Q&A with Gary Lutz
About a year ago, I interviewed Gary Lutz for The Stranger. Here's what got left out.
Q. Many of your characters seem to be in a sort of bafflement about "sexual relationships." Though some of your narrators become serially involved with (or successively detached from) men and women, the word "bisexual" has a connotation of equipoise that just doesn't apply here. And the more or less heterosexual narrators also move through a succession of ties that tend toward obsolescence. Even at the level of the sentence, there is a tendency for your series to leap from the singular into a sort of "whatever." As in this from “The Pavilion”: "cinquefoils, observatories, anything."
A. Yes, I doubt that any of my characters would even for an instant consider themselves bisexual, and for many of them, the words "heterosexual" or "homosexual" would probably be little more than confoundingly inapplicable nomenclature. Some of my narrators find the differences between the genders negligible and not worth even acknowledging or honoring or troubling over. For them, I guess, every encountered person, every arrival, is a novel, consuming totality of life and limb--a stupefying array of skin, hair, teeth, arms, busying emotions: a useful human integer, in short, for the narrator to blunder against, mount, disappear into, rhapsodize about, ride out some sadness on, suspect of almost anything. And you're right to observe that after a point, the fussed precision with which the narrator carries on about the regarded person and their conjoint fumbles reaches a crisis of depletion, and the regarded person vagues out, and the relationship gets pretty vaporous pretty quick. At that moment, another person is no doubt motioning into the narrator's cleared gaze.
And also this, regarding writers:
A. Elizabeth Smart is a favorite of mine, solely on the basis of a tiny, thrilling, thunderous collection of stories called THE ASSUMPTION OF THE ROGUES & RASCALS. Among living writers of prose I admire Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Dawn Raffel, Amy Hempel, Pamela Ryder, and Brian Evenson, each of whom is a supreme virtuoso of the sentence.
"...letters from students, or maniacs..." --Henry Green, Concluding.
"...vast frescoes, dashed off with loathing..." -- Beckett, Molloy.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
The Empty Secret
Steven Shaviro’s recent entry on the film Time Out reminded me of The Adversary, the non-fiction book about the case from which Time Out takes some of its plot. As in the film, Jean-Claude Romand drove over the border to Switzerland every day. He pretended to have a job at the WHO in Geneva; he sometimes hung around WHO headquarters, pilfering stationery and brochures. More purely than in the film, though, he did nothing, day after day. He made absolutely no money; there were no smuggling schemes, as in the film; he borrowed money from his family and his in-laws. On the point of being discovered, he murdered his wife and children and burned their house down.
It’s the doing nothing that fascinates me.
Romand started doing nothing in med school. He failed the exam that would have let him advance into his third-year training; moreover, he did not tell anyone he had failed. He stayed registered at school. He studied. He would be allowed to take the exam again (in secret, though, from his friends and family.) At this point, his secret life was merely on loan from his public life; once he passed the exam, he would again be what he seemed.
On the day of the make-up exam, though, he never left his room. He slept through the time appointed for the exam. This is delightful to me: he’s not diabolical, he’s Oblomovian. He exploited a curious lapse in the school regulations: there was no positive provision for throwing out someone who failed this exam twice. Nor did this mean they expected people to do an American-style perpetual schooling. A good Frenchman would’ve thrown himself out, would’ve declared his failure to everyone and lived with the shame, or even killed himself. Romand just quietly kept registering, pretending to always be in different courses than his friends. When everyone else graduated, he stopped going to med school, too.
He kept it up for eighteen years, from the failed exam to the murder of his children. All this time, he had secrets but no interiority. That his secret life was so dull fascinates me. Sleeping in his room, sleeping in his car at a Swiss rest stop, waiting for the hours to pass until it was time to go home again.
Steven Shaviro’s recent entry on the film Time Out reminded me of The Adversary, the non-fiction book about the case from which Time Out takes some of its plot. As in the film, Jean-Claude Romand drove over the border to Switzerland every day. He pretended to have a job at the WHO in Geneva; he sometimes hung around WHO headquarters, pilfering stationery and brochures. More purely than in the film, though, he did nothing, day after day. He made absolutely no money; there were no smuggling schemes, as in the film; he borrowed money from his family and his in-laws. On the point of being discovered, he murdered his wife and children and burned their house down.
