Life As Fiction

Remarks on Geoff Dyer’s “Zona”

Geoff Dyer asserts that the age at which a young man begins to truly discover literature and film is between the late teens and early twenties. In Zona, his excursion through his personal tastes and education as constellated around Tarkovsky’s Stalker, he describes a journey and life that is rich, rewarding, and completely foreign to me.

My late teens and early-to-mid twenties were a confused mess of broke, uncultured desperation. In many ways, that is how my life still is. Immediately after Secondary School, the movies I watched that entirely transformed my outlook on life were The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999) and Waking Life (Linklater, 2001). It wasn’t so much the spell-binding action of the former that got me: It was the image, near the beginning of the film, of Neo plucking from a shelf, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, that stuck in my memory. It signified to me that Neo’s apotheosis was born of and firmly rooted in literacy and philosophy. Waking Life confirmed this idea. Waking Life is a movie about big concepts and in many ways it is a philosophical tour de force to both the new initiate and the acolyte. For years I misinterpreted these two movies. I bought into the action movie fairy tale that the only hard work necessary is an imaginative focusing of energies and creative visualisation. I lost my way in self-help, and the occult until eventually I discovered that the idea of a short-cut is flawed. The story of Neo isn’t the one told in The Matrix. It is the one that occurs before The Matrix begins. It is the story of Neo’s self-education over many arduous years. Similarly, Waking Life wasn’t about the power of lucid dreaming but of lucid living (as evidenced by the title) by actively engaging with logic and ideas. I was in my twenty-fourth year when I became - for real lack of a better word - literate.

A late education is better than no education at all. I take comfort in that. Geoff Dyer’s book is engaging instruction for someone like myself who is only now in life getting to know the filmic and literary canon, and with at least a decade of reading, watching, and thinking remaining before I can even begin to feign familiarity.

Of course, the real prize here, as with any book on close-reading, is Dyer’s close reading of Tarkovsky and his work. He does enough I feel to entertain anyone though a good number of the observations are not really insights but trivia or autobiography, minutely footnoted.

He gives his opinions on various films, but often in passing. In particular, I was baffled by his assertion that “La Double Vie de Véronique (1991)” is a terrible film. Was he being genuine? Later in the book he incriminates himself somewhat when he describes one of the last scenes in Stalker:

Stalker’s wife walks towards the wall and then sits down, turns to the camera and takes a cigarette from her packet. A dreadful moment, this, for me. By lighting and smoking a cigarette she turns herself, instantly, into something hideous. That sheepskin coat, we realise now, must stink of cigarettes— and her hair. And it’s not just that: I hate all gestures associated with finding, lighting and smoking a cigarette.

In Véronique the starlet of the film smokes cigarettes several times. She (Irène Jacob) is a young and terrific beauty. Much of the film is spent simply in observing her walk, stare, read, be. The attention is lavish and a man must have a heart of brick to not fall in love with her during the course of the film. I can imagine Dyer experiencing this then, almost two thirds into the movie, watching the horrible spectacle of her - naked in bed, lying on her stomach, a golden dappled light spread over her, her nipples barely visible - lighting a cigarette and smoking it in what is one of the most luxurious close-ups I have ever witnessed. Dyer must have felt suicidal or at least apoplectic.

Véronique also acknowledges Tarkovsky in a set-piece that might well be Tarkovsky’s truest signature. Early in Stalker, Stalker leaves home to go on his odyssey, against his wife’s wishes. Her anguish is palpable as she collapses onto the floor and wails with that grief that all women know and feel with such singular force:

After Stalker leaves, his wife has one of those sexualized fits (nipples prominently erect) of which Tarkovsky seems to have been fond, writhing away on the hard floor in a climax of abandonment. (Cf. the second resurrection of Hari, in Solaris, coming back to life, so to speak, in a see-through shorty nightie after drinking liquid oxygen.)

