#WTW Glance: Inherent Vice

#WhatThomWatched Glance*: 

Inherent Vice

(2014, Paul Thomas Anderson; In theaters/Disc release announced for March 2015, Warner Bros.)

Inherent Vice is Paul Thomas Anderson’s seventh full length film, based on Thomas Pynchon’s seventh novel (published in 2009). But no Pynchon novel has ever been adapted for film; his early-career 1960’s and early 1970’s trifecta (V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow) are absolute classics of counterculture literature, but they and his later works were resistant to adaptation. PTA has pulled it off, creating a film parallel of Pynchon’s shambolic prose and outrageously-named side characters (though several of these have apparently been lost in the transition). The redoubtable Joaquin Phoenix plays “Doc” Sportello, a P.I. in a California beach town in 1970, who in time-honored film noir fashion is brought a confusing missing person case which twists bewilderingly through endless leads and complications until by the end it’s well-nigh impossible to tell if the bad guys were caught or if they weren’t the good guys all along. People who are complaining that they don’t understand the plot have clearly never watched noir; in the ur-noir The Big Sleep, with Bogie and Bacall, original writer Raymond Chandler famously told the screenwriters that he didn’t actually understand what was happening in the novel he himself had written. The best films noir similarly have a feeling of having gone off the rails as soon as the detective is on the case, with each followed lead pointing to yet another character with another murky motivation. (Also, in true noir, the lead must have the crap kicked out of him at least once and preferably over and over again.)

There have been other neo-modern, California-based, humorous, “sunny” films noir, and lots of critics bring them up as points of comparison, with Altman’s The Long Goodbye and the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski being the most obvious; these are fantastic movies in their own rights, but Inherent Vice is something very different. Long Goodbye’s primary hook is the 1940’s-detective-taken-out-of-his-time angle, Philip Marlowe going to sleep as Bogart and waking up in hippie-dippie L.A. and in Elliott Gould’s schlumpy body. Lebowski is the Coen’s reworking of the Bogart film’s beats into a 1990’s context, where Jeff Bridges’ reluctant Everydude is dragged through each noir step against his will. In Vice, Phoenix is a good detective; people around him are offbeat oddballs, but there’s nothing sloppy about the way he conducts his investigation. The missing person case is somehow connected to his great past love, played by Katherine Waterston; plenty of other friends and acquaintances are willing to assist him and despite the straight world’s distaste for his shaggy ways, he is able to gain access to the contacts and crime scenes he needs. The key to Vice is Phoenix’s relationship with his terminally grumpy frenemy counterpart in the straight world, Josh Brolin’s Lieutenant  Detective Christian F. Bjornsen, or "Bigfoot." Brolin is at odds with Phoenix and everything he stands for, and yet they can meet halfway in their collaboration to find answers — and, in fact, by the end Brolin has gone farther than Phoenix has in his attempt to understand the other’s viewpoint.  

Reminds me of:

Like Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy (from the book by Sterne), Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Thompson), or Kubrick’s Lolita (Nabokov), this was another one of those “unfilmable author/unfilmable novel” projects for which the filmmaker has been given enough support (and taken a sufficiently large step back from the source material) to create a workable film version. In each case, the adapters have had to come up with new filmic structures and elements which somehow capture unique aspects of the written work. I’m not attempting in this short essay to tease out all the ways that Anderson (brilliantly, in my opinion) accomplishes this, because I’m going to need to own the film and watch it a bunch more times for that. But the most obvious modification (and the one remarked upon by every reviewer — I’m not claiming any insight here) is the selection of Doc’s old friend Sortilège as the voiceover narrator and the casting of singer/songwriter Joanna Newsom to play her. She’s not supposed to be a reliable narrator at all, but she serves at least two irremovable functions: she acts as a welcoming, pleasing connection into Phoenix’s world, giving us some empathy and understanding for his character without having to directly introduce Doc’s own voice, and of course she allows Anderson to bring in a huge dollop of Pynchon’s writing. Voiceover narration in a film is almost always a bad idea — but in adaptations of work where the author has a very distinct voice, and where that voice acts as a character of its own in the narrative, narration can be the vital connection between the film and the page. (This doesn’t matter if the written work is plot-driven or if the characters themselves speak to each other in distinct voices. But imagine Clockwork Orange without the pages and pages of Burgess text that Kubrick allows Malcolm McDowell to read in voiceover.) Perhaps the similarity between all of these positive examples is that unreliable narrator — narration as a character, where we’re asked to evaluate its motivations and truthfulness just as we study actions onscreen and suss out what they say about internal states. Some books are clearly going to lend themselves to that treatment, and here Anderson’s smart idea to is not let Phoenix have a Doc Sportello V.O. — forcing us to interpret his actions and reactions — while allowing Newsom’s soothing voice to keep us engaged.

