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Prelude to a Certain Midnight (Gerald Kersh 1947): Larry David’s London

January 16th, 2008

Outraged by police inactivity during the investigation of the rape and murder of a little girl, an anti-sex activist superego named Asta Thundersly turns amateur detective. A crusading Kramer-figure, living comfortably without explanation, Asta is the centerpiece of a Seinfeldian underworld featuring a bevy of battered booze-hounds, all with peculiar characteristics, who gather at Bar Bacchus. There’s Catchy, a weepy beauty in decline, Cigarette, a principled feminist/poet who finds herself covering for her criminal boyfriend , and Mr. Pink, red-tie wearing “Christian socialist” who carries his papers everywhere and makes a life-long project of converting Bible stories into everyday speak, e.g, Judas’ betrayal as told using gangster lingo, like “rats” and “dames.” While few are spared Asta’s biting tongue, she empathetically embraces these wacky wayfarers, often despite uninspiring introductions. She takes on a belligerent boxer as a butler and tolerates another man who likes to make scenes and plots to overthrow the Salvation Army. As a detective, she classifies people by their unique characteristics, obsessions and situations, which she knows intimately, logically determining who is likely or not likely to violate a child, ultimately deciding that all are quite likely, especially men, from the isolated man who cares for his mother to the shy and sullen Apollo who loves the ladies.

Asta throws a party at Bar Bacchus, inviting all the would-be suspects. While the trick always works for the professional detectives in films, her party is a miserable failure . . . both as an investigation and as a party. Asta is unable to crack the case and grows frustrated; at her lowest moment, she slaps Catchy in the face while reproaching her.

Asta clashes, albeit politely, with her sister Thea Olivia, whose life’s work is quilting yet gets little quilting done. Thea would prefer Asta leave all the nasty business alone, yet it is Thea who, somewhat accidentally, solves the murder. However, she proves incapable of coming forward, fearing she has no tangible evidence to offer the police and that informing her sister will only cause a stir. Ten years later, with her quilt still unfinished, the case remains formally unsolved. The Murderer takes his nieces to the circus. The Bar Bacchus scene slowly withers and dies.

Judith Freeman asserts that the three major male characters in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye are all versions of the author. While Marlowe is his masculine ideal, friend Terry Lennox, a gentlemanly war hero, is the “good” Chandler and Roger Wade the “bad” Chandler, a drunk who despises himself for writing lousy genre fiction. Marlowe spends the bulk of the novel judging Wade, even picking apart his insipient prose with an overwhelming sense of disgust, focusing, in particular, on Wade’s dependence on similes, Chandler’s literary trademark.

In Prelude to a Certain Midnight, the Murderer is an amateur author, composing pulp prose under various pen names. Of all the shady suspects, the writer of crime fiction fits the bill best. When Mr. Pink sermonizes against the folly of such seedy stories, it is pointed out that he spends his days writing stories. His initial defense is that he merely translates the verse, not writes, but once convinced, he is brought to tears, utterly destroyed. If Chandler is guilty of a judgmental split personality, perhaps Kersh’s choice of culprit is equally revealing. Earlier in the work, Kersh’s narrator philosophizes over the connection between artist and criminal. “The edge of the two underworlds overlap,” the voice claims. The otherwise principled Cigarette’s affection for her crooked boyfriend demonstrates the intimate bond, one epitomized by Night and the City’s Harry Fabian, another Kersh creation, a wide-eyed optimist blind to the folly of his deluded ambitions, a born to lose street hustler who dreams of “controlling London wrestling.” The mat game is itself a hybrid of art and the hustle, and while Fabian is oddly talented in a damaged sort of way, he is destined to fail, as is Asta the amateur detective and her fellow denizens of Bar Bacchus.

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Monsieur Klein (Losey 1976): A Film That Will Both Horrify and Amuse

January 9th, 2008

Mr. Klein features a cynical art dealer in Vichy Paris who is pulled into a concentration camp by his name alone. No ‘facts’ of Jewishness operated in his deportation; Mr. Klein had reason to believe that there was a mix up and his name is the same as another man ‘intended’ for the round up. Klein’s pursuit of his double gets the man arrested. In the meantime, Klein, has come to unconsciously—without any indication of a change of heart or mind–identify with his morally superior and politically inferior double and does not avoid his being swept up as well.

The film is both funny and horrific in a way that Lars Von Trier’s America films are. The first scene features a middle aged woman stark naked being cruelly examined by a ‘doctor’ for racial pathology. She is diagnosed “doubtful” for Aryan identity after he manipulates and assesses her nostrils, jaw, ears and hair and makes her walk, uttering ridiculous pseudo-scientific racial descriptors. She asks him how much she has to pay.