It’s the doing nothing that fascinates me.
Romand started doing nothing in med school. He failed the exam that would have let him advance into his third-year training; moreover, he did not tell anyone he had failed. He stayed registered at school. He studied. He would be allowed to take the exam again (in secret, though, from his friends and family.) At this point, his secret life was merely on loan from his public life; once he passed the exam, he would again be what he seemed.
On the day of the make-up exam, though, he never left his room. He slept through the time appointed for the exam. This is delightful to me: he’s not diabolical, he’s Oblomovian. He exploited a curious lapse in the school regulations: there was no positive provision for throwing out someone who failed this exam twice. Nor did this mean they expected people to do an American-style perpetual schooling. A good Frenchman would’ve thrown himself out, would’ve declared his failure to everyone and lived with the shame, or even killed himself. Romand just quietly kept registering, pretending to always be in different courses than his friends. When everyone else graduated, he stopped going to med school, too.
He kept it up for eighteen years, from the failed exam to the murder of his children. All this time, he had secrets but no interiority. That his secret life was so dull fascinates me. Sleeping in his room, sleeping in his car at a Swiss rest stop, waiting for the hours to pass until it was time to go home again.
Sunday, July 06, 2003
Tony Leung Chiu-Wai's Face
Usually, there is something faintly ridiculous about an actor "doing" particular emotions with his face. An actor serially portraying now rage, now happiness, now anticipation strikes us as amateur, the more so if his or her discrete emotions are legible as separate states.
In Wayne Koestenbaum's book The Queen's Throat, which I don't have at hand, there's a series of photographs from a century-old instruction book called How to Sing; a woman who looks something like Margaret Dumont mugs for the camera to demonstrate a series of emotions every singer must know how to portray with her face. Her facial expressions are both hilariously overstated and hilariously under-differentiated: what really separates her portrayal of ecstasy from her pity from her scorn from her yearning? You get a giddy sense that the captions could be switched around with no effect on the senselessness of the illustrations.
The unwittingly comic series the Dumont-ish singer portrays--it's full of disjunctive inclusions, most of which my memory can't do justice to--culminates in an expression I would describe as a an edgy, almost hysterical half-smile, but which bears the caption "Neutral Indifference: Nothing in the Eyes, Nothing in the Mouth." This degree-zero of facial expression is, as I said, somewhat un-neutral, perhaps because the singer is a woman and ideals of femininity demanded (or still demand) that a woman's neutrality evince sympathy toward any onlooker.
(That the photographs are next to each other is also part of their comic effect: they appear to be a Muybridge series that uses a fast shutter speed to capture the rapid passage from pity to scorn to yearning to indifference.)
In films today, a more truly neutral version of "neutral indifference" seems to be the standard. Er, okay, that's a weak generalization, "seems to be the standard." My only evidence is the prevalence of this scene in recent comedies: a tyro actor offers to demonstrate his skill: "this is my angry face," he'll say, and then he'll do the Dumont-singer thing: an expression at once grotesquely overdone and poorly realized. We, the audience, know better: a real actor works by the dictum "nothing in the eyes, nothing in the mouth."
And there is a sense in which this is true: everyone who knows anything knows that the film actor has always been a prop (a "Requisit," Benjamin writes somewhere). Any theory that fails to recognize this threatens to perpetuate some naïve ideas about expression and emoting. Self-expression is the theory, melodrama is the practice.
Thus a good theorist will write about the face's thingliness: Barthes on the whiteness of Dietrich's face, Delueze on the way that Dreyer's close ups disorient space.
(Even Dreyer's Joan of Arc, the film that's all about the face, might be said to be structured around a series of oppositions in which the male face preserves something of its neutrality; the judges scowl, Falconetti weeps with wide-open eyes: scowling/weeping, closed/open, male/female.)
Tony Leung is, by these lights, a "bad" actor. He's extremely expressive; he also makes use of a seriality of expression that comes dangerously close to that weird Muybridge/Dumont series of photographs. And yet he's the greatest actor working today.
