Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (23 page)

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.]

[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 fucking
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.