by David Lipsky
The thing about Pauline Kael: she’s not read as much as she used to be. But Pauline Kael is one of those voices that I’m talking about. And Pauline Kael has this great thesis about, what’s terribly pernicious about a lot of movies, is that they make the bad guys wholly unlike you. They turn them into cartoons. That you can feel superior to. Instead of making you realize that there’s part of the villain in all of us. You know? And she would be—she would be a good model for the kind of thing that like, I mean, I think if, if like your age or people a little bit younger, if there were like ten Pauline Kaels? Who could go along and, you know?
When you were talking before, I remembered this quote: “We live in the twilight of the old morality: there’s just enough to make us feel guilty, but not enough to hold us in.” What do you make of it?
Whose quote is that?
What do you make of the quote though?
Who said it?
Updike, in a story from 1962. So it may be that people feel that same thing in any generation.
The thing that makes me uncomfortable about it, is the phrase “all morality,” my guess is—
Sorry. I meant to say “old morality.”
Yeah, my guess is—[So we’ve ended up doing Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory in My Dinner with Andre.]
[The tape side runs out.]
• • •
AT DENNY’s
OFF I-55 SOUTH
WILLOWBROOK, ILLINOIS
BETWEEN O’HARE AND BLOOMINGTON
[David observes that once I’m at my desk] you’ll be able to construct anything you want.
What I love in this sort of piece is getting the quote, I love people’s dialogue rhythms.
But you know that writing down something that somebody says out loud is not a matter of transcribing. Because written stuff said out loud on the page doesn’t look said out loud. It just looks crazy.
… Janet Malcolm thing, the postscript to Journalist and the Murderer … about Jeffrey MacDonald’s quotes.
Something else you’ve read I haven’t read, what?
The Janet Malcolm thing, you were quoting from it before. About Jeff MacDonald, that killer—
Jeffrey MacDonald? That’s about that writer and Jeffrey MacDonald. Yeah, I read it a long time ago.
[Checks tape] We should make sure this thing is spinning, that we haven’t stopped.
Got it. I am your able lieutenant.
We don’t have to do it for about forty more minutes.
Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think that that’s—that that’s it. That that’s the point, that that’s the goal, you know? And that’s the reason we’re here—because that’s so empty. And you as a writer know that it’s—if you as a writer think that your job is to get as many people to like your stuff and think well of you as possible … And I could, we could both, name writers that it’s pretty obvious that’s their motivation? It kills the work. Each time. That that’s maybe 50 percent of it, but it misses all the magic. And it misses, it doesn’t let you be afraid. Or it doesn’t, like, let you like make yourself be, be vulnerable. Or … nah, see, I’m not … Anyway, anyway.
[Thumps table]
We were talking about movies. Let’s go over some directors: Woody Allen.
Never much liked Woody Allen.
Why not?
Dunno. I think part of it is that, when I was at Amherst—I mean I’d never really heard of him. But I remember seein’ Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, and bein’ real excited, ’cause I thought it was going to be real sexy. And then not. So, on the East Coast, he was so trendy. And I’d heard so much about him before I ever saw him? I also think—I don’t think his humor’s all that subtle, it seems like a shtick to me. But I know, like I’ve got really smart friends from New York, who just think he’s an absolute genius. It’s sort of …
OK, the blowing-up-stuff directors. Walter Hill you don’t much dig. Richard Donner?
Don’t know that much about Richard Donner.
Lethal Weapon, Superman. OK, Spielberg?
I think Spielberg’s first few things were magic. And he’s got a real feel for how … for how to make film work on your nerve endings. You know, the chase sequences, even in a terrible movie like Jurassic Park, that scene with the truck chasing them down the tree?
I love it.
His ability to milk, um—to put you on this sort of emotional roller coaster. He for me is a prime example of Hollywood killing what it loves. By just dumping money on it, you know? And making him too important. He and Cameron I think are the two most vivid examples. Cameron would be making so much better movies if they gave him a seven-, eight-million-dollar budget on each one. And said, you know, “Do your best.” Y’know? Don’t indulge your love for really cool special effects. Make a story that like—that hangs together and treats the audience like grown-ups and means something.
We were talking … reason the scene works in Jurassic Park … same reason good fiction works … Based on details … Tree is dripping wet, we know it’s been raining all night. But then that truck is stuck in a tree, we know it’s going to fall. The consequences of the details.
But it also makes sense, in a whole lot of ways. It has to do with the exhaustion of, “They’ve been through so much,” you know? And more of this—so there’s this exhausted, “Oh, this!” That lets you get a little bit of a laugh, that charges up your battery for the next time the next branch cracks. And then it ends with that marvelous: “Well, we’re back in the car.” It allows you to laugh—like Spielberg knows exactly how much adrenaline to inject in your bloodstream, and when to let it ebb and when to … But the danger of that is, what that is, really, is manipulation. I mean, he’s a master manipulator. And a couple of times, when I think he was younger, and more naïvely idealistic—like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, even though it had a very silly reductive government-is-evil-and-they’ll-spray-you, and only the aliens are good. But even that stuff, there was this innocent … That, Jaws, E.T. There was this marvelous, “God, we’re all kids again,” back in that movie. But then starting with, I don’t know, stuff like Hook, or—
Always.