But then — the guilt!

I am a massive, colossal, irredeemable, unapologetic, unmitigated fanatic for PTA. He and the other Anderson are my favorite working guilty-pleasure filmmakers. Until they start blowing it — i.e., until never, per their track record so far — I am going to be in the cinema seat for the premiere week of their new movies, and I am not going to be sitting there in critical or questioning or snarky mode — I am going to be sitting there in a receptive state, waiting to see what they have brought to show me, expecting to be told something new, and if I’m not instantly gratified by some easy, crowd-pleasing fluff, I’m going to be working harder to understand what they say, not going away feeling like they failed. This is my unashamed statement of fact. Thank the heavens above that I am not a "critic" and that these aren’t “reviews.”

I’ve mentioned a number of films based on book above — Lolita, Tristram Shandy, Clockwork Orange and so on — but whereas I’ve actually read all those books, the truth is I’ve never read a word of Pynchon, not Inherent Vice nor any other. I’ve always intended to read them, especially The Crying of Lot 49, which is one of those sort of books that was so spiritually akin to all the books/music/films I did read/hear/watch that I find myself in that weird pop-culture position of being able to grok references to things like Silent Tristero’s Empire (W.A.S.T.E.) or the Yoyodyne Corporation despite never having actually read the source.

Pitch:

At the risk of seeming purely prurient, the lengthy single-take scene which moves from a key Phoenix/Watterson conversation into and through their . . . spirited lovemaking is an acting miracle. Maybe I’ll have a different feeling after I’ve seen the movie a few more times, but in the theater I was holding my breath.

*For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.

<< Do Not Adjust Your Set (-) The Friends of Eddie Coyle >>

#WTW: Do Not Adjust Your Set

(Hoorah, it's an even #WhatThomWatched dozen . . .)

Do Not Adjust Your Set

(1967-1969, Daphne Shadwell; Tango Entertainment disc set)

Monty Python fanatics know the origin story well (not to mention the exact dialogue from 515 separate sketches in the canonical series): among several other writing and acting gigs on British television, the six young Pythons had almost-assembled into two predecessor shows in the years immediately before the Flying Circus — John Cleese and Graham Chapman were part of the ensemble on At Last the 1948 Show, while Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin (and Terry Gilliam as writer/animator) were on Do Not Adjust Your Set along with fellow comedians Denise Coffey and David Jason. As these series ended, networks offered slots for new shows to these two pre-Python groups separately, and the Cleese/Chapman BBC project called Palin away from the ITV project to join them, who in turn brought the other three Pythons along. From a rich set of 1960’s performers, all working under the influence of the stage show Beyond the Fringe, this single show and these six comedians became the representatives for the whole of innovative British comedy for Americans (and, even then, only the ones who watched public television in the early 1970’s. In fact, American public television is largely responsible for Americans’ exposure to 1970’s British television culture, including Python, Doctor Who, The Two Ronnies, Are You Being Served, and (later) All Creatures Great and Small.)