There are a few scenes in Tony Leung's films that are exemplary of his radical departure from neutral indifference. In Happy Together, a friend has told Leung that on a mountain at the tip of the South American continent, where he's going to travel, you can release your cares. He then urges Leung to speak into his cassette tape recorder, to leave him a souvenir on tape. He, the friend, offers to leave Leung alone with the tape recorder. Alone, Leung picks up the recorder, holds it to his mouth--it's not a mike, he's holding the whole paperback-sized thing pressed to his face--and his face crumples in sorrow. He's weeping.
Earlier in the same film, Leung is sitting on a curb outside the tango bar where he works. His ex-lover, who's now hustling, has just given him a watch, obviously given him by (or stolen from) a john. The ex-lover is gone and Leung is alone on the curb. In contempt, he tosses the watch onto the street. He makes a sort of moue, as if reconsidering his contempt. He looks around sheepishly, picks up the watch, listens to it, and, again contemptuous, puts it in his pocket. He looks, in the end, like he is thinking for the benefit of anyone watching "I've seen better watches than this; I'm not impressed."
Finally, in Hard Boiled, there is a scene in which the undercover Leung has to abjure his criminal mentor, tell him to go to hell. And somehow his renunciation means that the mentor will die. (I'm getting the plot somewhat wrong, but the basic situation is right: he has to act an indifference while feeling pain about the mentor's certain death.) He coldly tells him off, then he turns around. Now the mentor cannot see him, but we can; it's as if he's alone. There are tears welling up in his eyes; then an intense effort passes over his face, like the effort of using rage to suppress tears. The expressions follow very closely, but they are nonetheless serial: sorrow, then suppression, rage.
There is a term for exactly matching the musical score to the action: it's called Mickey-Mousing. Likewise, the expression-series is a kind of Mickey-Mousing; now I throw the watch down, see my contempt; now I reconsider, see my sheepishness; now I pick it up, see my curiosity. Now I condemn my friend to death, see my sorrow; now I master myself, see my rage.
How does he get away with this? I could watch him every day, adding the seriality of repeat viewings to his serial displays. Though perhaps I damn him all the more with my enthusiasm; what demands repeat viewings more than a serial actor, a matinee idol? But that's not my intent. I really meant for these musings to be adjacent to, but more interesting than, recent think-pieces about "the new melodrama," which pieces are invariably hampered by a naïve the-artifact-reflects-the-zeitgeist thinking.
Is the risible seriality of Leung's emoting only in my description of it? Perhaps he never displays discrete states, perhaps it's the modulation, the continual change, that fascinates me in Leung's performances. I don't think so. He really does perform serially, even if there are fine modulations.
This is too long already, so no conclusions yet, only a few more remarks toward the typology: he is alone in all these scenes, or effectively alone. The scenes are all silent, in the sense that there is no dialogue. They are not close-ups, at least not of the extreme type of Dreyer's close-ups.
Usually, there is something faintly ridiculous about an actor "doing" particular emotions with his face. An actor serially portraying now rage, now happiness, now anticipation strikes us as amateur, the more so if his or her discrete emotions are legible as separate states.
In Wayne Koestenbaum's book The Queen's Throat, which I don't have at hand, there's a series of photographs from a century-old instruction book called How to Sing; a woman who looks something like Margaret Dumont mugs for the camera to demonstrate a series of emotions every singer must know how to portray with her face. Her facial expressions are both hilariously overstated and hilariously under-differentiated: what really separates her portrayal of ecstasy from her pity from her scorn from her yearning? You get a giddy sense that the captions could be switched around with no effect on the senselessness of the illustrations.
The unwittingly comic series the Dumont-ish singer portrays--it's full of disjunctive inclusions, most of which my memory can't do justice to--culminates in an expression I would describe as a an edgy, almost hysterical half-smile, but which bears the caption "Neutral Indifference: Nothing in the Eyes, Nothing in the Mouth." This degree-zero of facial expression is, as I said, somewhat un-neutral, perhaps because the singer is a woman and ideals of femininity demanded (or still demand) that a woman's neutrality evince sympathy toward any onlooker.
(That the photographs are next to each other is also part of their comic effect: they appear to be a Muybridge series that uses a fast shutter speed to capture the rapid passage from pity to scorn to yearning to indifference.)
