I’m Just a Sucker With No Self Esteem

What I Hate, from Toothpaste for Dinner

Sometimes creativity is really hard.

In addition to writing thousands upon thousands of words that I can hardly imagine anyone cares about, I also dabble in design and have been trying with varying degrees of effort, but always the same degree of success (which is to say, failure), to shoot a movie.

I don’t know if this is something specific to people who fancy themselves writers, or if it applies generally to all creative folk, but I typically hate the things I make. I gave up a while ago on needing validation from others about the things that I make and do. Despite the fact that other people’s negative criticism is still bound to sting (and, for that matter, the positive criticism to inflate my sense of self-worth) and may affect what I do in the future, the fact is that if I’ve seen something to completion, I did it for me, and that can’t be changed.

(The problem is that in doing things for me, I can’t logically expect to ever be financially successful in any sort of creative endeavor. I’ve come to terms with that, and am willing to work a job that doesn’t bring me any joy if that’s what I must do. But I digress.)

Unfortunately, even in creating for an audience of me, I typically despise the end product. I can pick it apart forever, marking this sentence or that line or whatever down as flawed in my mind. Whether I can correct said flaw or not isn’t important; it is in fact entirely beside the point.

The point being, I guess, that I’m crazy.

I’ve never written anything longer form than a feature length screenplay, and even as we speak I’m working out how to fix the ones I’ve “finished” on their next rewrite. I actually got physically ill rereading the first one I wrote in advance of beginning to rewrite it. (To be fair, I think it might have been the combination of lack of sleep and overcaffeination that caused the nausea moreso than the script, but they’re still linked in my mind.)

I’ve designed a few websites beyond my own. Visiting them now, even the one that I finished most recently, I can’t help but see every amateurish mistake I made and where I’ll have to tweak the code.

George Lucas once said, “Movies are never finished, only abandoned.” In his case, maybe some of the movies should have been abandoned a little sooner, like before they started production, but the spirit of what he said is entirely accurate across all creative projects, at least from my perspective. I’ve never looked at anything I’ve done and thought, “Ah, perfect!” It just does not apply to me, I guess.

I had a conversation with a friend who’s offered to help me with an upcoming project about my tendency to self loathing when it comes to the things I’ve made. She does not appear to have this problem, and I did a bad job of explaining it to her; she took it to mean that I assumed everything I did would fail. To her credit, I did say the words “I’ve never not failed” in the course of the conversation, but what I meant to say and how the words sounded were quite different.

This is a problem I have a lot.

This conversation turned into a argument, and I got pretty substantially taken down. I had to concede in the end, because my argument such as it was had no basis in anything other than my head.

I don’t really know how to cope with this tendency; it’s entirely instinctual, and I can’t remember ever feeling any differently. Nevertheless, it surely can’t be helpful; even if I don’t have a negative attitude about what I’m doing as I’m doing it (and I sometimes do, which is a whole other issue), denigrating it after the fact isn’t going to win me any supporters, either.

There’s probably some deep seated psychological or emotional reason for the way I view my own work. Surely someone out there enjoys their own output, someone who sells themselves relentlessly and wants the spotlight enough to take it when necessary.

I’m not that kind of narcissist.

I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my attributes, that my self judgment is both fair and accurate. But maybe it’s not, at least not about everything. Maybe I am, in fact, underselling myself on the quality of my work. Although I’m unlikely to be convinced of that.

Still, isn’t that better than the alternative? Do the people like someone who’s humble to the point of self-abasement over someone who’s braggadocios to the point of obnoxiousness?

I’d like to think so.

A is for Art part I: “I think we’re just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that”

Theatrical poster for The Royal Tenenbaums

The moving picture has been around for over 100 years, and has been a part of the pop consciousness for almost as long. From the earliest days of nickelodeons, movies have been part of mass entertainment.

The earliest American film that can really be considered a work of art is most likely D.W. Griffith‘s Birth of a Nation. There are several other works produced during the first five decades of filmmaking, some of them (such as Leni Riefenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will) just as incendiary as Griffith’s film.

There are of course, more: Chaplin‘s The Great Dictator, Ford‘s Stagecoach, Lean‘s Brief Encounter, and Kurosawa‘s Rashômon, among others.