But few of those fanatics have actually seen these origin shows, and with good reason: as with so much of television history, the original videotapes and/or kinescopes of shows from that era were routinely wiped and reused or destroyed. In the case of Do Not Adjust Your Set, that meant that all the bits were wiped from two series of 13 episodes each, plus three specials — except for the nine episodes from series 1 which were subsequently found to have survived on kinescope (series 1; episodes 1 and 2, 5 and 6, and 9 through 13, to be precise). Their sound and picture quality is, of course, abysmal. But as historical artifacts for comedy archaeologists, they are significant. And not just for their connection to Python: Do Not Adjust was also the showcase for a very important musical comedy predecessor, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, also known as the Bonzo Dog Band. These young men had started as college friends doing a post-modern riff on traditional jazz, both reproducing comic music hall standards from the 1920’s and also creating musical riffs on modern art concepts; by 1967 they’d already made a splash with several recordings and appearances on other television shows (including the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour). They were asked to become a kind of house band for Do Not Adjust, generally performing a number for each episode as well as appearing as utility actors in the sketches. Members of the group, particularly singer/songwriter Neil Innes, continued to have a heavy influence on Monty Python; most notably, Innes appears as the Minstrel to Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For people who remain fans of the Bonzos — and there are many — the true significance of the extant Do Not Adjust episodes is that they contain some of the only surviving performance footage of the band, in a very early pre-music-video kind of style.

But back to the sketch comedy: The show takes a traditional form of disconnected scenes with varied tempos ranging from very short, one-line “blackout sketches,” through longer two-person joke-punchline setups, to a couple of still longer multi-person sketches per episode. There’s also the aforementioned musical number in the form of a faux-live performance enhanced with silly business and costumes, and finally a single pre-filmed piece aping an old-fashioned silent serial about the adventures of a superhero (called “Captain Fantastic.”) The overall format is familiar from many other British and American “variety shows”; the only element missing is a host/live audience introductory piece (a staple of programs like The Carol Burnett Show but still extant today in a program like Comedy Central’s Key & Peele). As fun as any particular bit might be, the whole thing is completely standard — there’s barely a hint of the innovations then brewing in other shows which would culminate in Python’s free-association approach to linking sketches together into a whole. (There does seem to be a bit of this spirit in the very last sketch of the 13th show, which marks the end of series 1; the episode has a linking theme in which the entire cast plus the Bonzos is gathered in the television studio to bring the show to a close, devolving into an anarchic melee which ends with the studio being destroyed.) Along the way there are some quite good sketches and jokes, including one or two that seem like early drafts of Python material — but many are tedious and dated. David Jason is often the bright spot on the show; Denise Coffey is wonderful but is also often used as the stooge — the focus of mockery and abuse from the four men — which quickly sours for a modern viewer. She fares much better as the evil villainess in the “Captain Fantastic” pieces — and these were much-loved by the original audience, enough so that the BBC considered spinning it off as its own show — but these serial sketches now seem to be almost completely formless, as if they weren’t scripted but just improvised for the camera. Which is likely true — the other three pre-Pythons are the credited head writers for every episode, and the “Captain Fantastic” sequences were designed specifically to allow Coffey and Jason to produce a segment each week while the others had time to themselves in the writers’ room.

So in summary: The sketches are serviceable. A good example of a visual-pun sketch: A man is being carried in an old-timey carriage by four uniformed bearers; one man trips and hurts himself; the rider gets down out of the carriage, opens the carriage’s boot (trunk for us Yanks), takes out a fifth uniformed man, and “changes the flat” to swap the new bearer in. An example of a longer-form sketch is a secret-hideout meeting of five baddies planning a bank job, with one as a very obvious undercover policeman who can help but act like a policeman and arouse the suspicions of the others . . . . who in the punch line turn out to all be undercover policemen. Some of this is good; none of it is particularly surprising today. (That is in stark contrast to the 45 original Monty Python’s Flying Circus episodes from 1969-1974, which still shock and startle with their barely-followable logical leaps when viewed today.)