In films today, a more truly neutral version of "neutral indifference" seems to be the standard. Er, okay, that's a weak generalization, "seems to be the standard." My only evidence is the prevalence of this scene in recent comedies: a tyro actor offers to demonstrate his skill: "this is my angry face," he'll say, and then he'll do the Dumont-singer thing: an expression at once grotesquely overdone and poorly realized. We, the audience, know better: a real actor works by the dictum "nothing in the eyes, nothing in the mouth."
And there is a sense in which this is true: everyone who knows anything knows that the film actor has always been a prop (a "Requisit," Benjamin writes somewhere). Any theory that fails to recognize this threatens to perpetuate some naïve ideas about expression and emoting. Self-expression is the theory, melodrama is the practice.
Thus a good theorist will write about the face's thingliness: Barthes on the whiteness of Dietrich's face, Delueze on the way that Dreyer's close ups disorient space.
(Even Dreyer's Joan of Arc, the film that's all about the face, might be said to be structured around a series of oppositions in which the male face preserves something of its neutrality; the judges scowl, Falconetti weeps with wide-open eyes: scowling/weeping, closed/open, male/female.)
Tony Leung is, by these lights, a "bad" actor. He's extremely expressive; he also makes use of a seriality of expression that comes dangerously close to that weird Muybridge/Dumont series of photographs. And yet he's the greatest actor working today.
There are a few scenes in Tony Leung's films that are exemplary of his radical departure from neutral indifference. In Happy Together, a friend has told Leung that on a mountain at the tip of the South American continent, where he's going to travel, you can release your cares. He then urges Leung to speak into his cassette tape recorder, to leave him a souvenir on tape. He, the friend, offers to leave Leung alone with the tape recorder. Alone, Leung picks up the recorder, holds it to his mouth--it's not a mike, he's holding the whole paperback-sized thing pressed to his face--and his face crumples in sorrow. He's weeping.
Earlier in the same film, Leung is sitting on a curb outside the tango bar where he works. His ex-lover, who's now hustling, has just given him a watch, obviously given him by (or stolen from) a john. The ex-lover is gone and Leung is alone on the curb. In contempt, he tosses the watch onto the street. He makes a sort of moue, as if reconsidering his contempt. He looks around sheepishly, picks up the watch, listens to it, and, again contemptuous, puts it in his pocket. He looks, in the end, like he is thinking for the benefit of anyone watching "I've seen better watches than this; I'm not impressed."
Finally, in Hard Boiled, there is a scene in which the undercover Leung has to abjure his criminal mentor, tell him to go to hell. And somehow his renunciation means that the mentor will die. (I'm getting the plot somewhat wrong, but the basic situation is right: he has to act an indifference while feeling pain about the mentor's certain death.) He coldly tells him off, then he turns around. Now the mentor cannot see him, but we can; it's as if he's alone. There are tears welling up in his eyes; then an intense effort passes over his face, like the effort of using rage to suppress tears. The expressions follow very closely, but they are nonetheless serial: sorrow, then suppression, rage.
There is a term for exactly matching the musical score to the action: it's called Mickey-Mousing. Likewise, the expression-series is a kind of Mickey-Mousing; now I throw the watch down, see my contempt; now I reconsider, see my sheepishness; now I pick it up, see my curiosity. Now I condemn my friend to death, see my sorrow; now I master myself, see my rage.
How does he get away with this? I could watch him every day, adding the seriality of repeat viewings to his serial displays. Though perhaps I damn him all the more with my enthusiasm; what demands repeat viewings more than a serial actor, a matinee idol? But that's not my intent. I really meant for these musings to be adjacent to, but more interesting than, recent think-pieces about "the new melodrama," which pieces are invariably hampered by a naïve the-artifact-reflects-the-zeitgeist thinking.
Is the risible seriality of Leung's emoting only in my description of it? Perhaps he never displays discrete states, perhaps it's the modulation, the continual change, that fascinates me in Leung's performances. I don't think so. He really does perform serially, even if there are fine modulations.
This is too long already, so no conclusions yet, only a few more remarks toward the typology: he is alone in all these scenes, or effectively alone. The scenes are all silent, in the sense that there is no dialogue. They are not close-ups, at least not of the extreme type of Dreyer's close-ups.
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