The penultimate scene in Véronique is of Véronique with her new lover, a writer, and in fact, a stalker, her stalker. They have just made love and she, laughing, asks him what he wants to know about her. She empties her purse before him and she acquaints him with the history of the revealed objects, objects that in turn reveal her history and habits. He fixes on a series of photographs she took while visiting Krakow. He notices a particularly beautiful picture of her. But the picture, while of her, isn’t of her. It is the picture of her doppleganger, now dead, who at the time of the picture was staring into the bus, marvelling at the sight of herself in the bus taking pictures of herself. Véronique collapses and weeps with an inexplicable, all-encompassing grief, as though, the most difficult questions in her life have been answered and she has just realised the terrible loss. She lies on the bed, writhing away in a climax of bereavement. It’s a Tarkovskian sexualised fit. Then, it becomes something else: Her lover caresses her, kisses her, mouthing at her tears. It’s soon clear that he’s inside her, making love to her, trying (as many men before and since have tried and will try until the end of eternity) to calm the hysteria with his penis.

For a purist like Dyer, that scene, in a film of such undeniable beauty, must have driven him insane and prompted him to write that,

Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Véronique” made straight-ahead porn seem tasteful by comparison.

That, is quite probably, his most dishonest statement in the book. However, we understand his hysteria.

But did you see what I’ve did for a good portion of the review? I’ve turned a review, an ostensibly critical analysis, into an opportunity for autobiography. That seems to be the modern trend after all, but I question its usefulness. Just like Hip-hop’s monstrous and growing appetite lead to it subsuming and consuming every other genre especially those other two important genres of black culture: R&B and Soul, it seems that the confessional has almost completely subsumed critical essay writing so that now every essay is a reflection on the writer’s life through the prism of the piece of literature under discussion. Perhaps this isn’t a new trend but has always been the case. Still, I question the value of this approach. The narcissism of it all is a little overwhelming, and I don’t doubt that it forces everyone into a process of self-mythologising, or simply, myth-making.

Dyer’s book is said to owe a debt, or at least to give a nod, to Barthes’ “S/Z”. I wonder if Barthes’ text is as loose, casual, and often unserious as Dyer’s ¹. Names are mentioned, and a few quotes are given but the overall impression is one of lightness, and worryingly, of pandering to popular taste. I wanted (needed) an exposition that took its premise and its subject more seriously than Dyer’s does. I don’t object to having fun but when I ask myself what I’ve learnt from this book, I find that I’ve learnt a bit about Dyer, his various likes and dislikes, his ineffable wit, his obsession with owning a dog in spite of never actually owning one ², and the two occasions when he might have had a menagé a trois but didn’t. If that’s all then Dyer is not much different than Paul Carr (except that thankfully Dyer is proud of his pedigree and erudition while, lamentably, Carr is content only to scrape the very bottom of the muckiest barrel, as exemplified by Upgrade). I doubt if Dyer’s book has anything to offer to someone already moderately versed in the canon of cinema, literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

In conclusion: An enjoyable, fun, light, quick read. But I mustn’t be disingenuous: If the measure of a book is in the extent to which the reader highlights its pages then this book is an important one: I highlighted it a whole lot.

My problem with Diablo Cody

In 2007, a script by Diablo Cody was turned into the movie “Juno”, a rousing success which earned her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. When I watched the film, I was immediately taken by it. I watched it with a smile through out; my eyes moistened on cue and at the end of it I felt the release of pectoral constriction that comes after running a moderate distance and collapsing on a patch of grass underneath a bright, clean sky.

Almost half a decade later, the film “Young Adult” was released, a product of the same creative team as “Juno”. From the beginning of the film I was cringing. My arms were folded tight over my chest and I was more restless than the day I watched my dangling, lacerated finger get stitched back into its proper place. My reaction to the film was the exact opposite of what I had felt for Juno.

In Juno a teenage girl gets pregnant courtesy of her equally teenage boyfriend. She goes through the process of finding a suitable couple to adopt her child. She gives birth. The new parent takes possession of the child. Juno continues with her life and blissful relationship with her high-school sweetheart.