The real treasures here are the Bonzo Dog Band performances. These songs have the funny themes, crazy logic and random-seeming staging that would go on to inspire Python. But here there’s a different problem, and one that’s difficult to get past today: In the second episode, performing their album cut “Look Out, There’s a Monster Coming,” the Bonzos decided that the song’s comedy would be enhanced by blackface. The whole nine yards — white lips, wide eyes, fright wigs . . . . it’s almost impossible to watch (or at least not without being reminded of more recent tone-deaf incidents, such as “blackface parties” at fraternities). The bad taste and judgement on display ruin a great song. There’s a potentially mitigating factor specifically for Neil Innes; alone among the band, he is the only performer not in blackface, and he wears a look throughout the number that could be interpreted as disapproval. Further (possible) evidence: a few episodes later, during “Hunting Tigers (Out in India),” the Bonzos are dressed as English game-hunter types, except for one member who rides a tricycle through the number with a cardboard sign on his back reading “I Refuse To Dress Up This Week” — a possible internal band dig at Innes. But apart from the one terrible choice, the songs are wonderful and by far the loosest part of the show. They also most clearly belie the supposed “kids show” setup; adults certainly tuned in from the beginning, and the Bonzos seem to represent both the most puerile and most intellectual sides of the show.

Reminds me of:

I’m a long-time fan of the Bonzo Dog Band, discovering them through the post-Python Eric Idle and Neil Innes Beatles parody band The Rutles and the Lorne Michaels-produced 1978 fake Rutles documentary All You Need is Cash. After finding a Rhino Records CD re-release of The Rutles and then their Best of the Bonzo Dog Band, both in 1990, I became well-nigh obsessed with the 24 Bonzo tracks on that disc. (The 3-disc set Cornology came later, containing every Bonzo and Bonzo-side-project track recorded to that point, but it’s the 24 Best of tracks that I know backwards and forwards). It’s an amazing experience to see them semi-live and in action. I know this awe is not going to translate to most viewers, and especially folks who expect some polish in their musical production; I have a perverse love of the polar opposite: unpolished music, not to mention a thing for “modern art” analogue approaches to rock music, a la The Flying Lizards or Andy Warhol-sponsored Velvet Underground. The Bonzo’s “The Bride Stripped Bare (By ‘Bachelors’)” (from their 1969 album Keynsham), a musical analog to the similarly-titled Marcel Duchamp artwork (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), is, to me, an amazing thing. The Bonzos seem so careless and yet so self-assured in everything they do, which is something that I find very appealing in any art. (I really must note here that while I feel about 1% qualified to be writing about movies and television, I feel even less so about music. Moving on . . . .)

I just recently watched the hour-plus “work print” of Orson Welles’s abandoned film-theater-combo project from 1938, Too Much Johnson (it’s curated online by the National Film Preservation Foundation, but here’s a version that includes a live recorded backing soundtrack from an October 2014 film festival in Istanbul). From Welles’s few pre-cinema years as the Great White Hope of Broadway, this project was intended to be a mash-up stage performance of William Gillette’s 1890’s farce with each act bookended by projections of filmed scenes in the style of silent slapstick comedy. (The actual performance never happened; when the old footage was discovered in 2008, it was restored and turned into both a 30-minute short and a 65-minute full print, which started a festival run in 2013.) Where’s the Reminds me of connection? The Welles footage stars esteemed film actor Joseph Cotten, and it’s certainly interesting to see him as a young man simulating a then-relatively-recent style of film comedy. But in both Cotten’s case and in the case of David Jason as “Captain Fantastic,” the actors are clearly just imitating the slapstick stars from the 1920’s, most notably Buster Keaton; they cannot match the athleticism or technique of the real thing. This is most obvious in extended “Captain Fantastic”/Too Much Johnson sequences where our heroes totter around on rooftops; in each case, as the actor pretends to come close to falling, it really feels like an amateur (and slowly paced) version of Keaton and his cohorts. Actual silent comedies are some of the tightest-scripted films to be found; Keaton controls every second of his gags, a far cry from the meandering imitations. (As a long-time owner of Kino’s Art of Buster Keaton box set, with all of the 30 Keaton films from that decade, I’ll be getting back to him in detail at some point here at #WTW.)