Or—well, there was something about Always that made me cry. That whole bit about “Now I can tell you everything.” That whole business about his coming back and loving this woman and her not being able to see him. I’ve always, that kind of shit’s always gotten me. The first—A Guy Named Joe, the first version of that, knocked my socks off too. But there was also this—or the thing in Schindler’s List where when he—the one thing that movie absolutely depended on was a coherent picture of the moral metamorphosis of Schindler. And we don’t get it. We see a couple kind of moments, shocking moments. But we see him change from this coarse figure to this good weeping person, and there’s no coherent story of how that change took place.
Maybe grace is invisible.
Maybe grace is invisible, but one of the things that’s magical about art is that art can set up contexts where we can understand and identify somehow with how one can put oneself in the position of being influenced by grace. And that movie, that was a riveting movie in a lot of ways. And like a lot of the camp stuff was hair-raising. But that movie had the heart of a whore and was a cheat. And that ending, of having all those survivors go back? It was very moving, very cool. But what a cynical, you know, like-me-because-I’m-about-something-noble, instead of delivering on the art stuff. I mean—did Kael ever review that?
No, she talked about it in her interview. That’s what she said too.
Did she say that? Well, that makes me feel relieved. Because I think I was the only—I was so worried about hating a movie like that, ’cause right away you worry that people are going to think you’re anti-Semitic.
That’s one of the few films I cried in, was that movie … Did you read comics as a kid—
Braveheart I really liked. ’Cause that’s my f
ucking ancestor. William Wallace was like the first famous … um … he was like the grandson. The father in Argyle had actually emigrated from Wales. Those two brothers. And Wallace means “from Wales” in Scotch-Gaelic. Anyway, so I would go—I think I saw that four times. Just to hear guys in kilts going, “Wal-lace, Wal-lace!” (Laughs)
Even though it was not, it was probably not the most sophisticated. But the analogy is, I think probably, if you’re Jewish, and you’ve got all that ethnic history like in your consciousness, Spielberg dudn’t have to do much. To push your buttons. And that thing … I mean Braveheart, I wept, as he cried “Freedom.” Which I’m sure from the outside looks so cheesy.
I liked that scene, actually. I liked it ending that way.
He was perfect, though: he was never weak, he was never cowardly, he was never … There was no, there was nothing in there—I couldn’t recognize myself in him at all, you know?
He was entirely other. In a way Schindler was too … what about comic books as a kid?
Not particularly.
Because it’s funny. Spielberg’s framing devices come from D.C. Comics, faces pushed to the center, I hated those frames as a kid, but it works in movies.
Yeah, I don’t know what it was, I never liked—what I really liked, were these kid cycle books. The Hardy Boys. Tom Swift. Franklin W. Dixon. Frank O’Hara was a big—there was another Frank O’Hara, who wrote a lot of short stories, like “My Oedipus Complex,” and all that. No, Franklin W. Dixon, who it’s fairly proven was toward the end of his career a committee that was also Carolyn Keene and the Nancy Drew books. And I also read all the fucking Nancy Drew.
Did you?
Yeah. I don’t know what it was, I loved that kind of soap-opera-like serial thing.
[Like his long book; a whole world]
OK. What movies have you really liked in the last two, three years?
The biggest, most important movie experience of my life, was in the spring of 1986. When I was in grad school and saw David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Where, it’s weird, I can talk about it, ’cause I just finished this essay that’s all about this. But—
[He turns off the tape.]
[Break]
You were in graduate school?
OK. There were this—there were like five or six of us. Who were sort of experimentalists, avant-gardists at the U of A. And the U of A was hard-core, Updike New Yorker realism. And they thought—they basically thought we were assholes. And the painful matter of fact is that we were. We were pretentious and cold and cerebral. But we also really didn’t believe that the answer was to go back to writing nineteenth century. I mean someone has to live in a brownstone and have a cat, you know? I’m talking about coming out of my experience.
And I remember goin’ to see Blue Velvet. And I saw it with three women. One of whom walked out, and the other two of whom walked out just raging about it. And I didn’t have the balls to say anything. ’Cause I … I … it absolutely made me shake. And I went back and saw it again the next day.
And there was somethin’ about … it was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it upped them. And the magic of Blue Velvet was that it so clearly—I mean I’ve got this whole theory that you don’t want to hear about. That Lynch is really an expressionist in the way that like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is expressionist. Or that he’s very much about manifesting his inner states on the film, and it’s actually a very sick thing that drives him to make films.
