The Frame

(via Raphaël Bourelly: Photographie)

(via Raphaël Bourelly: Photographie)

homeofthevain: Martin Parr, Stockholm, Sweden, 1992 (from Bored Couples)

Thoughts on Jesus’ Son

Read Jesus’ Son this week, and was - and becoming even more - blown away. The stories are entertaining yet complex. I finished the book last night and today while I was thinking about something totally unrelated, one of the stories hit me viscerally - as if it was the residue from some vivid dream I had had where before your mind even has a chance to fill in the details, you feel the way you did when you first experienced it. Two chilling details remained with me: the slimy miniature bunnies found inside the guts of a roadkilled rabbit in “Emergency,” and the protagonist in “Beverly Home” on the ground peering beneath the Mennonite woman’s window curtain. 

In this last story, the junkie protagonist starts out a run-of-the-mill peeping Tom but becomes obsessed with observing a Mennonite woman and her husband - seemingly for non-sexual reasons, although this is sort of an open question. In one of the story’s final scenes, the junkie is laying on the ground outside the woman’s bedroom, desperately trying to see beyond a closed window curtain. At one point the woman yanks open the curtain and is face to face with the junkie - but since it is dark outside and light inside, she doesn’t see beyond her reflection. It struck me that this scene embodied something that happened throughout the book: outsiders looking in - and, rarely, insiders looking out. 

Every story involves a junkie of some kind, which might sound depressing, but the tone is entertaining and never taxing. The junkies are respectable for some reason - maybe because of the narration - although they are not control of their lives, they are certainly in control of the narration. Although the average reader of Johnson probably does not have much in common with the kinds of people presented in his stories, their lucid narration bridges the gap. You respect the perspective they have on their own situation.

I thought this was an interesting aspect of the book - the fact that the average reader probably doesn’t have much in common with the types of people in the stories. The last line of the book gets at this - “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a hearbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

The book presents two spheres of people: the responsible ones and the irresponsible ones. Usually you are asked to look into the world of the junky - who often interacts with the responsible ones. This point makes this tension all the more apparent: often, the junkies hold jobs that intrude on the other sphere in an uncomfortable way. They are in charge of cleaning patients in ER room, or working in old folks homes. They work in jobs you’d expect - and demand - more competent people to be working. Positions of trust - to some extent. One particularly horrifying intrusion is when one junkie, who works in an ER prepping patients, does drugs on the job and yanks a knife out of a patient’s eye without even thinking about it - all while the surgeon doubts his own ability to perform such a difficult removal. 

There’s one moment where a group of junkies find themselves interacting with another group of even worse junkies. But usually they’re interacting with normal folk and it can be uncomfortable but mostly it’s easy to sympathize - or at least be entertained - by the narrator junky. In “Beverly Home,” you sympathize - at least to some small degree - because he writes such a caring and enthusiastic newsletter for the community. As noted above, I believe the sympathy you feel relates to their ability to write, to express themselves. The narratives are direct and honest, sometimes visionary but controlled.

Here I am throwing around the word junky. Maybe I shouldn’t be judging everyone so quickly in a book called Jesus’ Son. I really don’t think the book is getting at something so trite (i.e. presenting you with “sinful” characters that evoke sympathy all to show you that even the sinful are worthy of love), but there might be something to that. I’m more interested in the relationship between these two spheres of people. The book asks you, the presumably educated, to examine the lives of the uneducated - to look out beyond your own reflection. 

Thoughts on Night of the Hunter

The Night of the Hunter

I was a little disappointed with this film. Although I enjoyed its angular cinematography (apparently influenced by German expressionism, I read) and could recognize James Agee’s influence in its more writerly moments, the film came off a little heavy-handed and blatant. It reduced what could have been a sophisticated if unsettling story into a trite morality tale praising the innocence of children. Part of my disappointment may be due to the fact that any story involving preachers instantly triggers Flannery O’Connor, whose writing was never preachy but rather unpredictable, dark, and ambiguous. Here, everything is stark black and white - and any judgment is made for you. It’s heroes are totally good and its villains are completely bad. 

The best part of the film for me were two characters, Powell and Ms. Cooper. Powell is a memorable villain, a murderer who pretends to be a preacher so as to gain access to his victim’s homes and money. Ms. Cooper, the old lady who saves the children, is an admirable, modern woman and Christian who stands on her porch with a shotgun. She is able to see through Powell’s false christianity immediately. She also delivers the film’s moral. In contrast to Powell, she’s a true preacher - but how do we know? “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Ms. Cooper performs many generous acts - but the irony is that the film doesn’t ever ask its viewer to perform the difficult act of judging that the victims of Powell failed at.

One question that I’m still working out is the pattern of duplicitous characters in the movie. Since the screenplay was written by the brilliant James Agee, he is no doubt hinting at something here. I’m interested in two parts. First, where the young boy John confuses the Jesus-floating-down-the-river story with the Moses-floating-down-the-river story. John himself floated down the river to escape an attempt on his life. Also recall the story John begins to tell his sister Pearl in their bedroom about the “rich king in Africa” while standing proudly with his hands on his hips. So it appears that John plays some sort of “king of men” figure. He’s no doubt heroic and smart, but perhaps his best quality, according to the film, is that he is able to move on (children “abide and they endure,” in the film’s last line), being totally enthralled with a pocket watch he gets for Christmas. 

The other scene that interests me is how John reacts identically to Powell’s arrest as he does to his father’s arrest. I’m still puzzled as to this scene - is the idea simply that he is having a psychological flashback of the earlier traumatic event of watching his father’s arrest? For its overall simplicity and earnestness, Agee leaves his mark in a few ambiguities. 

Update: I just found an excellent review at http://notcoming.com/reviews/nightofthehunter .

(via Daniel George, West Bay Street, 2011 | FlakPhoto.com)

(via Picture 195 « New York 1 | Vivian Maier Photographer)

(via Picture 214 « New York 1 | Vivian Maier Photographer)

(Source: goingconcern)