But then — the guilt!

I’ve also got the other Python antecedent released by Tango Entertainment, the surviving episodes of At Last the 1948 Show, and I’ll watch it at some point soon. But that’s nothing, nothing, a drop in the bucket, a grain of sand on the beach, a teensy cliché in a much bigger cliché of great British television comedy, the vast majority of which I’ll never get to watch. I won’t turn this into a big slush list of titles because that’s easy enough to find somewhere online, but most of these great predecessor shows only exist in the memories of a few aging Brits. Not Only But Also. That Was the Week That Was. To the degree these things turn up, I’ll try to grab them.

That said, my watch ratio picks up starting in the early 1980’s. I’m about due to re-watch my complete set of The Young Ones, for instance. (And in honor of the recently deceased Rik Mayall, I should do that soon. Oi, now I’m feeling guilty again.)

Pitch:

I’m not sure these discs will be of interest to any but the most determined fans, but of the skits and songs here I’m most fond of the Bonzo’s music-hall-throwback “Hello Mabel.” (“Look Out, There’s a Monster Coming” might have bested it if not for the horrid get-ups. Boo!)

*Note: In an effort to goad The Internet into finally commenting on my blog, I have carefully made at least two factual errors about British television in the article above.

If you can spot one or more of them — and comment in detail on the whatthomwatched.blogspot.com page — you will win absolutely nothing but my love and respect.

<< I Walked With a Zombie (-) Inherent Vice (Glance) >>

#WTW: I Walked With a Zombie

(#WhatThomWatched eleven . . .)

I Walked With a Zombie

(1943, Jacques Tourneur; from the Val Lewton Horror Collection, Warner Bros.)

RKO producer Val Lewton was an undisputed master of suspense and psychological, internalized horror. Working with a stock set of actors, writers and directors throughout the 1940’s, and known to have taken a heavily hands-on and detail-oriented (and often uncredited) approach to the scripts, his films are impeccably designed on miniscule budgets. Cat People from 1942 is his most recognizable title (especially after the light-years-more-graphic remake in 1982), but I Walked With a Zombie must run a close second. Essentially Jane Eyre reset on a South Seas island, a nurse played by Frances Dee has come to a wealthy sugar plantation to care for the catatonic wife (Christine Gordan, in a nonspeaking role) of owner Tom Conway. His younger brother James Ellison is a troubled drunk; the matriarch Edith Barrett indulges her sons while hiding an odd relationship to the island natives and their voodoo-based religious ceremonies. Dee is attracted to Conway, but as a honorable person she decides to channel her energies into helping Gordan recover and Conway restore his marriage. Of course, she can’t help but run up against several family secrets, long-held grudges, and cracks in the community’s façade.

For anyone unfamiliar with Hays Code 1940’s horror, Walked might be difficult to get into. It’s got very few scares, no special effects, little supernatural content, and no real villain. To enjoy this (or any other Lewton film), the viewer has to become an audience member of 1943, when the “exotic” voodoo content was new and exciting, and the calypso music was almost completely foreign to Americans (in fact all evidence indicates that the Sir Lancelot performances here are the very first appearance of calypso music in a film). To that end, the sets and art design are gorgeous and never betray the low budget. Walked is beautifully filmed in rich contrasts of light and dark; despite the almost completely soundstage-based setting, there always seem to be breezes stirring from off-screen. Not only does this contribute immeasurably to the illusion of being on location, it also causes the viewer to remain uneasy, scanning the dark recesses of the screen, watching for something to emerge.