In Young Adult we are introduced to a writer of novels for middle to late teens (young adults, hence the title). She is rather successful having penned a series of vampire novels that, in her words, “are everywhere.” She is a drunkard (or at least, we see her drink a lot), she is slothful, untidy and messy. She is dishevelled and unkempt, except when it becomes necessary to deploy her looks as an asset, whereupon it becomes patent that she—played by Charlize Theron—is indeed one of the most beautiful Caucasian women on the planet. One day, she receives a missive from her ex-boyfriend. He’s just had a baby, and as new parents are wont to do, he’s helpfully included a picture of the chubby marvel. In the middle of the night, waking from an anonymous one night stand, she packs up to go back to her home town—where he lives—to win him back. His baby, his job, his wife, are all boring burdens, she believes. She’s there to relieve him of them and give him a life. However, there is no redemption to be had: she causes mayhem between generous swigs of neat bourbon, learns nothing, and to some extent gets what we feel must be her comeuppance.

In watching Young Adult, I was forced to consider Juno more critically than I previously had. The sheer amniotic warmth of Juno made it impossible and seemingly unnecessary to think. YA jangled and jarred my nerves so often and so rigorously that all I could do was pause every few minutes to take a deep breath and criticise.

Then, I realised what had happened: I had been manipulated. Juno, the girl, is eminently likeable. She is sweet, gentle, fresh-faced and as pure as the driven snow. Ellen Page with her open impressionability; her round, absorbing eyes; her ovoid, kissable pout; her sing-song voice that all but demands that a guitar be strummed as she speaks—this is the kind of young girl for whom anyone will do anything if she asks. In the film, she is precocious and the sex—and the story—which began, as these things tend to do, with a large, sumptuous armchair, redolent with history, is all her initiative. Still, somehow, we can’t help feeling that Juno is chaste, good and generous.

The film is structured in such a way that Juno is never bad, never wrong. Yes she had a baby at a young age—a stupid mistake (are there any other kind?) by any measure—and yet she weaves such a compelling narrative of her romance with her colourless, hapless, essentially good-hearted boyfriend that this teenage disaster seems, not tragic, but right ¹; not a catastrophic cascade of wild, uncontrollable, unstoppable, hormonal infatuation and insuperable ignorance but a consummation of all the things that a good, stable relationship should be, an inevitable, if slightly premature culmination of love, friendship, empathy, sympathy, respect and commitment. It’s an essentially Catholic message without the sacrament of marriage, hence the conflict.

But it is not really conflict because in Juno there is absolutely nothing at risk or at stake. Will she lose her boyfriend? No. Will she be ostracised? Not really. Will she disgrace her family? No. Will she be forced into single-motherhood? God no. Will she be scarred for life? Never, if we are to believe the sunny ending. Will she lose anything at all? No.

Does Juno then speak to any of the realities of teenage pregnancy? Ramblings on the Internet screamed yes with vehemence but unless one is an upper-middle class white girl whose life is perfectly cushioned by an endless layering of safety nets and safe guards, this movie must have been puzzling, fantastical and with aspects of a sort of modern fairy tale.

The tears Juno cries are the tears that are shed freely when we know we are safe and so we indulge in our pain in ways that are also safe. There is nothing self-destructive here. The question is: Why does Juno have to be so likeable? Is this true? Is this honest? Is this, at all, real? What does her fundamental, bone-deep, niceness got to do with the story of a teenage girl, pregnant and giving her baby away for adoption? Why is Juno’s faultlessness the core of the story?

The answer, to my thinking, is the same as the answer to why Mavis (the anti-heroine of YA), is so despicable: By painting a character in one distinct colour, by casting her in a single lambent light, it makes it easy, elementary, to elicit whatever response you want from the audience. You can’t hate Juno so you must sympathise with everything about her. Even when you feel the sting of doubt, you must cheer for her because what kind of Godless person are you if you hate the Virgin Mary? Conversely, Mavis is so abhorrent, so irredeemable that you must see that she is deplorable. There is nothing more to her. Her self-loathing narcissism is fuel for all our other judgements and responses to the film. This is, fundamentally, emotional exploitation of an audience by a writer.

YA is a revenge mission masked as literature. We all remember the mean girls in high-school². We remember their refined beauty, their genetic gifts of such a high quality that the hostility of these girls, their condescension, their abusiveness, their entitlement, all seemed justifiable and even acceptable. In the face of such dazzling creatures we recognised that we deserved to suffer. We had to be punished for being lesser humans. The hierarchy of all things sentient seemed perfectly clear: If someone could be so wonderfully beautiful, if such a person—so obviously a gift to the rest of us—could actually exist on this planet then it must be up to us, the unwashed masses, to be her subjects. Supreme beauty is a numinous thing: we do not question the caprices of our gods.