Even with all these avowed classic films, the medium was essentially scoffed at; the only awards came from the industry itself, and films were not critiqued for their merit so much as they were criticized for their content.

That all changed thanks to Cahiers du cinéma. Founded in 1951, this magazine fundamentally altered the way that film was viewed. For the first time, criticism of film became about the form as much as about the content. Essentially, films came to be viewed as objects as well as stories, similar to the fine arts.

The magazine is also responsible for advancing the auteur theory. The short version of the theory is that directors are the ones who put their personal stamp on the film, and because of it, nearly every classic film was reevaluated and directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Lean were recognized for the quality of their oeuvre. This theory still persists today; modern filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, and the Coen Brothers are considered auteurs.

Of course, Cahiers du cinéma is also responsible for introducing a bunch of fancy French words into the language of film so that obnoxious film students could let the entire world know how pretentious they are, so it wasn’t a total triumph.

Now, of course, only the stodgiest denier of reality will argue that at least some film is not Art. For over half a century now, the film medium has been seen as an arena of skilled craftsmen. Without the radical reinvention of film criticism engineered by Cahiers du cinéma, however, film’s ascendence to capital-A Art may never have happened.

We Didn’t Miss It. This Is It.

When I was sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty, when I was learning how to be who I’d eventually become, I think it was safe to say that I was an idiot. Like the time I destroyed my wheel hitting a curb on the way to see Primus, then rolled the car back in the jack. Then the show sucked.

That said, all those nights of going to shows with my friends and hanging out at the Gypsy until it closed followed by coffee all night at Denny’s, then slogging through school the next day, they were great. I remember what those nights felt like. I thought I had problems then; I didn’t. And now all that’s left is a stylized, romanticized set of memories that are better than the actual times could possibly have been. I had friends, I had dreams, and I had forever in front of me. Same as I have now, minus the responsibilities.

Sometimes I get wistful for those times. I remember thinking how big everything was, how much the things I was doing mattered, how grown up I was. But I wasn’t. I was a child. I’m safer now, and happier, and smarter, and a whole host of other things. Including more cynical.

But sometimes I am reminded of who I was then. How much fun it was not to know what I thought I knew. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist reminds me of that. Driving around all night chasing down a dream.

It makes me feel that. And that’s a wonderful thing.

I Got a Line on You, Babe

theatrical poster

Burn After Reading is the Coen brothers‘ first movie since No Country for Old Men, which everyone decided was the movie to honor for the brothers’ career of nearly unbroken awesomeness.

(Nearly unbroken, rather than just unbroken, because of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.)

As one might expect if one has followed their careers at all, they didn’t exactly get full of themselves. Instead, they made a weird, awkward, blackly hilarious movie starring a bunch of great actors. That’s as opposed to their other style, the weird, awkward, dramatic movies starring a bunch of great actors.

Burn After Reading is not a great movie. It is, in fact, a very very good movie. It’s light, it’s funny, it has unexpected moments, and it’s good to see great actors actually appear to be having fun.

With lesser talent, this movie would have devolved into an insoluble mess. However, the brothers enlisted J.K. Simmons to play the director of the CIA in a couple of scenes. Without these scenes, the movie would seem incompetent. With them, it proves that they did what they did on purpose and expected the audience to follow along.

I appreciate that sort of faith in the audience. I appreciate that sort of storytelling. I appreciate this movie, and the Coen brothers.

Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance to the Radio

Anton Corbijn is one of the key image-makers from the post-punk era, so obviously, when I heard that he was directing a movie based on the life of Ian Curtis, I had to see it.

Here’s the part where I speak — again — about how awesome it is to live in New York, where the movie is playing at the Film Forum.

Control is crushing.  The movie tells the story you need to know, even without a familiarity with Joy Division.  Curtis is not a sympathetic protagonist, but he’ll still break your heart.

Just Let Me Down Easy

I saw The Darjeeling Limited on Saturday.

To start with, things like this are among the reasons I love living in New York City. Knowing that a huge number of good movies will open here long before they open elsewhere–if they open at all–is very gratifying to me.

