the “male gaze” that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summarises the view thus: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.” Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor. She asserts: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness,” and as a result contends that in film a woman is the “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Mulvey argues that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and ‘looking’ in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as “the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking.”

I remember reading Mulvey’s essay for a class and feeling a bit guilty since the movies I seemed to enjoy the most almost always allowed me to identify with the on-screen male character, who, most certainly, always had a beautiful, sexually-charged counterpart.

Maybe I’ve done more to describe the male gaze that I personally bring to reading rather than anything Perotta does in the book. I now realize that Perotta does describe, in similar level of detail, the way the men wear their clothes and do their hair and the effect it has on a female character. I probably saw nothing sexual in such a scene and moved quickly through it, but perhaps a female reader may think differently. I should ask my girlfriend.

Filed under: Fiction

The Brett Award

In 1966, Clyde Haberman, the young City College correspondent for the New York Times (with a very promising future), was bored while filling out three columns with City College student awards. To amuse himself, he came up with:

BRETT AWARD to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap– Jake Barnes.

Not too long after his editor found out, he was fired.

Filed under: Nonfiction

The Thrill of Creation

Continued to breeze through Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life. The central theme in this book is about an unceasing passion for manga that drives the main character Hiroshi Katsumi. One of my favorite scenes so far is when he is alone at his desk and deeply involved with his work. “The work was proceeding smoothly… For the first time in a long time, Hiroshi felt he had accomplished something big.”

A panel with a close-up of Hiroshi’s face and a couple of thought bubbles says: “So this is the thrill of creation! I had no idea.” The next page goes on to depict runners experiencing a runner’s high and how Hiroshi, in his productive manga drawing session, experiences a similar light and free feeling.

I’ve been experiencing nostalgia and a bit of regret while reading this book. Scenes like the one I described, where the process of creating brings sheer joy to the artist, remind me of the days in high school and college when I would stay up late into the night writing short stories or working on my personal website. Such moments are hard to come by these days, and it’s frustrating to see myself growing older and becoming less and less enthused about things. It makes Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s work all the more admirable because A Drifting Life is essentially a memoir of how he stuck out with his passion and lived only to create more of what he loved.

Filed under: Graphic Novel/Comics

A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Time flies (on the subway and on the toilet) when you have an engrossing 840-page comic book. You’ve got to love a heartfelt bildungsroman centered on a passion for creating manga.

Also enjoyed New Yorker’s piece on Wes Anderson (“Wild, Wild, Wes”), another passionate artist whose quirks and idiosyncrasies have found their way into making genuine, personal movies. Definitely want to see The Darjeeling Limited now.

Filed under: Article, Graphic Novel/Comics

Chin Music: The White House’s war with Fox News by Louis Menand

From a Talk of the Town piece in this week’s New Yorker.

Glad to see Menand in print – it’s been a while. This is a very typical Menand piece in which he analyzes Obama’s Administration’s decision to ostracize Fox News. After an introduction, the rest of the piece goes like this: some historical references (LBJ, Nixon) to show that the administration’s plan may or may not work, a bit about Roger Ailes, the man responsible for creating Fox News, general statement about the growth of mass-media niche journalism, some data thrown in to show people’s distrust in news, and, of course, a Menand finish:

The dubious efficacy of a war on Fox News is not the only reason to feel qualms. It’s hard to kill the press, but it is not hard to chill it, and this appears to be the White House’s goal in the case of Fox. “The best analogy is probably baseball,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said—meaning that throwing a few inside fastballs, a little chin music, gets hitters to back off the plate. Maybe, but he should also remember that deliberately throwing at a batter is grounds for ejection. The state may, and should, rebut opinions that it finds obnoxious, but it should not single out speakers for the purpose of intimidating them. At the end of the day, you do not want your opponents to be able to say that they could not be heard. It may be exasperating, but that is what the First Amendment is all about.

Sometimes his New Yorker pieces feel like a slow lap around the track and then, just because, we get a little burst of speed in the last 10 meters. That’s where you’ll find delight.

I should really update the Menand site sometime.

Filed under: Article

Why Rich Boys Don’t Make Good Reporters

I’ve been reading Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power the past few months. It’s about the rise of The New York Times and all the big names that made it into the institution it was when Talese wrote the book in the 1960s. I’m up to the part where Orvil Dryfoos, the third publisher of the Times, unexpectedly dies of a heart ailment only a couple years into his job as the head man, leading to a scramble for new leadership. The ultimate choice is Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, the grandson of Adolph Ochs, the man who bought the failing Times in 1896 and set it on course to become the prestigious institution it is today.

Sulzberger was only thirty-seven when he became the shot-caller for the Times. Talese talks about Sulzerberger’s life up to that point, a child who grew up as the “prince” of the Times kingdom and one part that struck me was the way Talese writes about Sulzberger and his stinit as a journalist:

He was now twenty-six, considerably more mature and poised, well liked around the newsroom, eager to learn about journalism. And he would learn a good deal during the next few years, but he would never become a top reporter, lacking qualities that are essential and rarely cultivated by such men as himself, the properly reared sons of the rich. Prying into other people’s affairs, chasing after information, waiting outside the doors of private meetings for official statements is no life for the scion of a newspaper-owning family. It is undignified, too alien to a refined upbringing. The son of a newspaper owner may indulge in reporting for a while, regarding it as part of his management training, a brief fling with romanticism, but he is not naturally drawn to it.