Diablo Cody then goes about unleashing the full load of vitriol on such a girl. Ostensibly the question is “what happens to those mean girls, those true beauties, once they reach middle age”? Mavis has been divorced already, now she makes it her business to be a home-wrecker. She doesn’t even seem to need to work. Success for her is not a matter of exerting effort but of whimsy: it comes naturally. Therefore, she can dedicate herself to ruining the lives of others (just as Cody has systematically gone about ruining the life of her lead character).

Juno’s beauty is physical, but it seems to emanate from a solid core of goodness. Her redemptive powers are so great that she transforms the couple she engages to be parents. The man, a hopeless case not of mid-life crisis but of an inability to grow-up, discovers himself and his passion, through her and leaves his wife in order to go pursue his dream. Juno cries when this happens, after all, being good is so difficult. Meanwhile, Juno bequeaths the now single woman the one thing she has always wanted while simultaneously helping her get rid of a no-good man. “If you’re still in, I’m still in,” she says. Juno feels everything.

The men in the film are throwaway characters, placed there to highlight Juno’s goodness. Her boyfriend (Michael Cera) is so ineffectual and insubstantial that his voice always quavers with effeminate tenderness. One wonders how he mustered the energy to relieve Juno of her virginity. The other guy, the would-be adoptive father— he too is a cypher.

In YA, the men (also two) work as agents of morality. This time, the men are good, with honest aspirations and noble intentions. They want to do the right thing, they feel deeply and are passionate about where they are in life. When we first meet Buddy he is preparing baby formula and telling her that spontaneity is, for him, a thing of the past. Later, when he briefly kisses her, we see it as noble respect for the history they share, an honourable act of closure, even though a sign that his battlements are wavering under the onslaught of seduction.

Patton Oswalt, as Matt, is a cuddly cripple with his own home-brewery where he ages bourbon diligently, with great sensitivity, meticulously. Mavis quaffs down his Special Reserve without taste, discernment or compunction. But no one would ever accuse Oswalt of being handsome (endearing as he is) and so when Mavis sleeps with him in a fit of depression, drunkenness and self-loathing after being rebuffed by Buddy (who must have been the prom king or captain of the football team), it is a fillip for all of us geeks who were perfectly invisible to the beautiful girls of our youth.³ We contemplate, with relish, how low she has fallen and how we have sweetly—vicariously—triumphed.⁴ The lead up to that moment is a series of brutal, publicly humiliating blows that range from wine being spilt on her outfit to complete public rejection even after she confesses—also publicly—to having once had a miscarriage by the now happily married Buddy. She takes a beating, and we, sitting in the arena, watch with glee as she is dragged through the muck. There are few movies that take such delight in showing a human hit rock bottom.

YA is Cody’s great insult to the mean girl set. She’s got a very large soap-box in the shape of a big budget Hollywood film. She stands on her pulpit and shames every one of those girls in a very public way. It is petty, it is narcissistic, it is trite.

By tying her audience into the same straight-jacket in both films, by robbing us of any opportunity to think through the common humanity in all people, she forces us to feel what she wants us to feel. She’s too evolved for a laugh-track but the emotional cues are all there and we are forced to respond to them or expose ourselves as soulless. Juno (good) will be rewarded (and slightly tested?), Mavis (evil) will be punished, and so on, ad infinitum. What Diablo does so cleverly, is gesture towards nuance that isn’t there. But if from the beginning we know that Juno will not suffer any permanent damage, then what is the point? If Mavis is doomed to eternal loneliness, emptiness, shame and dissatisfaction in spite of her success and beauty, then what is the point?

There is the question of a writer’s duty: Isn’t a writer supposed to manipulate the audience’s emotions to achieve an effect? There is nothing at all to the question because nobody should manipulate anyone else’s emotions. It is simply dishonest, it is disingenuous, it is evil, it smacks of moral, and if not creative then at least philosophical, bankruptcy. The task of literature is to enquire honestly into human nature. Such honesty, when it is there, always reveals that there is more to a person that what seems obvious, whether they initially appear to be good or bad. Cody abandons honesty and bullies us into accepting her opinions and conclusions.