The movie itself was quite good. It fits well into Wes Anderson’s oeuvre of dysfunctional family stories. It comes across as a bit strange, though, compared to the intensive melancholy that has increasingly become the focus over Anderson’s career. It’s much more manic than The Life Aquatic, and this is probably a good thing.

In short, I’m still not clear, exactly, on how I feel about it. The themes are the same as usual, but it’s so wildly different in how it goes about addressing them that it strikes as a bit weird. Nevertheless, it comes recommended, as does its prologue/part 1, Hotel Chevalier.

How can a train be lost? It’s on rails.

It’s not every day that a new Wes Anderson movie opens on my birthday. Discuss.

Fight Test

I ride my bicycle around New York a lot. It is often faster than any other form of transportation and always more fun, plus it makes me feel a lot better about the fact that I don’t get any exercise, primarily because it’s, you know, exercise.

On Monday, I went to see Paprika, which was simultaneously excellent and bizarre beyond explanation. I rode my bike to the theater, which is stupid for several reasons: it was 85°F that day; I rode into Manhattan at midday; and I had to leave my bike chained up outside for a few hours. Nevertheless, I persevered. And my bike didn’t get stolen.

After the movie finished, which left me riding home in the middle of rush hour, I pedaled off down 2nd Avenue. When the city planners deign to put a bike lane on a one-way street (which they did in this case), that lane is on the left. I was riding on the right because I had a right turn upcoming, and not even a New York City cab driver would be crazy enough to take a right turn from the left lane. Wait, yes, he would.

This one, however, committed a far more egregious sin. Cabbies often cut me off to make turns or perform a passenger pickup or dropoff. This is normal behavior, but one could say that familiarity breeds contempt, because cab drivers are my enemies. However, this particular cabbie did more than just cut me off. He did it on purpose, for no greater reason. He cut me off for its own sake.

I pulled around him, yelling “Thanks!” (sarcastically, duh) at him as I rolled by. He pulled out, or tried to at any rate, but I was taking too much of the lane for him to get out until I passed. For vengeance, you know.

He finally got around me and yelled, “Why do you think they put the bike lanes on the left?” I have a sneaking suspicion that my response (“To protect us [cyclists] from cabbies, motherfucker!”) may have angered him, because he immediately cut me off again. I rolled past, again. He responded with, “My name’s not motherfucker. I’ll run you down!”

Now, the obvious response to that is to get away from the crazy man quickly. Which, thanks for a confluence of my self-preservation instincts and friendly traffic lights that made him stop while I kept going, I did. Still, I think it’s needless to say that within a few blocks I had come up with several to many witty comebacks to his defense/threat. The lesser of these involved either some form of violence against his car or insult to his manhood vis-à-vis threatening a cyclist with a car (obviously, the car would win. Thank you for your kind explanation, sir). However, the cleverer, and meaner, and more likely to result in my not getting hired by any potential employer that discovers this blog, were thus:

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t read your name card, Mr. Shithead.”
“Oh, right, I was the one fucking your mother.”

The moral of this story is that cab drivers have finally come out into the open with their previously barely-concealed desire to kill me. Which isn’t really a “moral” so much as maybe a “theme” or an “observation” or something. But I didn’t study literature at college, so I don’t really know. Anyway, the point is that they are more like Travis Bickle than I can be comfortable with.

Take Me Back to That Place Where Stars Glow

After about eight years of citing American History X as my favorite movie without any serious consideration that anything else might even compete, I’ve come to a realization: it’s been supplanted.

Midway through the (estimated… and I’m totally serious about the number) hundredth or so viewing of the usurper earlier tonight, I realized that it has done what I thought impossible: it’s come to mean more to me than American History X.

When Margot told Richie, “I think we’re just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that,” through the tent flap, it hit me: The Royal Tenenbaums is my new favorite film.

This is a big fucking deal to me.

See Me Change

In a past life, I was part of the French New Wave. I did it all: wrote for Cahiers du cinéma, worked out ideas with Truffaut on The 400 Blows and Godard on Breathless. I even introduced Jean-Pierre Melville to Japanese culture, which inspired him to make Le Samourai. I knew Brigitte Bardot and reveled in the arts of the jump cut and mise en scène.  I’ve always wanted to be an auteur.

And in a past life, you were…?