Upon reading this paragraph, my initial thought was about Talese and his own background as a son of an Italian immigrant tailor from New Jersey. I sensed a bit of disdain for the rich and privileged, especially since Talese himself had toiled as a reporter. And then he lays it all out in the next paragraph:

The reportorial ranks are dominated by men from the lower middle class. It is they who possess the drive, patience, and persistence to succeed as reporters; to them reporting is a vehicle to a better life. In one generation, if their by-lines become well known, they may rise from the simplicity and obscurity of their childhood existence to the inner circles of the exclusive. They may gain influence with the President, friendship with the Rockefellers, a front-row seat in the arenas of social and political power. From these positions they might not only witness, but influence, the events of their times — as did Reston, the son of poor Scottish immigrants; as did Krock and Catledge, Daniel and Wicker, the sons of the rural South; as did A. M. Rosenthal and dozens of other Jewish Americans whose forebears escaped the ghettos of Europe.

Basically, if you’re going to be a successful reporter, you need hustle. And hustle, Talese implies, doesn’t come naturally to those who have been fed with a silver spoon all their lives. Reminded me a bit of a recent Mad Men episode when Connie Hilton tells Don Draper that he’s like a son, or more so, because Don grew up without the riches, privilege and a sense of entitlement — a connection that he shares with Hilton.

Filed under: Nonfiction

Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

I’m almost done with Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s 3rd volume of work from Drawn & Quarterly (and edited by Adrian Tomine). I really loved The Push Man and Other Stories when I first read it a few years ago. It was one of those moments when the work made me see the genre of graphic novels in a whole different way. The simplicity of the drawings combined with an unrelenting bleakness made The Push Man an intense experience.

The scene below, from one of his stories called The Burden, shows a husband murdering his wife as she is about to give birth.

In Tatsumi’s world view, it’s hard to really know what a person is capable of doing and many scenarios explore unspeakable acts that may happen in the private lives of people who feel alienated and lonely in an urban landscape.

Good-Bye is the collection of work by Tatsumi from 1971-1972 (Push Man was from 1968). Its stories are longer and, from what I can tell, there’s a bit more sophistication in the illustrations. His stories continue to explore loneliness and tied with it, impotence and the helpless feeling of growing old all alone.

The stories are also a bit more abstract. I didn’t quite understand in one story, how an old man’s attempt to “control” the outbreak of a rash on his body was related to a mushroom he found in the forest. Felt pretty random, but maybe I missed something in my quick reading.

I really liked the story of a man who dreads his upcoming retirement, which will force him to spend the rest of his days living with his unbearable wife (who, he explains, has had an affair with his son-in-law and is an “arrogant, ruthless bitch”). He finally finds the courage to rebel and blows his life savings in pursuit of “passionate love” which, sadly, he never finds.

As depressing (and sometimes shocking) as his stories may be, there’s a seductive and pleasing quality that I feel from Tatsumi’s bleak world — a world where happiness is elusive and people act on their darkest impulses.

Filed under: Graphic Novel/Comics

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou

I read this graphic novel hastily a few weeks ago after seeing an article about it in the Times. I bought it right away because it’s about Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, mathematician, logician, and whatever else you want to call him. I never really knew about his math/logic background and only knew about him through my parents, who both kept their respective copies of History of Western Philosophy nearby at all times and tried multiple times to get me to read it (I skimmed it and fell asleep many times trying).

Logicomix is enjoyable for its biographical dramatization, but my lack of knowledge in logic and the history of its development limited my ability to fully appreciate the efforts of the authors. If anything, I was surprised the book made very little mention of Russell’s work in philosophy. I did pick up on the theme of how tackling the challenges of logic pushed more than a few bright minds to the brink of insanity including Russell himself.

While we’re on Bertrand Russell, I should probably mention that it was in reading his 1927 speech “Why I Am Not a Christian” that I was ultimately convinced that Christianity wasn’t for me. I think this was sometime in high school, when I had already stopped going to church and had serious doubts about religion in general. Here’s the link — http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

It’s a nice, easy-to-understand argument against Christianity and religion laid out in Russell’s clear and rationale way, and I can see why it resonated with me so much when I was a teen.

Filed under: Graphic Novel/Comics

Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football? by Malcolm Gladwell

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell

I always like the stuff that Malcolm Gladwell puts out for The New Yorker and this was no exception. The article left a chilly feeling, especially when he describes the number of hits a lineman may take to the head during the course of his career:

The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.

When I played football in high school, I didn’t like to hit or get hit. That’s why I was a subpar blocker and never played any defense. I played the little tailback who ran away and tried to avoid tackles. I didn’t mind getting tackled while trying to run away, but I never sought out contact. I do remember one time my junior year during a scrimmage when I collided in the middle with a large nosetackle. He must have been close to 300lbs., almost twice my own weight. I remember taking a shot at the line as soon as I received the handoff and then being piled on by several defenders. I must have lost a yard or two but I was able to get up on my feet after the play. I remember as I returned to the huddle seeing yellow spots and feeling pretty dizzy. I’m not sure what happened next, but it took a few plays for my head to come back around.

Thankfully, our team mostly ran sweep plays to the outside during my playing days so I was able to avoid large linemen altogether and minimize the impact of the hits by linebackers with jukes and cut-backs. But I can see how, even in high school, it’s possible for players to experience continuous trauma to the head, especially if they embrace an aggressive, all-out style of play. I always envied the guys who had no fear and hit like hammers, but I’m also glad I never felt the need to prove myself in such a way.

So — if I had a kid one day in the future, would I allow him to play football? If he truly wanted to, I wouldn’t say no (and his mom would probably have a say in the matter before anything could be decided), but I would definitely be concerned and worried. I really enjoyed football and it probably shaped me in many ways, but virtues like teamwork, practice, and discipline can be found in other less violent sports. And what if he becomes a superstar lineman or linebacker or safety who thrives on making huge hits over and over again? It could present a difficult scenario in which success could also spell great dangers. Soccer, anyone?

Filed under: Article