But the magic of that was … For instance, some of the stuff I know: that final scene, when Jeffrey is in that apartment and the Yellow Man is standing there and he’s dead, but he’s just standing there? It comes out of a dream that Lynch had. He’s admitted it. It’s completely dreamlike. But it’s also absolutely right. And it just—and it so completely opens out, and it’s just one of those little off things in every frame, that instead of seeming gratuitous or stupid or pretentious, actually makes those frames mean a whole lot. It was my first realization that there was a way to get at what these realist guys were saying, that was via the route of the surreal and expressionist. But that it was tremendously scary. Because, for instance for me, Wild at Heart dudn’t work at all. That all these things are red herrings, and they go nowhere and the characters are interchangeable. But the difference between that and like Blue Velvet is a hair’s breadth, in so many scenes.
[Silverware sounds, beeping sounds, working restaurant: talk and hum]
That’s what’s interesting about his mechanism. That he could make a film so soon after it that was that bad … I also wonder if all the attention he got after making the TV series and Blue Velvet, I mean he was on the cover of Time. I mean, it must have been strange and hurt. I mean, I think that may have something to do with the failures of those movies.
I think that’s—that had a lot to do with the problems of the second season of Twin Peaks, and a lot of the problems of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The thing is, Lynch had already been through the experience of Dune in the early ’80s. Which I think was his real trial by fire. And where he could have—it could have either broken him or he—
He turned down a lot of money and a lot of shit to take De Laurentiis’s offer. Look, here’s this tiny budget but you get control. I think he’s kind of a hero. But anyway, that movie was huge for me.
I happen to like Dune. Kenneth McMillan.
Happen to like what?
Dune.
Dune is all right. But Dune—I mean, you probably know this, Dune was cut 50 percent, not by Lynch, right beforehand. It’s incoherent. I mean that lady who starts out and narrates it, we never see her again. Um, the little girl, that horrible actress who plays his little sister, whose mouth movements don’t match her. … But there were great little touches. Kenneth McMillan was incredible. What were other—oh, just the mechanisms of the water retention, the worms. Have you noticed that the worms in that, with that sort of triangular snout opening up, it’s identical to the worms in Eraserhead? That little worm in the cabinet that he’s so obsessed with and plays with? It’s very, very, very, very strange.
[Just keeps tossing on the modifiers, loping them on]
He disliked the film so much that when it’s shown on TV, he’s taken off the director’s credit … The way the guild works, credit goes to Alan Smithee, who’s apparently directing a lot of films …
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that.
… that’s the director on that movie … On TV, directed by someone Smithee.
It’s interesting too, ’cause thinking of ’86, right about that same time, Brazil came out. Which was another thing that used dreams in a really powerful, sort of coherent way. And I think one of my—I mean, I’d always used sort of dreamy stuff. But I had never as a young writer realized that you still had an obligation to make a kind of narrative. That really the goals of realism and the goals of surrealism are exactly the same. And they’re indescribable. But they’re two completely different highways that have the same destination. And I’d never snapped to that before.
David Lynch, Blue Velvet coming along when it did, I think saved me from droppin’ out of school. And saved me maybe even from quittin’ as a writer. ’Cause I’d always—if I could have made a movie, right at that time? That would have been it. I mean, I vibrated on every frequency.
Including the fact that it was absolutely horrifying. That that’s not a movie about a kid discovering horror in a town. It’s about a kid discovering that he—that there are parts of himself that are just like Frank Booth. [Not afraid of cliché; the only way to deliver this, at this late date, would be to be ironic.] And it’s a weird movie, ’cause the climax comes at the end of act two, when Frank turns around in the car, and looks at Jeffrey and says, “You’re like me.” But it’s the one—except for the voyeurism scene—it’s the one shot that’s out of Jeffrey’s eyes. And it’s all very—
I thought that was a stagey moment, though, a t
iny bit, because that was the point of the movie.
Yeah. But so many critics missed that that was the point of the movie. So many of the critics missed that it was a coming-of-age movie. And thought it was a, you know, “Gee-whiz kid discovers corruption underneath.” You know? You have the surface of the super-saturant colors, and waving firemen, and then underneath—they utterly missed it. I mean I had to read all that stuff for this essay, it was like very few critics got what was going on—
Pauline didn’t.
Yeah, but her review is like a page and a half. And she’s more interested in the fact of how disingenuous it is. Her big line is there’s very little art between you and Lynch’s psyche in this. You know, that it’s really like watching somebody’s id get projected onto the screen.
So what kind of stuff were you writing before that movie came out?
Let’s see, I can remember exactly. Tch tcho tcho tcho thch tcho. I had written—I was taking Old English, and I’d written a story about a village in England, that was all in Old English. And I’d written a long novella that actually ended up coming out in a magazine, about a WASP who passes himself off as Jewish. Even with his wife—and is exposed when his wife gets terminal cancer. But both things were basically vehicles for me to show off in various technical ways. Like to do really good, a kind of really good kitschy Jewish voice and dialogue. And it was more like that’s what I want to do, now how can I structure a story so that I can?