The historical episodes of the round-up and deportation to German concentration camps of 4,000 Jewish families in 1942 Paris is carefully narrated as unexplained scene interspliced into the plot of an art dealer pursuing his troubling double. The round-up is the crushing actuality of the final scene of the man cut off from his world by his name. He is not, like the others, a victim.
The build up for the round-up is meticulous: a doctor diagnoses a woman for Jewishness after a brutal examination for which she has to pay, a boardroom with a map of Paris illuminated by the underlying window of an elegant room is presented, police march, park and unpark their black sedans in an elaborate ad-hoc indoor garage, a busy archive room filled with clerks and card files with names and addresses and clerks appears, and a stadium-sized bicycle track is prepared. Rich people feed their lap dogs at cafes while the poor stand in bread lines.

The actual round-up is excruciating. The description of French participation in Nazi extermination is all the more forceful because it lurks in the background until the last scene. Mr. Klein in the meantime is obsessed, single minded and clueless, a Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm with without the light-hearted humor. He even laughs at an anti-Semitic joke in the papers he is clearly in the hot seat to the disgust of his female companion–”You gotta admit that this one is funny!” The dialogue of his ‘jewing’ the desperate Jewish man fleeing France by buying an heirloom painting for a fraction of its worth overlaying the scene of his being taken in the train to Auschwitz with his double further illustrates his own obtuse bigotedness. The dialogue-over could only be our anti-hero’s grasshopper-like mind that attempts justify state violence even when he is the target, holding him impossibly straddled between Nazi and Jew. Mr. Klein is a noir insofar as the operator is a pawn and the police do not ’serve and protect’.

The final scene is imbued with Klein’s racism and racial sympathy at once. As he joins the victims of the brutal round-up, the others around him have a different appearance and seem stoic. The voice over is the dialogue between Klein and the desperate Jewish man who undersold him a painting. Later in the film, Klein demonstrates a passionate attachment towards the painting when the state repo’s his household. In the dialogue, Klein is ‘jewing’ the Jewish man, as if in Klein’s mind, that is why he is in the round-up.

Hearing his name announced over loudspeakers at the round-up, Klein believes he spots his double and gives chase amidst the throng of detainees, ignoring his lawyer, Larry David’s agent Jeff Green to Klein’s Larry David, who frantically waves freshly secured papers that establish Klein’s identity and guarantee his freedom. Klein pursues his double right onto the train bound for concentration camps. The closing image, Klein’s pathetic face vacantly peering through bars on the train window, so perfectly mirrors of the typical conclusion of Curb Your Enthusiasm, one can almost imagine the Curb theme song playing over the film’s closing credits.

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They Made Me a Fugitive (1948): Stalked by Bad Luck

January 9th, 2008

Ex RAF officer Clem Morgan has escaped Nazis only to land in the hands of a gang boss Narsi, short for Narcissus. Clem, a loner whose only attachment is a girlfriend, who he bores by drunkenly idealizing her, signs on with Narsi, an architect with post-modern sensibilities who figures that such a well-born chap would add class to the funeral parlor storefront where gang members impersonate pallbearers with a pomp that coolly clashes with the garishness of a giant self standing lettering on the rooftop that reads RIP– an imitation of American gaudiness that outdoes the original in bad taste.

Clem gets second thoughts when he sees evidence of cocaine trafficking, making his scruples disgustingly clear to his new boss. He confides to his girlfriend he intends to go through with the job he agreed to do because he gave his word. Clem is unaware that he had fallen into a rabbit hole when he signed on with Narsi, for whom an accomplice had transformed into an adversary, dashes Clem’s whole life into the dustbin, taking away his girl, involving him in murder and leaving him to stew in the trials of meaningless punishment. Clem is framed for killing a policeman whose death was only for the sake of the frame and therefore a horrific consequence of reluctant amateur gangster’s actions.

This is the essence of noir: An amateur falls into a rabbit hole without knowing it and has to find his/her own way out in a world where one does not know what to do and others seem to know everything; it’s a world where radio broadcasts, stoolies and police radios in gangsters’ dens give ‘professionals’ almost total knowledge of mutual surveillance. The law can’t help you; it hates you. In the words of Kafka’s The Trial, you attract the Law. You are faced with pure rivalry in the form of some ridiculous underworld character. The menace comes from the crazy new rules you have to live by, the strange settings whether interiors, the streets and highways or nature itself, which informs you of the true meaning of your acts, intentions and behaviors. The drama of bad luck that seems to seep from the scenery inculcates a diffuse paranoia– it’s nobody in particular who has it in for me.