The characters and performances are remarkable as well. Barrett as the mother (despite being the same age as the actors playing her “sons”!) has a particularly natural style. After meeting the stiff and formal elder and the morose younger brother, her confident and easy way with Dee makes it easy to believe that she is holding the island’s inner workings in the palm of her hand. Sir Lancelot was a hugely influential calypso singer/composer and Walked is the first place most people saw him, with his own song “Shame and Sorrow” figuring heavily in the plot; he plays an unnamed town-troubadour type paid to entertain diners in the square who sings ballads about the plantation’s past (and puts ideas in Dee’s head). It’s an innovative and effective form of exposition in a show that has lots of information to convey in what is an astonishingly compact story. There’s also a weird Dee voiceover that vanishes halfway through the movie, just as the story is turning to its creepier content.

In retrospect, the zombie Carrefour (Darby Jones) is not only completely benign, but he is the person who can be seen in the opening footage under the credits, in a long shot on a well-lit beach on a peaceful shore; this scene, which doesn’t appear again in the movie proper, establishes the exotic location but certainly is not menacing or scary. That would seem to imply right up front that the native culture is nothing to be feared, which turns out to be true — the “demons” are entirely within the history of the white family of plantation owners. In fact, the whole native culture is handled with (relative) respect; yes, it is invented and non-authentic, but it is not exploitative; compared with most popular films of the same year, African-American actors are shown as equivalent to caucasians, and not used as comic relief. And the made-up details are evocative and effective as metaphors for slavery and other racial-imbalance-of-power issues that are not otherwise openly addressed: the village custom of gathering to weep and mourn when a child is born (a tradition, we are told, that stems from their slave ancestors) might seem silly, but upon reflection is a clever way to indicate a strong community awareness of (and audible disapproval of) the overlords’ past status as slaveholders. The driver that picks up Dee at the dock and brings her to the Hammond estate is a gentle and dignified corrective to Dee’s initial wide-eyed acceptance of the island. The wooden ship’s figurehead that graces the grounds, a remnant from the slave ship that brought the original residents to the island, is so striking that we almost expect it to fulfill some supernatural function in the story — perhaps it will animate like Mozart’s accusing Commendatore statue; this is a horror film after all! — but in the end it is exactly what it is: a completely non-metaphorical reminder of the blood and inhumane toil that allowed the foreign plantation owners to thrive, no matter how benignly they try to treat the island now.

Reminds me of:

I haven’t really seen any other contemporary movies which attempt to depict this kind of subculture (the ones that try do a mostly poor job, apparently). Jungle cultures do put me in mind of Werner Herzog’s three astounding collaborations with Klaus Kinski that are jungle-set; the best of these (and one of the greatest movies I’ve ever experienced) is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but the one that is probably closest to the island culture here is Cobra Verde. Needless to say, Herzog’s recreations in the 1970’s and 1980’s are far closer to the real thing than this or any other 1940’s take, not to mention shot on location. (Though that said, the voodoo sequences here are reported to be well-researched and are presented to be taken seriously.)

After commenting on the effectiveness of the Mystery Man played by Robert Blake in Lost Highway, I have to note that Jones’s Carrefour is rendered ultra-creepy by exactly the same no-tech trick: His character holds his eyes wide open and is never seen to blink, even in lengthy shots. (Of course Jones had a build and look that kept him playing a similar character for most of his career, perhaps not to his satisfaction.)

All right, this descends into the “mere coincidence” category: As it happens I watched this and the previous Living in Oblivion on the same night. Oblivion ends with a credit block that I reproduced in the last entry. Mere minutes later, in the opening credits for Walked, I caught this:

Too fun. (And you can even see the “I” and the “zombie” doing the “walk” of the title, just behind this text block.)

But then — the guilt!

I will admit that I was unprepared for Walked’s light touch and literary tone when I began the movie — the lurid title had me expecting something more B-movie like a William Castle or Roger Corman film. Of course those campy movies come later, in the late 1950’s and the 1960’s; the movies produced by Val Lewton and his contemporaries were high-class (despite the titles, which were apparently pre-selected by RKO). I should have remembered that I had the same experience with Cat People several years ago — expecting it to be more thrills ’n’ chills, it took me a while to get into the groove.

I listened to the Steve Jones and Kim Newman commentary on this one (both are Lewton and horror genre experts), and their work as well as the tribute site by Erik Weems were very helpful. I tried to keep all of the observations that I made above my own, but I’ll admit that I did not really notice or appreciate the lighting effects on my first viewing; once clued in by Jones and Newman, the lighting artistry was very apparent (nothing, particularly peoples’ faces, is ever broadly lit without filtering shadows from vegetation, blinds, or ironwork). All in all I came away with a higher level of appreciation for Lewton, and I’ll need to both re-watch Cat People and also complete his other 1940’s output at some point (The Seventh Victim and Bedlam sound particularly — troublesome).

Pitch:

I’ve already mentioned Sir Lancelot’s calypso ballad which provides exposition, heightens dramatic tension, and is beautiful all at once. He actually sings this in two halves, in separate scenes, and the second of these — as he advances on Dee and the passed-out Ellison, emerging from that darkened background, all traces of his earlier subservience gone — is the menacing highlight of the film.

<< Living in Oblivion (-) Do Not Adjust Your Set >>

#WTW: Living in Oblivion

(It’s a #WhatThomWatched milestone: 10! plus 5 Glances...)

Living in Oblivion

(Tom DiCillo, 1995; Sony Picture Classics disc)

Writer/director DiCillo won a well-deserved screenwriting award at Sundance with a knowing insider script that sought to satirize the pretensions and travails of its contemporary independent film movement. It contains three distinct sections structured around dreams; the first is a frazzled director’s anxiety dream about trying to complete a scene in his film; the second is his star actress’s dream about filming a different scene; and the third is a real-life attempt to shoot yet another scene — of course, a dream sequence. As each segment develops it presents additional obstacles to the filmmakers: the usual host of technical glitches with sound, cameras, lights, or blocking; low-budget problems like a poorly run craft services table or a lack of qualified personnel to run a smoke machine; the varying level of commitment of the actors between multiple takes; a preening actor who wants to educate the director; or a half-baked scene that the director has trouble helping his actors realize.

Does the movie satirize “indie films” inherently, through its form (beyond its clearly satirical plot points and characterizations)? The obvious first example (and the reason this question surfaces to begin with): The film begins in an inky, grain-filled black-and-white, as if it’s laboring under a microbudget (and looking like a murky version of the Jim Jarmusch movies on which DiCillo got his start as a cinematographer, such as Stranger in Paradise). Even after the reveal that the movie proper will be in color, it continues to use black-and-white in a playful way: the first segment’s film-within-a-film is in color; the second segment is color while its film-within-a-film is (pretentiously) black-and-white, and in the final “real” segment the colors of the dream-sequence set are highly saturated. The second clear example is Oblivion’s use of the extended dream sequences, eventually mocking the overuse of such sequences in “stupid” (read: indie) movies to try and bring an edge or an unearned sense of mystery and meaning to an ultimately ridiculous set of events and images; Peter Dinklage’s famous rant about the use of dwarfs to indicate “weirdness” can easily be extrapolated to indict these kinds of movies in general.