Whereas for Clem, Narsi is the source of unmitigated disaster, for others he is a more commonplace brute–a woman beater. Beaten backstage by the gangster for visiting the now ferally hostile Clem in prison, Narsi’s old girlfriend Sally literally drinks a tear drop tea, cognizant at last of being in over her head. Narsi is, according to Cora, his underling Sopey’s girl, “not even a respectable crook.” Narsi throws his weight around in demonstrations of violence like a street version of a lower level manager, hysterically barking orders. Even his men don’t respect him, showing annoyance as they take his orders and object to his commands in order to cling to the dignity of their individual styles of street fighting. They seem motivated instead by the pleasure taken from the job, enjoying putting on a show as pallbearers and hiding in coffins to stage a surprise attack. Jim is a sadist with his decorated metallic belt he named ‘the coaxer’; Sopey is a submissive by nature; and the knife man has loving cultivated his skilled knife fighting moves.

Sopey and Cora are the instruments of Narsi’s will. They cannot save Clem or Sally and cannot be saved by Clem and Sally. Narsi forces Sopey to run down the policeman and Cora to tell him where Sopey is hiding. Unlike the clueless outsiders, they know when they lose. Sopey and Cora both know when Sopey will die. Terrified at the news of Clem’s escape from prison, Sopey is told by Narsi, “It’s your turn,” his face registering the weight of a double entendre at the pool table side.

When Cora laments, “I killed Sopey… Why don’t you kill me too? I have nothing to live for!” she regrets the decision to survive.

Clem, on the other hand, makes his own survival his last priority, breaking out of prison to avenge the frame-up. He romances Sally with talk of what if they met when they were still in Sunday school; they can only be together if they were removed from the reality in which they met.

Clem’s horrendous luck does not come solely from Narsi. One frame-up for murder deserves another in the brutal logic of this noir narrative, and the menace of outrageous and unforeseeable consequences is given a more surreal rendering in an interlude of fugitive refueling. Breaking into her ornate home, Clem is victimized by a bourgeois country wife whose piano notes are audible through her window and thick curtains. A predator posing as prey, her murderous intent is only matched by her quick thinking opportunism. She gives the broadcasted fugitive food, bath and clothes in exchange for a small favor– that he shoot her unremittingly besotted husband. After all, he already has one murder rap, and she would like to avoid a hanging. “You want jam on too,” the wry Clem comments on hearing her plan, “You’ll want to get rid of those motherly ideas of yours or they’ll land you in the soup I’m in.” Clem, whose generalized disgust has spread to the point that he seems to want to pull is own face off his head when he contemplates his beard in the bathroom mirror, contemptuously stalks off, leaving the wife to do the job herself with the gun she delicately offered him under a linen napkin over after-dinner coffee, with the assurance offered by the event of Clem’s having handled the gun mistaking it for a gift (“It’ll keep off the mosquitoes”) before self righteously abandoning it on the dining room table. Again Clem’s uprightness is nothing but trouble.

The show-down struggle between Clem and Narsi has the structure of a set-up within a set-up. Clem finally catches a break when the police decide to use him and enter the Valhalla funeral home store-front from the skylight onto the morbid stage set where Narsi’s men await hidden in coffins. Fake signs are cosmically and ridiculously in-tune: “Death is around the corner” and “It’s later than you think.” Clem makes the first knock-out with a milk bottle and the last by hurling a gun, adding to the staginess of the conflict. Alone with his rival at last, the two climb the stairs to the steep and slippery rooftop where the struggle is focused on not falling more than fighting. Narsi clings to the giant R of the RIP sign while hand hacking the dogged Clem. Police intervention is accomplished purely symbolically when Narsi ceases from delivering the final chop to a precariously positioned Clem in order to run in response to the sight of arriving police cars. He jumps to the next building, seems surprised to have made it, and teeters backward, falling off with a girlish shriek. The police arrive in time to scrape everybody up, and Clem is taken in for double murder having been unable to extract a confession from the dying Narsi whose last words are a bitter, “I hope you both rot in hell,” demonstrating in all consuming jealously rather than admitting to it so that everybody knows of Clem’s innocence except the Law.

The last shot is the image of noir. Sally gazes after the departing police cars, her shiny coiffed hair in an overcoat and stilettos stands on the rainy sidewalk alone next to a massive mud puddle.

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Two Lives on the Road: Jack Black v. Jack Kerouac

January 8th, 2008

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