Finally, DiCillo uses well-established indie actors and has them play to type, evoking other then-contemporary movies and roles; Steve Buscemi (as the director) freaks out and goes on a hilariously profane rant, James Le Gros (as the lead actor) is an ultimately vacant pretty-boy, Dermont Mulroney (as the cinematographer) is brooding and self-serious, and so on. Yet these typed scenes more often than not turn out to be in the other character’s dreams, and the actual performances are subtle upon reflection. The movie depicts the pressures of low-budget indie filmmaking as a nightmare out of Kafka, and yet in the end the efforts of a set of artists result in a single sublime finished scene, better than anyone could have planned, and a feeling of satisfaction after a day’s work and promise for the next. Even that wide-eyed excitement itself might be intended as a bit of self-parody — after living through unrealized dreams and another hard day of disappointments and compromises, the cast and crew gets just enough of an uplift to drag them on to the next day of work. The closing “thirty seconds of silence” to “record room ambience” seems, at first, like a gimmick or a forced conceit (reminding us to consider each character’s point of view). Yet when the time ends and no issues have popped up to spoil the recording, and everyone seems genuinely gratified, it feels moving and meaningful.

Reminds me of:

Any number of other movies feature a film-within-the-film and behind-the-camera footage documenting multiple takes of the same scene, such as Boogie Nights or The Stunt Man . . . . but here, the repeated takes of that two-actor conversation in the first segment strongly recall the great Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (directed by William Greaves). In that head-bending mind-game from 1968, Greaves plays a director of a fictitious movie who is shooting some test footage in Central Park, and we see two actors rehearsing the same scene over and over again, with variants (not to mention conversations among crew members and other actors, just as in Oblivion).

The vain actor with no self-awareness played by Le Gros is said to be modeled on someone DiCillo had worked with in the past. He’s a vicious dead ringer for early Brad Pitt, who had starred in DiCillo’s previous film Johnny Suede. But DiCillo has gone on record denying that Le Gros’s “Chad Palimino” is parodying Pitt; he even claims that the part was supposed to be played by Pitt himself but that he was committed to Legends of the Fall instead. So as a public service experiment, I urge you to watch the second segment of Oblivion and not think of Pitt. Good luck!

But then — the guilt!

DiCillo had a run of movies in the 1990’s but I don’t think I’ve seen any other ones — the aforementioned Johnny Suede, Box of Moon Light, The Real Blonde and so on. He’s still around as a television director of shows like Law & Order or Chicago Fire, but I feel like I should have supported him more as a feature director back when I loved Living in Oblivion so much. There was a definite window in which these kinds of films thrived; see Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures for a thorough discussion. Part of why Oblivion worked so well for us then is that we were watching so many indie films; this felt like a special secret joke for us insiders who were already watching actors like Buscemi in movie after movie (this was the first time I’d ever seen Catherine Keener who then showed up in many other places, like a second Parker Posey; Mulroney, Kevin Corrigan, and Le Gros were familiar faces as well).

I try to be as catholic in my watching choices as I can be — pulling film and television from anywhere and any era — but I can’t escape the fact that my early days of falling in love with movies (and having the time to pursue them) were marked by that 1990’s surge of independent filmmaking. At that time, when Sundance and Slamdance sought out the new talents and New Line, Miramax, October and others fought to distribute them, Oblivion was a comment on and a tribute to the movement. There was a comfortable rhythm to these movies, reliable patterns (albeit self-styled as quirky patterns), and I and my friends sought them out at college screenings, the couple of arty theaters still in town, or the back corner of the last non-Blockbuster video store. It took a few years to admit it to ourselves, but a healthy percentage of these movies were dreadful. For every Quentin Tarantino there were ten Tarantino-esque imitations; for every Hal Hartley or Whit Stillman or Steven Soderberg there was a rookie filmmaker with half of their insight and none of their restraint. So it’s great to revisit a movie like Living in Oblivion, but I’ll understand if it’s lost a lot of its resonance today. The masterpieces of the indie era will continue to live on, but the dregs — and along with them some of DiCillo’s targets — have mercifully washed away.

Pitch:

This was Dinklage’s first film and it’s easy to see why he became such a popular performer; he’s completely appealing and funny as hell. The sight of his Tito popping out of the “dream doorway” and trudging around Keener — while, as Buscemi directs him to, “laughing” — is hysterical.

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